IN THE CLOUDS

BY
CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK,
AUTHOR OF “IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS,” “DOWN THE RAVINE,”
“THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS,” ETC.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1887

Copyright, 1886,
By MARY N. MURFREE.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge:
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

In the semblance of the cumulus-cloud from which it takes its name, charged with the portent of the storm, the massive peak of Thunderhead towers preëminent among the summits of the Great Smoky Mountains, unique, impressive, most subtly significant.

What strange attraction of the earth laid hold on this vagrant cloud-form? What unexplained permanence of destiny solidified it and fixed it forever in the foundations of the range?

Kindred thunderheads of the air lift above the horizon, lure, loiter, lean on its shoulder with similitudes and contrasts. Then with all the buoyant liberties of cloudage they rise,—rise!

Alas! the earth clasps its knees; the mountains twine their arms about it; hoarded ores of specious values weigh it down. It cannot soar! Only the cumbrous image of an ethereal thing! Only the ineffective wish vainly fashioned like the winged aspiration!

It may have said naught of this to Ben Doaks, but it exerted strenuous fascinations on the sense alert to them. Always he turned his eyes toward Thunderhead, as he came and went among his cattle on the neighboring heights of Piomingo Bald, a few miles distant to the northeast. Often he left the herder’s cabin in the woods below, and sat for hours on a rock on the summit, smoking his pipe and idly watching the varying aspects of the great peak. Sometimes it was purple against the azure heavens; or gray and sharp of outline on faint green[2] spaces of the sky; or misty, immaterial, beset with clouds, as if the clans had gathered to claim the changeling.

“’Pears-like ter me ez I couldn’t herd cattle along of a mo’ low-sperited, say-nuthin’ critter’n ye be, Ben,” his partner remarked one day, sauntering up the slope and joining him on the summit. “Ye jes’ set up hyar on the bald an’ gape at Thunderhead like ez ef ye war bereft. Now, down in the cove ye always air toler’ble good company,—nimble-tongued ez ennybody.”

He thrust his cob-pipe into his mouth and pulled away silently at it, gazing at the smoke as it curled up with delicate sinuosity and transparently blue.

Ben Doaks did not reply at once. There was no need of haste on Piomingo Bald.

“Waal, I dunno but it air a sorter lonesome place, an’ a-body don’t feel much like talkin’ no-ways,” he drawled at last. “But ye’ll git used ter it, Mink,” he added, in leisurely encouragement. “Ye’ll git used ter it, arter a while.”

Mink looked down disconsolately at the vast array of mountains below him on every side. The nearest were all tinged with a dusky purple, except for the occasional bare, garnet-colored stretches of the “fire-scalds,” relics of the desolation when the woods were burned; the varying tints were sublimated to blue in the distance; then through every charmed gradation of ethereal azure the ranges faded into the invisible spaces that we wot not of. There was something strangely overwhelming in the stupendous expanse of the landscape. It abashed the widest liberties of fancy. Somehow it disconcerted all past experience, all previous prejudice, all credence in other conditions of life. The fact was visibly presented to the eye that the world is made of mountains.

That finite quality of the mind, aptly expressing itself in mensuration, might find a certain relief in taking note of the curious “bald” itself,—seeming some three or four hundred bare acres on the summit. Wild grass grows[3] upon its gradual slope; clumps of huckleberry bushes appear here and there; occasional ledges of rock crop out. A hardy flower will turn a smiling face responsive to the measured patronage of the chilly sunshine in this rare air. The solemnity of the silence is broken only by the occasional tinkling of cow-bells from the herds of cattle among the woods lower down on the mountain side.

“I never kin git used ter it,” said Mink, desperately. “I never kin git used ter hevin’ sech dumbness about me, an’ seein’ the time go so slow. ’Pears ter me some fower or five hunderd year sence we eat brekfus’,—an’ I ain’t hongry, nuther.”

He was a tall, singularly lithe man of twenty-four or five, clad in a suit of brown jeans. He wore his coat closely buttoned over his blue-checked cotton shirt, for the August days are chilly on Piomingo Bald. His broad-brimmed white wool hat was thrust back on his head, showing his tousled auburn hair that hung down upon his collar, curling like a cavalier’s. He had a keen, clear profile, a quickly glancing, dark eye, and his complexion was tanned to a rich tint that comported well with the out-door suggestions of his powder-horn and belt and shot-pouch, which he wore, although his rifle was at the cabin. He maintained the stolid gravity characteristic of the mountaineer, but there was a covert alertness about him, a certain sharpness of attention almost inimical, and slow and dawdling as he was he gave the impression of being endowed with many an agile unclassified mental faculty.

His eyes followed the flight of a bird soaring in great circles high above the “bald,” sometimes balanced motionless in mid-air,—a pose of ineffable strength and buoyancy,—then majestically circling as before.

“That thar buzzard ’pears ter be a-loungin’ around in the sky, a-waitin’ fur we-uns ter die,” he said, lugubriously.

Doaks broke with an effort from his reverie, and turned his languid gaze on the malcontent herder.

“In the name o’ heaven, Mink Lorey,” he said solemnly, “what is it ye do like ter do?”

[4]

Despite the spark of irritation in his eye, he seemed colorless, especially as contrasted with his comrade. He had a shock of fair hair and a light brown beard; the complexion which is the complement of this type had freckled in its exposure to the sun instead of tanning, and added its original pallor to the negative effect. He had good features, but insignificant in their lack of any marked peculiarity except for the honest, candid look in the serious gray eye. He too wore a broad white wool hat and a suit of brown jeans.

Mink gazed at his companion with an expression of brightening interest. He found himself and his own idiosyncrasies, even when berated, more agreeable to contemplate than the mountains. He did not reply, perhaps appreciating that no answer was expected.

“Ye don’t like ter herd up hyar, an’ the Lord knows I ain’t keerin’ ter hev ye. Ye hev gin me ez much trouble ez all the cattle an’ thar owners besides. When ye wanted ter kem so bad, an’ sorter go partners with me, I ’lowed ye’d be lively, an’ a toler’ble good critter ter hev along. An’ ye hev been ez lonesome an’ ez onconsiderate an’ ez ill-convenient ez a weanin’ baby,” he declared, rising to hyperbole. “What do ye like ter do?”

Once more Mink refrained from reply. He looked absently at an isolated drift of mist, gigantic of outline, reaching from the zenith to the depths of Piomingo Cove, and slowly passing down the valley between the Great Smoky and the sun-flooded Chilhowee Mountain, obscuring for the moment the red clay banks of the Scolacutta River, whose current seemed a mere silver thread twining in and out of the landscape.

“Look a-hyar at the way ye go on,” said Doaks, warming to the subject, for there are few exercises so entertaining as to preach with no sense of participation in sin. “Ye went ter work at that thar silver mine in North Car’liny, an’ thar ye stayed sorter stiddy an’ peaceful till ye seen yer chance. An’ Pete Rood, he kem an’ stayed too, an’ he war sorter skeered o’ the ways,—not[5] bein’ used ter minin’. An’ then yer minkish tricks began. Fust, when that thar feller war let down inter the shaft an’ ye hed a-holt o’ the windlass, ye drapped a few clods o’ clay in on him, an’ then a leetle gravel, an’ then mo’ clay. Then he bellered that the shaft war cavin’ in on him, an’ plead an’ prayed with ye ter wind him up quick. An’ ye wouldn’t pull. An’ when the t’other fellers run thar an’ drawed that man out he war weak enough ter drap.”

“I ’member!” cried Mink, with a burst of unregenerate laughter. “He said, ‘Lemme git out’n this spindlin’ hell o’ a well!’”

He sprang up, grotesquely imitating the gesture of exhaustion with which the man had stepped out of the bucket to firm ground.

“Waal, it mought hev turned out a heap wus,” said Doaks, “’kase they ’lowed down yander ’bout Big Injun Mounting, whar Rood hails from, ez he hev got some sort’n heart-disease. An’ a suddint skeer mought hev killed him.”

“Shucks!” said Mink, incredulously. He looked disconcerted, however, and then sat down on the rock as before. Ben Doaks went on:—

“An’ that warn’t enough fur ye. When they hed Rood thar a-pumpin’ out water, all by himself all night, nuthin’ would do ye but ye must hide up thar in the Lost-Time mine in the dark o’ the midnight an’ the rain, an’ explode a lot o’ gunpowder, an’ kem a-bustin’ out at him from the mouth o’ the tunnel, wropped in a sheet an’ howlin’ like a catamount. He run mighty nigh a mile.”

“Waal,” said Mink, in sturdy argument, “I ain’t ’sponsible ’kase Peter Rood air toler’ble easy skeered.”

“They never hired ye ter work thar no mo’, bein’ ez that war ’bout all the use ye put yerse’f ter in the silver mine in North Car’liny.”

Despite the reproof, Doaks was looking kindly at him, for the wayward Mink had evidently endeared himself in some sort to the elder herder, who was weakly conscious of not regarding his enormities with the aversion they merited.

[6]

The young man’s countenance fell. His mischief differed from that of his namesake in all the sequelæ of an accusing conscience. But stay! What do we know of the mink’s midday meditations, his sober, ex post facto regrets?

“An’ what do ye do then,—’kase they turned ye off? Ye go thar of a night, when nobody’s at the windlass, an’ ye busts it down an’ flings the bucket an’ rope an’ all down the shaft.”

Mink was embarrassed. “How d’ ye know?” he retorted, with acrid futility. “How d’ ye know ’twar me?”

“’Kase it air fairly kin ter yer actions,—know it by the family favor,” said Doaks. “Ax ennybody ennywhar round the Big Smoky who did sech an’ sech, an’ they’d all say, Mink. Ye know the word they hev gin ye, ‘Mink by name an’ Mink by natur.’”

Lorey made no further feint of denial. He seemed a trifle out of countenance. He glanced over his shoulder at the rugged horizontal summit line of Chilhowee, rising high above the intervenient mountains, and sharply imposed upon the mosaic of delicate tints known as the valley of East Tennessee, which stretches so far that, despite its sharp inequalities, it seems to have the level monotony of the sea till Walden’s Ridge, the great outpost of the Cumberland Mountains, meets the concave sky.

Then, as his wandering attention returned to those sterner heights close at hand, their inexpressible gravity, their significant solemnity, which he could not apprehend, which baffled every instinct of his limited nature, smote upon him.

He broke out irritably:—

“What do ye jes’ set thar a-jowin’ at me fur, Ben, like a long-tongued woman, ’bout what I done an’ what I hain’t done, in this hyar lonesome place whar I hev been tolled ter by you-uns? I never begged ter be ’lowed ter herd along of ye, nohow. When I kem an’ axed ye ’bout’n it, ye ’lowed ye’d be powerful glad. An’ ye said ez so many o’ the farmers in the flat woods hed promised[7] ter bunch thar cattle an’ send ’em up ter ye fur the summer season, that ye war plumb skeered ’bout thar bein’ too many fur one man ter keer fur, an’ ye didn’t see how ye’d git along ’thout a partner. An’ ye ’lowed ye’d already rented Piomingo Bald right reasonable, an’ the owners o’ the cattle would pay from seventy-five cents to a dollar a head; an’ ye’d gin me a sheer ef I’d kem along an’ holp ye,—an’ all sech ez that. An’ I kem up in the spring, an’ I hev been on this hyar durned pinnacle o’ perdition ever sence. It ’minds me all the time o’ that thar high mounting in the Bible whar the Tempter showed off all the kingdoms o’ the yearth. What ails ye ter git arter me? I hain’t tried no minkish tricks on you-uns.”

“Ye hev, Mink. Yes, ye hev.”

Mink looked bewildered for a moment. Then a shade of consciousness settled on his face. He lifted one foot over his knee, and affected to examine the sole of his boot. The light zephyr was tossing his long, tangled locks, the sun shone through their filaments. No vanity was expressed in wearing them thus,—only some vague preference, some prosaic prejudice against shears. Their fineness and lustre did nothing to commend them, and they had been contemptuously called a “sandy bresh-heap.” His bright eyes had a fringe of the same unique tint that softened their expression. He dropped his boot presently, and fixed his gaze upon a flitting yellow butterfly, lured by some unexplained fascination of fragrance to these skyey heights.

“Ye can’t make out ez I stand in yer way, enny,” he said at last, enigmatically.

Doaks’s face flushed suddenly. “Naw, I ain’t claimin’ ez I hev enny chance. Ef I hed, an’ ye war in my way,” he continued, abruptly, with a sudden flare of spirit, “I’d choke the life out’n ye, an’ fling yer wu’thless carcass ter the wolves. I’d crush yer skull with the heel o’ my boot!”

He stood up for a moment; then turned suddenly, and sat down again. Mink looked at him curiously, with narrowing lids.

[8]

Doaks’s hands were trembling. His eyes were alert, alight. The blood was pulsing fast through his veins. So revivified was he by the bare contemplation of the contingency that he seemed hardly recognizable as the honest, patient, taciturn comrade of Piomingo Bald.

“Waal,” Mink said presently, “that war one reason I wanted ter herd along o’ you-uns this year. I ’lowed I’d make right smart money through the summer season, an’ then me an’ Lethe would git married nex’ fall, mebbe. My folks air so pore an’ shiftless,—an’ I’d ez lief live along of a catamount ez Lethe’s step-mother,—an’ so I ’lowed we’d try ter git a leetle ahead an’ set up for ourselves.”

Doaks trembled with half-repressed excitement.

“Ye tole me ez ye an’ she hed quar’led,” he said. “Ye never dreampt o’ sech a thing ez savin’ fur a house an’ sech till this minit. Ye ain’t been ter see her sence ye hev been on the Big Smoky till ye fund out ez I went down thar wunst in a while, an’ the old folks favored me.”

“Waal,” retorted Mink, hardily, “I know she’d make it up with me enny minit I axed her.”

Doaks said nothing for a time. Then suddenly, “Waal, then, ef ye air layin’ off ter marry Lethe Sayles, whyn’t ye quit hangin’ round Elviry Crosby, an’ terrifyin’ Peter Rood out’n his boots? They’d hev been married afore now, ef ye hed lef’ ’em be.”

“Whyn’t she quit hangin’ round me, ye’d better say!” exclaimed Mink, with the flattered laugh of the lady-killer. “Laws-a-massy, I don’t want ter interfere with nobody. Let the gals go ’long an’ marry who they please,— an’ leave me alone!”

His manner implied, if they can! And he laughed once more.

Doaks glanced at him impatiently, and then turned his eyes away upon the landscape. Fascinations invisible to the casual gaze revealed themselves to him day by day. He had made discoveries. In some seeming indefiniteness of the horizon he had found the added[9] beauty of distant heights, as if, while he looked, the softened outline of blue peaks, given to the sight of no other creature, were sketched into the picture. Once a sudden elusive silver glinting, imperceptible to eyes less trained to the minutiæ of these long distances, told him the secret source of some stream, unexplored to its head-waters in a dark and bosky ravine. Sometimes he distinguished a stump which he had never seen before in a collection of dead trees, girdled long ago, and standing among the corn upon so high and steep a slope that the slant justified the descriptive gibe of the region, “fields hung up to dry.” The sky too was his familiar; he noted the vague, silent shapes of the mist that came and went their unimagined ways. He watched the Olympian games of the clouds and the wind. He marked the lithe lengths of a meteor glance across the August heavens, like the elastic springing of a shining sword from its sheath. The moon looked to meet him, waiting at his tryst on the bald.

He had become peculiarly sensitive to the electric conditions of the atmosphere, and was forewarned of the terrible storms that are wont to break on the crest of the great mountain.

Often Mink appealed to him as he did now, imputing a certain responsibility.

“Enny thunder in that thar cloud?” he demanded, with the surly distrust which accompanies the query, “Does your dog bite?”

“Naw; no thunder, nor rain nuther.”

“I’m powerful glad ter hear it, ’kase I don’t ’sociate with this hyar bald when thar’s enny lightning around.”

He had heard the many legends of “lightning balls” that are represented as ploughing the ground on Piomingo, and he spoke his fears with the frankness of one possessed of unimpeachable courage.

“That’s what makes me despise this hyar spot,” he said, irritably. “Things ’pear so cur’ous. I feel like I hev accidentally stepped off’n the face o’ the yearth. An’ I hev ter go mighty nigh spang down ter the foot o’ the mounting ’fore I feel like folks agin.”

[10]

He glanced downward toward the nearest trees that asserted the right of growth about this strange and barren place. “Ye can’t git used ter nothin’, nuther. Them cur’ous leetle woods air enough ter make a man ’low he hev got the jim-jams ez a constancy. I dunno what’s in ’em! My flesh creeps whenever I go through ’em. I always feel like ef I look right quick I’ll see suthin’ awful,—witches, or harnts, or—I dunno!”

He looked down at them again, quickly; but he was sure not quickly enough.

And the woods were of a strange aspect, chiefly of oaks with gnarled limbs, full-leaved, bulky of bole, but all uniformly stunted, not one reaching a height greater than fifteen feet. This characteristic gave a weird, unnatural effect to the long avenues beneath their low-spreading boughs. The dwarfed forest encircled Piomingo Bald, and stretched along the summit of the range, unbroken save where other domes—Silar’s Bald, Gregory’s Bald, and Parsons’ Bald—rose bare and gaunt against the sky.

“Ez ter witches an’ harnts an’ them, I ain’t never seen none hyar on Piomingo Bald,” said Doaks. “It ain’t never hed the name o’ sech, like Thunderhead.”

Mink placed his elbows on his knees, and held his chin in his hand. His roving dark eyes were meditative now; some spell of imagination lay bright in their depths.

“Hev he been viewed lately?” he asked.

“Who?” demanded Doaks, rousing himself.

“That thar Herder on Thunderhead,” said Mink, lowering his voice. The fibrous mist, hovering about the summit of Thunderhead and stretching its long lines almost over to Piomingo Bald, might in some mysterious telegraphy of the air transmit the matter.

“Not ez I knows on,” said Doaks. “He ain’t been viewed lately. But Joe Boyd, he’s a-herdin’ over thar now: I kem acrost him one day las’ week, an’ he ’lowed ez his cattle hed been actin’ powerful strange. I ’lowed the cattle mus’ hev viewed the harnt, an’ mebbe he war tryin’ ter ’tice ’em off.”

[11]

“Ef ye’ll b’lieve me,” said Mink ruminatively, after a pause, “I never hearn none o’ them boys tell a word about that thar harnt of a herder on Thunderhead.”

“Them t’other herders on Thunderhead don’t hanker ter talk ’bout him, no-ways,” said Doaks. “It’s powerful hard ter git a word out’n ’em ’bout it; they’re mighty apt ter laff, an’ ’low it mus’ be somebody ridin’ roun’ from ’cross the line. But it’ll make enny of ’em bleach ef ye ax ’em suddint ef all o’ Joshua Nixon’s bones war buried tergether.”

The mists had spanned the abyss of the valley in a sheer, gossamer-like network, holding the sunbeams in a glittering entanglement. They elusively caressed the mountain summit, and hung about the two lounging figures of the herders,—a sort of ethereal eavesdropping of uncomfortable suggestions,—and slipped into the dwarfed woods, where they lurked spectrally.

“Waal, ef ye ax ’em ef Joshua Nixon’s bones war all buried tergether they’ll bleach,” Doaks repeated. “See that thar sort’n gap yander?” he continued, pointing at a notch on the slope of Thunderhead. “They fund his bones thar under a tree streck by lightning. They ’lowed that war the way he died. But the wolves an’ the buzzards hedn’t lef’ enough ter make sure. They hed scattered his bones all up an’ down the slope. He hed herded over thar a good many year, an’ some o’ the t’other boys keered fur the cattle till the owners kem in the fall.”

He recounted slowly. Time was no object on Piomingo Bald.

“Waal, nobody hearn nuthin’ mo’ ’bout’n it fur a few years, till one day when I war herdin’ thar the cattle war all fund, runned mighty nigh ter death, an’ a-bellerin’ an’ a-cavortin’ ez ef they war ’witched. An’ one o’ the herders, Ike Stern, kem in thar ter the cabin an’ ’lowed he hed seen a lot o’ strange cattle ’mongst our’n, an’ a herder ridin’ ’mongst ’em. ’Twar misty, bein’ a rainy spell, an’ he lost the herder in the fog. Waal, we jes’ ’lowed ’twar somebody from Piomingo Bald huntin’ fur[12] strays, or somebody from ’cross the line. So we jes’ went on fryin’ the meat, an’ bakin’ the hoe-cake, an’ settin’ roun’ the fire; but this hyar man kept on complainin’ he couldn’t holp seein’ that thar herder. An’ wunst in a while he’d hold his hand afore his eyes. An’ one o’ the old herders,—Rob Carrick ’twar,—he jes’ axed him what that herder looked like. An’ Ike jes’ sot out ter tell. An’ the coffee war a-bilin’, an’ the meat a-sizzlin’, an’ Carrick war a-squattin’ afore the fire a-listenin’ an’ a-turnin’ the meat, till all of a suddint he lept up an’ drapped his knife, yellin’, ‘My God! ye lyin’ buzzard, don’t ye set thar a-tellin’ me ez Josh Nixon hev kem all the way from hell ter herd on Thunderhead! Don’t ye do it! Don’t ye do it!’ An’ Ike Stern,—he looked like he seen Death that minit; his eyes war like coals o’ fire, an’ he trembled all over,—he jes’ said, ‘I see I hev been visited by the devil, fur I hev been gin ter view a dead man, apin’ the motions o’ life.’”

Doaks pulled at his pipe for a few moments, his eyes still absently fixed on the purple peak shimmering in the gauzy white mists and the yellow sunshine.

“I never shell furgit that night. Thar war three men thar: one hed herded along o’ Josh on Thunderhead, but Ike Stern had never seen him in life, an’ me not at all. Waal, sir! the rain kem down on the roof, an’ the wind war like the tromplin’ o’ a million o’ herds o’ wild cattle. We ’lowed we hed never hearn sech a plungin’ o’ the yellemints. The night war ez dark ez a wolf’s mouth, ’cept when it lightened, an’ then we could see we war wropped in the clouds. An’ through all them crackin’ peals them men talked ’bout that thar harnt o’ a Herder on Thunderhead. Waal, nex’ mornin’ Stern jes’ gin up his job, an’ went down the mounting ter Piomingo Cove. An’ he stayed thar, too. They ’lowed he done no work fur a year an’ a day. His time war withered an’ his mind seemed darkened.”

“He ’pears ter hev toler’ble good sense now,” said Mink, striving against credulity.

“Yes, he hev spryed up powerful.”

[13]

“Waal,” said Mink, constrained by the fascination of the supernatural, “I hev hearn ez Carrick seen the Herder, too.”

“He did,” replied Doaks. “Arter a while—a week, mebbe—Rob kem up ter me an’ axed, ‘Whar’s them cattle a-bellerin’?’ I listened, but I never hearn nuthin’. We hed missed some steers arter Ike hed seen the Herder, an’ Rob war sorter ’feard they’d run down inter the cove. He jumped on a half-bruk clay-bank colt an’ rid off, thinkin’ the bellerin’ mought be them. Waal, time passed. I hed nuthin’ in partic’lar ter do: cattle war salted the day before. Time passed. I jes’ sot thar. I ’lowed I’d wait till Rob kem back, then I’d go a-huntin’. Time passed. I ’lowed I’d furgit how ter talk ef I warn’t herdin’ along o’ sech a sociable critter ez Rob, an’ I wondered ef I war by myself up on Thunderhead ef I’d hev ter talk ter myse’f a little. An’ ez I sot thar in the fog—’twar September then, an’ we war clouded ez a constancy—I said, jes’ like a fool, out loud, suddint, ’Howdy, sir!’ Waal, I never did know what I seen ez I looked up; mought hev been the mist, mought hev been the devil. I ’lowed I seen a man on a horse gallopin’ off in the fog. Then I hearn a power o’ jouncin’ hoofs, an’ hyar kem Rob’s colt arearin’ an’ a-pawin’, skeered ter death mighty nigh, with all the hide scraped off’n his knees, an’ his shins barked bad. I seen he hed hed a fall; so I jumped up an’ run down a leetle piece along the trail, an’ thar war Rob lyin’ on the groun’, flunged over the colt’s head ez neat an’ nip! I run up ter him. I ’lowed he war hurt. He never answered a word I axed him. His eyes war stretched open bigger ’n enny eye I ever seen, an’ he said, ‘Ye hev viewed him too, Ben, I know it, fur ye’ve got the “harnt bleach.” I know the reason now,’ says Rob, ’ez he herds on Thunderhead,—’kase his bones warn’t all buried tergether, though we sarched nigh an’ we sarched fur.’”

“Did the Herder tell him that?” asked Mink, with a sudden accession of credulity.

[14]

“Naw, ye durned fool!” exclaimed Doaks, scandalized at the idea of this breach of spectral etiquette. “The Herder jes’ passed him like the wind, an’ the colt jes’ reared and flung Rob over his head.”

“Waal,” said Mink sturdily, “I b’lieve ’twar nuthin’ but somebody from the Car’liny side, ridin’ roun’ an’ tollin’ off cattle.”

“Mebbe,” said Doaks, non-committally. “Ye can’t prove nuthin’ by me. All I know is, Carrick seen his face, an’ he jes’ fell in a sorter stupor for a year an’ a day. I hev hearn o’ sech sperits ez can’t kill ye, but jes’ wither yer time, an’ mebbe this hyar Herder on Thunderhead be one o’ them.”

Neither spoke, for some moments. Both sat gazing fixedly at the massive mountain in the likeness of a cloud lowering aggressively over the mean altitudes of the range. What wrath of elements did it hold enchained? What bolts of heaven unhurled? What strange phenomena of being might lurk in those mystic vapors metamorphosed into the solidities of earth—this apostate cloud that asserted itself a mountain? The sky was clear about it now; the mists had all drifted over to Piomingo Bald, veiling the dwarfed forests.

Suddenly there was a vague shiver among them. Into the silence was projected the report of a rifle. The two men sprang to their feet, and looked at each other.

“Somebody a-huntin’, I reckon,” said Mink. He was beginning to laugh, a little shamefacedly.

“Listen!” said Doaks. “What’s that?”

The cattle were bellowing with affright in the stunted woods. The earth shook under their hoofs. A young bull came plunging out of the mists. He paused as he reached the bare slope, lifted his head, and looked back over his shoulder with great dilated eyes.

“What ails the cattle?” exclaimed Doaks, running down the slope. Mink hesitated for a moment, then followed.

The boles of the dwarfed trees stood shadowy here and there, growing still more indistinct further, and fading[15] into the white opaque blankness of the vapor. So low were their summits that one could see the topmost boughs, despite the encompassing mist.

All the cattle were in the wildest excitement, snorting and bellowing, and, with lowered horns, and tails in the air, they were making at full speed for the upper regions of the bald. Each, bursting out of the densities of the fog, separated from the others, seemed to give some individual expression of bovine rage. There might be heard, but not seen, an infuriated animal hard by, tearing up the ground.

“Waal, I never ’sperienced the like in my life off ’n Thunderhead!” exclaimed Doaks.

Mink said nothing; he sprang aside to avoid the headlong rush of a brute that shot out of the mist and into it again with the swift unreality of an apparition.

Then he spoke suddenly. “Ye never said he rid with a rifle.”

“Who?” asked Doaks, bewildered. He was in advance. He looked back over his shoulder. “Who?” he repeated.

“That thar Herder from Thunderhead.” said Mink.

“Ye dough-faced idjit,—what d’ ye mean?”

Mink pointed silently.

A few yards distant there was a rude barricade of felled trees, laid together after the zigzag manner of a rail fence. It was intended to prevent the cattle from running down a precipitous ravine which it overlooked. Close to it in the mist a cow was lying. There was no mistaking the attitude. The animal was dead. A carefully aimed rifle-ball had penetrated the eye, and buried itself in the brain.

There was blood upon the ground. An awkward attempt had been made to cut the brute’s throat, and, this failing, the rifle had been called into use. Doaks walked up to the animal, and turned her head to look for the brass tag about her horns which would bear her owner’s mark. She wore no tag, and her hide had never known the branding-iron. His eye fell on a peculiar perforation in her ear.

“Mink,” he exclaimed, with a note of anguish, “this hyar critter’s my cow!”

Mink came up, his countenance adjusted to sympathy. He had little of the instinct of acquisition. He was almost incapable of any sentiment of that marvelous range of emotions which vibrate with such fineness of susceptibility to the alternations of gain and loss. He looked like an intelligent animal as he helped make sure of the herder’s mark.

“Ye hed sech a few head o’ stock o’ yer own, ennyways,” he observed, with a dolorous lack of tact.

“Oh, Lord A’mighty, none sca’cely,” exclaimed Doaks, feeling very poor. “I dunno how in this worl’ this hyar cow happened ter be singled out.”

“Mebbe he hed a gredge agin ye, too, ’bout them bones, bein’ ez ye herded on Thunderhead wunst,” suggested Mink.

“What bones?” demanded Doaks, amazed.

“Why, his’n,” said Mink, in a lowered voice.

“In the name o’ reason, Mink, what air ye a-drivin’ at?” cried Doaks, flustered and aghast.

“Why, the Herder, o’ course. Him ez skeered the cattle on Thunderhead. I ’lowed mebbe he hed a gredge agin you-uns, too.”

[17]

“How’d he kem over hyar?” demanded Doaks, with scorn, as if the harnt of a Herder were limited to the locality of Thunderhead. “It’s a deal mo’ likely ter be some livin’ man ez hev got a gredge agin ye fur yer minkish ways, an’ seein’ the critter hed no tag on, an’ warn’t branded nuther, killed her fur ye.”

Mink drew a long breath. “Waal, I hope so, the Lord knows. I’d settle him.” An essentially mundane courage was his, but a sturdy endowment as far as it went.

His imagination was of the pursuant order; it struck out no new trail, but, given a lead, it could follow with many an active expression of power. He accepted at once this suggestion, with a confidence as complete as if he had never credited the grudge of a ghostly herder.

“An’ I’ll be bound I kin tell ye jes’ who ’twar,” he said, stoutly, producing a corollary to the proposition he had adopted as his own. “’Twar that thar pop-eyed fool Peter Rood. I reckon ye hev noticed, ef one o’ them black-eyed, thick-set, big-headed men git made game of ’bout ennything, he’ll pay ye back some mean way. Stiddier skeerin’ me fur skeerin’ him, he kems hyar an’ shoots that cow.”

He thrust one hand in his leather belt, and turned his bold bright glance on his partner. As he stood at his full height, vigorous, erect, a touch of freakishness in his eyes, decision expressed in his clear-cut features, a certain activity suggested even in his motionless pose, it might have seemed that the revenge of shooting the cow was the more hopeful project.

Doaks, a philosopher in some sort, and reflective, could discriminate as to motives.

“Rood never done it fur that by itself. I don’t b’lieve he would hev done it jes’ fur that. But the way ez ye hev been performin’ sence ’bout Elviry Crosby air powerful aggervatin’. I hearn tell ez she hev turned Rood off, an’ won’t speak ter him, though the weddin’ day hed been set! I reckon he felt like payin’ ye back ennyhow it kem handy.”

[18]

Doaks drew a plug of tobacco from his pocket, wrenched off a fragment with his strong teeth, and, talking indistinctly as he chewed, continued, the anxiety of forecast blunting the actual pain of experience.

“Ef he keeps this hyar up, Mink,—ef it’s him, an’ he kems roun’ shootin’ at cattle agin,—he mought git some o’ the owners’ stock nex’ time, an’ they mought hold me ’sponsible. I dunno whether they could or no. I ’low he war ’quainted with this cow, an’ knowed her ter be yourn, an’ never drempt ez ye hed swopped her off ter me. I wisht ter Gawd the critter knew ye hed no cattle on the mounting, an’ ain’t ’sponsible ter the owners, ez ye never traded with them, but arter my contract war made ye jes’ went shares with me.”

He seated himself on the rude fence in an awkward attitude, his long legs dangling, and drew out a red cotton handkerchief with which he rubbed his corrugated brow as vigorously as if he could thus smooth out the pucker in his brain.

“Waal, waal! this mortal life!” he exclaimed, presently. “Satan won’t leave ye in peace. Ye may go an’ set yerse’f up on the bald of a mounting, herdin’ ’mongst the dumb ones, an’ the worl’ an’ the things o’ this life will kem a-cropin’ up on ye with a rifle, an’ ye be ’bleeged ter turn ’roun’ an’ cornsider how ye kin keep what ye hev got an’ how ye kin git mo’. I useter ’low ef I war a perfessin’ member, this worl’ wouldn’t stick so in my craw; so I tuk cornsider’ble pains ter git religion, an’ mighty nigh wore out the mourners’ bench settin’ on it so constant, till I war actially feared the Lord would be pervoked ter see me in the front row o’ them convicted o’ sin at every revival, and visit wrath on me. An’ I never got religion at last; though I feel nigher ter it on Piomingo Bald than ennywhar else, till Rood, or somebody, starts up like they hed a contract with Satan to be-devil me.”

Mink listened with a sort of affectionate ruefulness. Then he broke forth, suddenly, “Mebbe I mought see Rood ef I war ter go down ter Piomingo Cove, whar the boys be goin’ ter shoot fur beef this evenin’. An’ I kin[19] let him know I don’t own no cattle up hyar, an’ hain’t got no trade with the owners, an’ ain’t ’sponsible ter nobody.”

There was a sudden expression of alarm in Doaks’s face. “Don’t ye let Rood know we suspicioned him, ’kase he mought hev hed nuthin’ ter do with it.”

“Naw,” said Mink, with a diplomatic nod, “I’ll jes’ tell that whilst I’m a-spreadin’ the tale ’bout the cow.”

There was a short silence. Doaks still sat, with a pondering aspect, on the fence.

“Rood mought take his gredge out on you-uns some other way, Mink,” he suggested presently. He felt bound in conscience to present the contingency.

“I’m ekal ter him,” said Mink hardily.

In fact, Mink bore the most lightsome spirit down the mountain, scarcely to be expected in a man who goes to invite a more personal direction of the machinations of a feud. He would have dared far more to secure a respite from the loneliness of Piomingo Bald, to say nothing of the opportunity of mingling in the festivity of shooting for beef. He had not even a qualm of regret for the solitary herder whom he left standing at the fence, gazing down at him a trifle wistfully. He was out of sight presently, but Doaks heard the mare’s hoofs long after he had disappeared,—the more distinctly, because of the animal’s habit of striking her hind feet together.

The mists had lifted. It was a positive happiness to Mink to watch the forests expand, as he went down and down the rugged ways of the herders’ trail. There were taller trees on every hand; great beds of ferns, their fronds matted together, began to appear; impenetrable jungles of the laurel stretched all along the deep ravines. Now and then a flash of crimson rejoiced the sight; from far gleamed the red cones of the cucumber tree; the trumpet-flower blossomed in the darkling places; he marked the lustre of the partridge-berry by the wayside.

The earth was moist from the recent rains, as the narrow, slippery path, curving between a sheer declivity on[20] one side and an almost perpendicular ascent on the other, might testify. His mare traveled it in a devil-may-care fashion, snatching as she went at leaves on the slope above, regardless that a false step would precipitate both herself and her rider into eternity. Noticing this breach of manners, Mink now and then gave a reckless jerk at the bit.

“Dad-burn ye! ye buzzard! A greedy body would ’low ye hed never hearn tell o’ nuthin’ ter eat afore in this worl’!”

Here it was only, above these depths, that he might see the sky,—afar off, as was meet that it should be: he, the earthling, had no kinship with its austere infinities. The growths of the forest were now of incredible magnitude and magnificence. Up and up towered the massive boles, with a canopy of leaves so dense that all the firmament was effaced, and the sunshine trickling through had a white, tempered glister like the moonbeams. What infinite stretches of solitudes! What measureless mountain wilds! In these solemn spaces Silence herself walked unshod.

Yet stay! A crystalline vibration, a tinkling tremor, a voice smiting the air, so delicately attuned to all sylvan rhythms, with an accent so fine, so faint,—surely, some oread a-singing!

Nay—only the mountain torrent, dashing its fantastic cascades down its rocky channel, with a louder burst of minstrelsy and a flash of foam as its glittering swirl of translucent water revealed itself, the laurel and ferns crowding upon its banks and a cardinal flower reflected multiform in a deep and shadowy pool. A mossy log spanned it as foot-bridge, and then it slipped away into the forest, to spring out suddenly and cross the road again and again before it reached the base of the mountain. Mink reckoned the distance by its reappearances, in default of other means.

“Ye be a-travelin’ toler’ble smart this evenin’,” he observed to the mare. “Ye be mighty nigh ez glad ter git off’n that thar buzzard’s roost up yander ez I be,[21] though I don’t crack my heels tergether ’bout it like you-uns do yourn.”

He did not follow the road into Eskaqua Cove when he reached the level ground. He struck off through one of the ridges that lie like a moulding about the base of the mountains, crossed another nameless barrier, then descended into Piomingo Cove. Sequestered, encompassed by the mountains, rugged of surface, veined with rock, its agricultural interest is hardly served by the conditions which enhance its picturesque aspect. The roofs of a few log cabins at long intervals peer out from among scanty orchards and fields. Tobacco flourishes down the sides of steep funnel-shaped depressions worked exclusively with the hoe, and suggesting acrobatic capacity as a co-requisite with industry to cultivate it. The woods make heavily into the cove, screening it from familiar knowledge of its hills and dales.

Mink, trotting along the red clay road, came suddenly upon the banks of the Scolacutta River, riotous with the late floods, fringed with the papaw and the ivy bush. Beyond its steely glint he could see the sun-flooded summit of Chilhowee, a bronze green, above the intermediate ranges: behind him was the Great Smoky, all unfamiliar viewed from an unaccustomed standpoint, massive, solemn, of dusky hue; white and amber clouds were slowly settling on the bald. There had been a shower among the mountains, and a great rainbow, showing now only green and rose and yellow, threw a splendid slant of translucent color on the purple slope. In such environment the little rickety wooden mill—with its dilapidated leaking race, with its motionless wheel moss-grown, with its tottering supports throbbing in the rush of the water which rose around them, with a loitering dozen or more mountaineers about the door—might seem a feeble expression of humanity. To Mink the scene was the acme of excitement and interest. His blood was quickening as he galloped up, his hair tossing under the wide brim of his hat, his stirrup-leathers adjusted to the full length of his leg according to the custom[22] of the country, his rifle laid across the pommel of his saddle.

“Enny chance lef’ fur me?” he asked, as he reined in among the loungers.

This observation was received in some sort as a salutation.

“Hy’re, Mink,” said several voices at once. Other men merely glanced up, their eyes expressing languid interest.

“Ye don’t want ter shoot, Mink,” said one, with a jocose manner. “Ye knowed all the chances would be sold by now. Ye hev jes’ kem ’kase ye hearn old Tobias Winkeye air out agin.”

Mink’s dark eyes seemed afire with some restless leaping light. His infectious laughter rang out. “Never s’picioned it,—so holp me Jiminy! When?”

“Ter-night. Ye keep powerful low,” with a cautionary wink.

“I reckon so,” promised Mink cordially.

A sullen remonstrance broke into these amenities.

“Waal, Jer’miah Price, I dunno ez ye hev enny call ter let all that out ter Mink Lorey.”

Pete Rood, who delivered this reproof, was not an ill-looking fellow naturally, but his black eyes wore a lowering, disaffected expression. His swarthy square-jawed face indicated a temperament which might be difficult to excite to any keen emotion, and was incapable of nice discrimination; but which promised, when once aroused, great tenacity of purpose. He wore a suit of gray jeans, loosely fitting, giving his heavy figure additional breadth. He carried his hands in his pockets, and lounged about, throwing an occasional word over his shoulder with a jerky incidental manner.

“Why not tell Mink?” exclaimed Jerry Price, a long, lank fellow, far too tall and slim for symmetry, and whose knees had a sort of premonitory crook in them, as if he were about to shut up, after the manner of a clasp-knife, into comfortable and convenient portability. His head was frankly red. His freckles stood out plainly[23] for all they were worth; and, regarded as freckles, they were of striking value. A ragged red beard hung down on his unbleached cotton shirt. Physically, he had not a trait to commend him; but a certain subtle magnetism, that inborn fitness as a leader of men, hung upon his gestures, vibrated in his words, constrained acquiescence in his rude logic. “Ain’t Mink always been along of we-uns?” he added.

Mink dismounted slowly and hitched his mare to the limb of a dogwood tree hard by. Then, leaning upon his rifle, he drawled, “’Pears like everybody’s gittin’ sot agin me these days. I dunno who ’twar, but this very mornin’ somebody kem up on Piomingo Bald an’ shot a cow ez used ter b’long ter me.”

He raised his eyes suddenly. Rood had lounged off a few steps with an idle gait, swaying from side to side, his hands still in his pockets. But there was tenseness in the pose of his half-turned head. He was listening.

“Hed ye done traded her off?” asked Price, interested. “Gimme a chaw o’ terbacco.”

“Ain’t got none. Pete, can’t ye gin this hyar destitute cuss a chaw o’ terbacco?”

Rood could not choose but turn his face, while he held out his plug. The crafty Mink scanned it, as he leaned his own sun-burned cheek upon the muzzle of the long rifle on which he lazily supported his weight.

“Naw, Jerry, ’twarn’t my cow. I can’t keep nuthin’ long enough ter lose it; I hed traded her off to Ben Doaks.”

There was no mistaking the patent disappointment on Rood’s face. One with far less sharp intelligence than Mink possessed might have descried that hot look in his eyes, as if they burned,—that vacillating glance which could fix on naught about him. The surprise of the moment deterred him from observing Mink, whose air of unconsciousness afterward afforded no ground for suspicion or fear.

Rood pocketed his plug, and presently slouched off toward the tree where the marksmen were preparing for the shooting-match.

[24]

Now and then there flitted to the door of the mill the figure of a stripling, all dusted with flour and meal, and with a torn white hat on his head. He wore ragged jeans trousers of an indeterminate hue, and an unbleached cotton shirt. When the men were strolling about, he slunk into the duskiness within. But when they were all intent upon the projected trial of skill, he crept shyly to the door, and looked out with a singularly blank, inexpressive gaze.

“Hy’re ye, Tad!” called out Mink gayly.

The young fellow stood for an instant staring; then, with a wide, foolish grin of recognition, disappeared among the shadows within.

“Let the idjit be, Mink,” said old Griff, the miller, querulously,—“let him be.”

He was a man of sixty years, perhaps, and bending beneath their weight. His white beard was like a patriarch’s, and his long hair hung down to meet it. He had a parchment-like skin, corrugated, and seeming darker for the contrast with his hair and beard. Beneath his bushy white eyebrows, restless, irritable eyes peered out. He was barefooted, as was the boy, and his poverty showed further in the patches on his brown jeans clothes.

“Naw, I won’t,” said Mink irreverently. “I want ter see what Tad does when he skeets off an’ hides that-a-way.”

He pressed into the mill, and the old man looked after him and cursed him in his beard. He swore with every breath he drew.

“Go on, ye dad-burned fool—go on ter damnation! Ever sence that thar sneakin’ Mink hev been roun’ hyar,” he continued, addressing Price, “Tad ’pears weaker ’n ever. I can’t ’bide ter keep Tad in the house. He gits into one o’ his r-uproarious takin’s, an’ it looks like hell couldn’t hold him,—skeers the chill’n mighty nigh ter death. Yes, sir! my gran’chil’n. Daddy war shot by the revenuers, mammy died o’ the lung complaint, an’ the old man’s got ’em all ter take keer of—ten o’ ’em. An’ my nevy Tad, too, ez war born lackin’. An’ ev’y[25] one of ’em’s got a stommick like a rat-hole—ye can’t fill it up. Yes, sir! The Lord somehows hev got his hand out in takin’ keer o’ me an’ mine, an’ he can’t git it in agin.”

“Waal, they holps ye mightily, plowin’ an’ sech, don’t they,—the biggest ones; an’ one o’ the gals kin cook, that thar spry one, ’bout fifteen year old; I’m a-goin’ ter wait fur her,—beats all the grown ones in the cove fur looks,” said the specious Jerry Price. “An’ they air all mighty good chill’n, ain’t they? Oughter be. Good stock.”

“Naw, sir; naw, sir!” the old man replied, so precipitately that his iterative mutter had the effect of interruption. “Durries’ meanes’ chill’n I ever see. Ripenin’ fur hell! Scandalous mean chill’n.”

“I reckon so,” said Rood suddenly. “Thar goes one o’ ’em now.” He pointed to a scapegrace ten years of age, perhaps, clad in a suit of light blue checked cotton. His trousers reached to his shoulder blades, and were sustained by a single suspender. A ragged old black hat was perched on the back of his tow head. He had the clothes-line tied to the hind leg of a pig which he was driving. He seemed to be in high feather, and apparently felt scant lack of a more spirited steed. In fact, the pig gave ample occupation to his skill, coming to a halt sometimes and rooting about in an insouciant manner, reckless of control. When he was pushed and thumped and forced to take up the line of march, he would squeal dolorously and set out at a rate of speed hardly predicable of the porcine tribe. “Look how he’s a-actin’ to that thar pore peeg,” added Rood.

Old Gus Griff fixed his dark eye upon him.

“Enny friend o’ yourn?” he asked.

“Who?” demanded Rood, amazed.

“That thar peeg.”

“Naw, o’ course not.”

“Then keep yer jaw off’n him. Who set ye up ter jedge o’ the actions o’ my gran’chile. That thar boy’s name air ’Gustus Thomas Griff—fur me! An’ I got[26] nine mo’ gran’chil’n jes’ like him. An’ ye lay yer rough tongue ter a word agin one o’ ’em, an’ old ez I be I’ll stretch ye out flat on that thar groun’ they air a-medjurin’ ter shoot on. Ye greasy scandal-hit scamp yerse’f!”

Rood was fain to step back hastily, for the miller came blustering up with an evident bellicose intention. “Lord A’mighty, old man!” he exclaimed, “I never said nuthin’ agin ’em, ’cept what ye say yerse’f. I wouldn’t revile the orphan!”

“Jes’ stop a-pityin’ ’em, then, durn ye!” exclaimed the exacting old man. “They ain’t no orphans sca’cely nohows, with thar grandad an’ sech alive.”

“That’s what I knowed, Mr. Griff,” said the bland Price, standing between them. “Pete’s jes’ ’bidin’ the time o’ the fool-killer. Must be a powerful rank crap fur him somewhar, bein’ ez Pete’s spared this long. That’s what I knowed an’ always say ’bout them chill’n.”

The old man, mollified for the instant, paused, his gnarled knotted hands shaking nervously, the tremor in his unseen lips sending a vague shiver down all the length of his silver beard. The excitement, painful to witness, was dying out of his eager eyes, when a mad peal of laughter rang out from the recesses of the old mill.

“What be that thar blamed idjit a-doin’ of now! him an’ that thar minkish Mink!”

He turned and went hastily into the shadowy place. Bags of grain were scattered about. The hopper took up much room in the limited space; behind it the miller’s nephew and Mink were sitting on the step of a rude platform. They had a half-bushel measure inverted between them, and on it was drawn a geometric figure upon which were ranged grains of corn.

There was a pondering intentness on the idiot’s wide face very nearly approaching a gleam of intelligence. Mink, incongruously patient and silent, awaited Tad’s play; both were unaware of the old man, among the dusky shadows, peering at them from over the hopper.[27] At last, Tad, with an appealing glance at Mink, and an uncertain hand, adjusted a grain of corn. He leaned forward eagerly, as Mink promptly played in turn. Then, fixing all the faculties of his beclouded mind upon the board, he finally perceived that the game had ended, and that his opponent was victor. Once more his harsh laughter echoed from the rafters. “Ye won it, Mink. Ye won the coon.”

“I don’t want yer coon,” said Mink, good-naturedly. “Ye kin keep yer coon ter bet nex’ time.”

“Naw, ye kin hev the coon, Mink!” He caught at a string dandling from a beam. “Kem down hyar, ye idjit!” he cried, with a strange, thick-tongued enunciation. “Kem down hyar, ye damned fool!”

The old man suddenly made his way around the hopper and stood before them. Tad rose, with a startled face. Mink looked up composedly.

“Do ye know what ye air a-doin’ of, Mink Lorey?” asked the old man, sternly.

“L’arnin’ Tad ter play ‘five corn,’” said Mink, innocently. “He kin play right sorter peart fur a lackin’ one. I dunno ez I b’lieve Tad’s so powerful fursaken no-ways, ef ennybody would take the pains ter l’arn him. I b’lieves he’d show a right mind arter a while.”

“An’ thar ye sit, ez complacent ez a bull-frog—ye that the Lord hev favored with senses,” cried the old man, “sech ez they be,” he stipulated, making not too much of Mink’s endowments, “a-usin’ of ’em ter ruin a pore idjit boy,”—Mink’s eyes flashed surprise,—“a-l’arnin’ him ter play a gamblin’ game.”

“Shucks! five corn!” cried Mink, accustomed to the iniquity of “playin’ kyerds,” and scorning to rate the puerile beguilements of “five corn” among the “gambling games” which he had mastered,—“what’s five corn! Enny child kin play it—that thar coon could l’arn it ef he hed a mind ter do it. I don’t want the critter. Tad; I don’t want it.”

The old man’s tongue had found its ready oaths. “A-fixin’ on the idjit boy fur the prey o’ Satan. A-l’arnin’[28] him ter play a gamblin’ game ter damn his soul. An’ a-trickin’ him out’n his coon.”

“I never!” cried Mink, in hasty extenuation. “I jes’ put up my rifle agin his coon ter make him think he war playin’ sure enough! But I ain’t a-goin’ ter keep his coon, an’ I don’t want it, nuther!”

“I kin read the future,” cried out the old man, suddenly, flinging up his hand and shading his peering eyes with it. “I kin view the scenes o’ hell. I see ye, Mink Lorey, a-writhin’ in the pits o’ torment, with the flames a-wroppin’ round ye, an’ a-swallerin’ melted iron an’ a-smellin’ sulphur an’ brimstone. I see ye! Bless the Lord,—I see ye thar!”

“Naw, ye don’t!” interpolated Mink, angrily.

The idiot had slunk to one side, and was gazing at the two with a white, startled face, still mechanically jerking the string, at the end of which the reluctant coon tugged among the beams above.

“I see ye thar,—damned yerse’f fur tryin’ ter damn the idjit’s soul!”

“Ye’d better look arter yer own soul!” cried Mink, “an’ quit l’arnin’ the idjit ter cuss. He do it percisely like he gits the word from ye, an’ ye air a perfessin’ member, what shouts at the camp-meetin’, an’ prays with ’the Power,’ an’ laffs with the ‘holy laff’! Shucks! I hev hearn ye exhortin’ them on the mourners’ bench.”

Once more the old man broke out angrily.

Mink interrupted. “Quit cussin’ me! Quit it!” he cried. He wore a more harried look than one would have believed possible, as the miller, with his hoary head and tremulous beard, pressed close upon him in the dark, narrow apartment, the idiot’s white face—a sort of affrighted glare upon it—dimly visible beside him. “Quit it! I ain’t a-goin’ ter take nare nuther word off ’n ye!”

“How ye goin’ ter holp it? Goin’ ter hit a old man,—old enough ter be yer grandad, eh?” suggested the wary old creature, making capital of his infirmities.

“I’ll bust yer mill down, ef ye don’t lemme out’n it[29] Lemme out!” cried Mink, tumultuously, striving to push past.

Jerry Price’s long, lank figure appeared in the doorway. It was not policy which animated him, for he had nothing at stake. With an inherent knowledge of human nature, some untutored instinctive capacity for manipulating its idiosyncrasies, he half consciously found a certain satisfaction in exercising his keen acumen on the men about him. It might have been employed more profitably in the field of local politics, had the gift been adequately realized and valued. He was of an amiable, even of an admirable, temperament, and he devised the adjustment of many complications, in which open interference would avail naught, by subtly appealing to some predominant motive or sentiment with the accuracy with which a surgeon can touch a nerve.

“Look-a-hyar, Mink,” he said, apparently unobservant of any signs of a quarrel, “ain’t you-uns a-goin’ ter shoot?”

Mink’s angry aspect dropped like a husk.

“Waal, I can’t, ye know,” he said, in a voice eager with interest. “They ’lowed ter me ez they hed done made up the money an’ bought the beef, an’ all the chances are gone,—six fur a dollar, shillin’ apiece.”

“Waal, I bought eight chances. I’ll let ye hev two of ’em, ef two’ll do ye.”

“Jiminy Crack-corn an’ I don’t keer!” exclaimed Mink, doubling himself partly in a gesture of ecstasy, and partly to reach a silver coin that led a lonesome life in the depths of his long pocket. He handed it over, and slapped his leg with a sounding thwack. “I could shoot ye all off ’n the ground, an’ I kin git the fust an’ second ch’ice in two cracks.”

Rood, in the doorway behind Price, regarded the transaction with disapproval.

“I don’t b’lieve it’s ’cordin’ ter rules, Jerry,” he expostulated, “ter go roun’ an’ swap off yer chances arter ye paid fur ’em. I never seen it done afore, no-ways.”

“Ye hold yer jaw!” said Price, imperious, though[30] good-natured. “I hev shot fur beef ’fore ye war born!”—a diminutive marksman, were this statement to receive full credit, since he was but a year or two older than Rood.

Irregular though it may have been, there was no appeal from the self-arrogated authority of Price, and his oft-reiterated formula as to his experience before his interlocutor’s birth had all the enlightened functions of precedent.

Rood said no more, appreciating the futility of remonstrance. He stood, surly enough, in the doorway, listening absently to the garrulous clamor of the old miller, who was telling again and again of Mink’s iniquity in teaching Tad “five corn,” and of his threats against the mill.

“I dare ye ter lay a finger on the mill!” he cried. “I’ll put ye in that thar hopper an’ grind every ounce o’ yer carcass ter minch meat.”

Mink gave him no heed. He had joined the group of marksmen near the tree on which the targets were to be fixed. He was loading his gun, holding the ball in the palm of his hand, and pouring enough powder over it to barely cover it in a conical heap. He dexterously adjusted the “patching,” and as he rammed down the charge he paused suddenly. From a little log cabin on a rise hard by, a delicate spiral wreath of smoke curled up over the orchard, and airily defined itself against the mountain. Beside the rail fence a girl of fifteen was standing; sunny-haired, blue-eyed, barefooted, and slatternly. The peaches were ripe in the weighted trees above her head; he heard the chanting bees among them. The pig was grunting luxuriously among their roots and the fallen over-ripe fruit; for his driver, ’Gustus Tom, and the elder boy, Joseph, had gone down to the mill for a closer view of the shooting; the small girls who had mounted the fence being deterred from accompanying them by feminine decorum. The dogs appertaining to the place had also gone down to the mill, and were conferring with the followers of the contestants in the match. One, however,[31] a gaunt and gray old hound, that had half climbed the fence, hesitated, his fore-paws resting on the topmost rail, a lean, eager curiosity on his grave, serious countenance, his neck stretched, his head close to the pretty head of the golden-haired maiden.

“Howdy, sis!” called out the bold Mink, the ramrod arrested half-way in the barrel, his face shadowed by his broad-brimmed hat, his hair flaunting in the wind.

She gave a flattered smile, full of precocious coquetry.

“Sick him, Bose!” she exclaimed to the faithful dog. “Sick him!”

Bose fastened his glare on Mink, raised his bristles, and growled obediently.

The young man with a gay laugh drove the charge home, and rattled the ramrod sharply into its place.

Already the first report of the rifle had pealed into the quietude of the cove; the rocks clamored as with the musketry of a battle. Far, far and faint the sound clanged back from the ranges between Chilhowee and the river, from all the spurs and ravines of the Big Smoky. The sunshine had the burnished fullness of post-meridian lustre, mellow, and all unlike the keen, matutinal glitter of earlier day; but purple shadows encircled the cove, and ever and anon a shining curve was described on the mountain side as the wings of a homeward-bound bird caught the light. Sometimes the low of cattle rose on the air. The beef, as the young ox was prematurely called, lifted his head, listening. He stood, the rope about his neck, secured to a hitching-post near the mill, looking calmly upon the ceremonies that sealed his destiny. It is to be hoped, in view of the pangs of prescience, that the animal’s deductive capacities and prophetic instincts are not underrated, or the poor beef’s presence at the shooting-match might express the acme of anguished despair. He was an amiable brute, and lent himself passively to the curiosity of ’Gustus Tom, who came up more than once, gazed fixedly at him, and examined his horns and hoofs, his eyes and nozzle, doubtless verifying some preconceptions as to facts in natural history.

[32]

The young mountaineers seemed to shoot with startling rapidity. Only one green hand labored under the delusion that a long aim can do aught but “wobble the eyes.” As each flung himself prostrate, with a grave intentness of expression and a certain precipitancy of gesture, it might have seemed some strange act of worship, but for the gun resting upon a log placed for the purpose, sixty yards from the mark,—the customary distance in shooting-matches with the old-fashioned rifle,—and the sudden sharp crack of the report. Their marksmanship was so nearly equal that it became readily apparent that the office of the anxious-eyed judges was not an enviable honor. Occasionally disputes arose, and the antagonists gathered around the tree, examining the targets with vociferous gesticulation which often promised to end in cuffs. Once the two judges disagreed, when it became necessary to call in an impartial “thirdsman” and submit the question. The old miller, placid once more, accepted the trust, decided judiciously, and the match proceeded.

Mink’s turn came presently.

As he ran deftly in and out among the heavy young mountaineers, he seemed more than ever like some graceful wild animal, with such elastic lightness, such reserve of strength, such keen endowment of instinct. He arranged in its place his board, previously blackened with moistened powder, and marked with a cross drawn on it with a knife-blade; each contestant had brought a precisely similar target. Then, to distinguish the centre at sixty yards he carefully affixed a triangular piece of white paper, so that it touched the cross at the intersection of the lines. As he ran lightly back to the log and flung himself upon the ground, his swift movement and his lithe posture struck the attention of one of the men.

“Now, ain’t ye the livin’ image o’ a mink! Ye’ve got nothin’ ter do but ter crope under that thar log, like thar war a hen hidin’ thar, an’ ye war tryin’ ter git it by the throat.”

Mink cast his bright eyes upward. “Ye shet up!” he[33] exclaimed. Then he placed his rifle on the log and aimed in a twinkling,—his finger was on the trigger.

At this moment ’Gustus Tom, in his overwhelming curiosity, contrived to get his small anatomy between the marksman and the tree. The jet of red light leaped out, the funnel-shaped smoke diffused itself in a formless cloud, and the ball whizzed close by the boy’s head.

There ensued a chorus of exclamation. The old man quavered out piteously. Mink, dropping the rifle to the ground, leaped up, seized the small boy by the nape of the neck, and deposited him with a shake in the bosom of his aged relative.

“Ye limb o’ Satan, ’Gustus Tom!” cried out the old man. “Ain’t ye got no better sense ’n ter go out fur a evenin’ walk ’twixt that thar tree an’ these hyar boys, ez couldn’t begin ter shoot agin me an’ my mates when I shot for beef whenst I war young? A-many-a-time I hev fired the five bes’ shots myself, an’ won all the five ch’ices o’ the beef, an’ jes’ druv the critter home,—won it all! But these hyar fool boys jes’ ez soon bang yer head off ez hit the mark. Ye g’ long ’fore I skeer the life out’n ye!”

And ’Gustus Tom, in the unbridled pride of favoritism and with the fear of no man before his eyes, went along as far as the front rank of the crowd, continuing a fervid spectator of the sport.

The agitation of the moment had impaired to a slight degree Mink’s aim. The shot was, however, one of the best yet made, and there was a clamor of negation when he insisted that he ought to have it over. The judges ruled against him and the sport proceeded.

As Rood made his last shot, his strongly marked dark face was lighted with a keen elation. Although, according to strictest construction, the ball had not penetrated the centre, it was within a hair’s breadth of it, and it was so unlikely that it would be surpassed that he tasted all the assured triumphs of victory before the battle was won.

With Mink’s second shot arose the great dispute of[34] the day. Like Rood’s, it was not fairly in the bull’s-eye, if the point of intersection might be so called, but it too lacked only a hair’s breadth. Mink was willing enough for a new trial, but Rood, protesting, stood upon his rights. The judges consulted together apart, reëxamined the boards, finally announced their incapacity to decide, and called in the “thirdsman.”

Mink made no objection when the miller, as referee, came to look at the board. He, too, examined it closely, holding his big hat in his hand that it might cast no shadow. There was no perceptible difference in the value of the two shots. Mink hardly believed he had heard aright when the “thirdsman,” with scarcely a moment’s hesitation, declared there was no doubt about the matter. Rood’s shot was the fairer. “I could draw a line ’twixt Mink’s and the centre.”

There was a yell of derision from the young fellows. Rood wore a provoking sneer. Mink stood staring.

“Look-a-hyar,” he said roughly, “ye haffen-blind old owel! Ye can’t tell the differ ’twixt them shots. It’s a tie.”

“Rood’s air the closest, an’ he gits the fust ch’ice o’ beef!” said the old man, his white beard and mustache yawning with his toothless laugh. “Ai-yi! Mink, ye ain’t so powerful minkish yit ez ter git the fust ch’ice o’ beef.”

“Ye’ll hev the second ch’ice, Mink,” said Price consolingly. He himself, the fourth best shot, had the fourth choice.

“I won’t hev the second ch’ice!” exclaimed Mink. “It’s nobody but that thar weezened old critter ez ’lows I oughter. Fust he sent his gran’son, that thar slack-twisted ’Gustus Tom, ter git in my aim,—wisht I hed shot him! An’ then, when I lets him be thurdsman, he air jes’ so durned m’licious he don’t even stop an’ take a minit ter decide.” Mink’s heart was hot. He had been wounded in his most vulnerable susceptibility, his pride in his marksmanship.

“Look-a-hyar, Mink!” remonstrated Price, “ye ain’t[35] a-goin’ off ’fore the beef’s been butchered an’ ye git the second ch’ice. Stop! Hold on!”

For Mink was about to mount.

“I don’t want no beef,” he said. “I hev been cheated ’mongst ye. I won the fust ch’ice, an’ I won’t put up with the second.”

Price was nonplused for a moment; then he evolved a solution. “I’ll sell it, Mink,” he cried, “an’ bring ye the money! An’ don’t ye furgit old Tobias Winkeye,” he added beguilingly.

“Who’s old Tobias Winkeye?” asked the miller tartly.

Price laughed, sticking his hands in the pockets of his jeans trousers, and looked around, winking at the others with a jocosity enfeebled somewhat by his light sparse lashes. “Jes’ a man ez hev got a job fur Mink,” he said, enigmatically.

The old miller, baffled, and apprehending the mockery, laughed loud and aggressively, his white beard shaking, his bushy eyebrows overhanging his twinkling eyes.

“Hedn’t ye better bust the mill down, Mink?” he said floutingly.

“I will,—see ef I don’t!” Mink retorted, as he wheeled his mare.

Only idle wrath, an idle threat, void of even the vaguest intention. They all knew that at the time. But the significance of the scene was altered in the light of after events.

Mink’s fate had mounted with him, and the mare carried double as he rode out of Piomingo Cove.

The iterative echoes of the shooting-match, sharply jarring from mountain to mountain, from crag to crag, evoked a faint reverberation even in the distant recesses of Wild-Cat Hollow. Alethea Sayles, sitting at her loom on the porch of the little log cabin, paused, the shuttle motionless in her deft hand, to listen.

All aloof from the world was Wild-Cat Hollow, a limited depression, high up on the vast slope of the Great Smoky. It might have seemed some secret nook, some guarded fastness, so closely did the primeval wilderness encompass it, so jealously did the ridgy steeps rise about it on every hand. It was invisible from the valley below, perhaps too from the heights above. And only a glimpse was vouchsafed to it of the world from which it was sequestered: beyond a field, in a gap of the minor ridges superimposed upon the mountain, where the dead and girdled trees stood in spectral ranks among the waving corn, might be seen a strip of woods in the cove below, a glint of water, a stately file of lofty peaks vanishing along the narrow skyey vista. Sunrise and sunset,—the Hollow knew them not: a distant mountain might flare with a fantasy of color, a star of abnormal glister might palpitate with some fine supernal thrill of dawn; but for all else, it only knew that the night came early and the day broke late, and in many ways it had meagre part in the common lot.

The little log cabin, set among its scanty fields, its weed-grown “gyarden spot,” and its few fruit-trees, was poor of its kind. The clapboards of its roof were held in place by poles laid athwart them, with large stones piled between to weight them down. The chimney was of clay and sticks, and leaned away from the wall. In[37] a corner of the rickety rail fence a gaunt, razor-backed hog lay grunting drowsily. Upon a rude scaffold tobacco leaves were suspended to dry. Even the martin-house was humble and primitive: merely a post with a cross-bar, from which hung a few large gourds with a cavity in each, whence the birds were continually fluttering. Behind it all, the woods of the steep ascent seemed to touch the sky. The place might give a new meaning to exile, a new sentiment to loneliness.

Seldom it heard from the world,—so seldom that when the faint rifle-shots sounded in the distance a voice from within demanded eagerly, “What on yearth be that, Lethe?”

“Shootin’ fur beef, down in the cove, I reckon, from thar firin’ so constant,” drawled Alethea.

“Ye dunno,” said the unseen, unexpectedly, derisive of this conjecture. “They mought be a-firin’ thar bullets inter each other. Nobody kin count on a man by hisself, but a man in company with a rifle air jes’ a outdacious, jubious critter.”

Alethea looked speculatively down at the limited section of the cove visible from the Hollow above. Her hazel eyes were bright, but singularly grave. The soft sheen of her yellow hair served to definitely outline the shape of her head against the brown logs of the wall. The locks lay not in ripples, but in massive undulations, densely growing above her forehead, and drawn in heavy folds into a knot at the back of her head. She had the delicate complexion and the straight, refined lineaments so incongruous with the poverty-stricken mountaineer, so commonly seen among the class. Her homespun dress was of a dull brown. About her throat, of exquisite whiteness, was knotted a kerchief of the deepest saffron tint. Her hands and arms—for her sleeves were rolled back—were shapely, but rough and sun-embrowned. She had a deliberate, serious manner that very nearly approached dignity.

“I hopes they ain’t,” she said, still listening. “I hopes they ain’t a-shootin’ of one another.”

[38]

“Waal, I’m a-thinkin’ the lead wouldn’t be wasted on some of ’em,” said the acrid voice. “Piomingo Cove could make out mighty well ’thout some o’ them boys ez rip an’ rear aroun’ down thar ez a constancy. I dunno ez I’d feel called on ter mourn fur Mink Lorey enny. An’ I reckon the cove could spare him.”

Looking through the window close by the bench of the loom, Alethea could see the interior of the room, rudely furnished and with the perennial fire of the wide chimney-place slowly smouldering in a bed of ashes. A half-grown Shanghai pullet was pecking about the big flat stones of the hearth in a premature and unprescient proximity to the pot. There were two bedsteads of a lofty build, the thick feather beds draped with quilts of such astounding variety of color as might have abashed the designers of Joseph’s coat. The scrupulous cleanliness and orderliness of the place were as marked a characteristic as its poverty.

A sharp-featured woman of fifty sat in a low chair by the fire, wearing a blue-checked homespun dress, a pink calico sun-bonnet, and a cob-pipe,—the last was so constantly sported that it might be reckoned an article of attire. She was not so old as she seemed, but the loss of her teeth and her habit of crouching over the fire gave her a cronish aspect.

Alethea hesitated. Then, with a deprecatory manner, she said in her soft contralto drawl, “He ain’t down ’mongst the boys in Piomingo Cove none.”

Mrs. Sayles sneered. “Ye b’lieve that?”

“He be a-herdin’ cattle along o’ Ben Doaks on Piomingo Bald.”

Mrs. Sayles looked at her step-daughter and puffed a copious wreath of smoke for reply.

“Reuben tole me that hisself,—an’ so did Ben Doaks,” persisted Alethea.

“Mink, I calls him, an’ nuthin’ shorter,” said Mrs. Sayles, obdurately,—as if anything could be shorter. “But ef Ben Doaks gin the same word, it mus’ be a true one.”

[39]

Alethea flushed. “I know ye air sot agin Reuben, but I’d believe his word agin enny other critter’s in the mountings.”

“Set a heap o’ store on him, don’t ye?” said Mrs. Sayles, sarcastically. “An’ when he kem a-courtin’ ye, an’ ’peared crazy ’bout’n ye, an’ ye an’ him war promised ter marry, ye couldn’t quit jowin’ at him fur one minit. Ye plumb beset him ter do like ye thought war right,—ez ef he hed no mo’ conscience o’ his own ’n that pullet thar, an’ hedn’t never hearn on salvation. An’ ye’d beg an’ beg him ter quit consortin’ with the moonshiners; an’ a-drinkin’ o’ apple-jack an’ sech; an’ a-rollickin’ round the kentry; an’ layin’ folkses fences down on the groun’; an’ liftin’ thar gates off’n the hinges; an’ ketchin’ thar geese, an’ pickin’ ’em, an’ scatterin’ thar feathers in the wind, an’ sendin’ ’em squawkin’ home; an’ a-playin’ kyerds; an’ a-whoopin’, an’ ridin’, an’ racin’. An’ ye war always a-preachin’ at him, an’ tryin’ ter straighten him out, an’ make him suthin’ he war never born ter be.”

Her pipe was smoked out. She drew from her pocket a fragment of tobacco leaf, which was apparently not sufficiently cured for satisfactory smoking, for she laid it on the hot ashes on the hearth and watched it as it dried, her meditative eyes shaded by her pink calico sun-bonnet.

“Naw, sir!” she continued, as she crumpled the bit of leaf with her fingers and crowded it into the bowl of her pipe, “I hev never liked Mink. I ain’t denyin’ it, nuther. I ain’t gamesome enough ter git tuk up with sech ways ez his’n. Mighty few folks air! But I could see reason in the critter when he ’lowed one day, right hyar by this very chimbly-place,—he sez, sez he, ‘Lethe, ye don’t like nuthin’ I do or say, an’ I’m durned ef I kin see how ye like me!’”

Alethea’s serious, lustrous eyes, looking in at the window, saw not the uncouth interior of her home,—no! As in a vision, irradiated by some enchantment, she beheld the glamours of the idyllic past, fluctuating, waning.

[40]

Even to herself it sometimes seemed that she might have been content more lightly. Her imbuement with those practical ideas of right and wrong, the religion of deeds rather than the futilely pious fervors of the ignorant mountaineers in which creed and act were often widely at variance, was as mysterious an endowment as the polarity of the loadstone. She was not introspective, however; she never even wondered that she should speak openly, without fear or favor, as she felt impelled. Had she lived in an age when every inward monition was esteemed the voice of the Lord, she might have fancied that she was called to warn the world of the errors of its ways. Her sedulous conscience, the austere gravity of her spirit, her courage, her steadfastness, her fine intelligence, even her obdurate self-will, might all have had assertive values in those long bygone days. As an historic woman, she might have founded an order, or juggled with state-craft, or perished a martyr, or rode, enthusiast, in the ranks of battle. By centuries belated in Wild-Cat Hollow, she was known as a “perverted, cross-grained gal” and “a meddlin’ body,” and the “widder Jessup” had much sympathy for having in a misguided moment married Alethea’s father. Sometimes the Hollow, distorted though its conscience was, experienced a sort of affright to recognize its misdeeds in her curt phrase. It could only ask in retort who set her up to judge of her elders, and regain its wonted self-complacency as best it might. Even her own ascetic rectitude lacked some quality to commend it.

“I can’t find no regular fault with Lethe,” her step-mother was wont to say, “’ceptin’ she’s jes’—Lethe.”

Mrs. Sayles’s voice, pursuing the subject, recalled the girl’s attention:—

“An’ ye tired his patience out,—the critter hed mo’ ’n I gin him credit fur,—an’ druv him off at last through wantin’ him ter be otherwise. An’ now folks ’low ez him an’ Elviry Crosby air a-goin’ ter marry. I’ll be bound she don’t harry him none ’bout’n his ways, ’kase her mother tole me ez she air mighty nigh a idjit ’bout’n[41] him, an’ hev turned off Peter Rood, who she hed promised ter marry, though the weddin’ day hed been set, an’ Pete air wuth forty sech ez Mink.”

Alethea turned away abruptly to her work, and as she lightly tossed the shuttle to and fro she heard, amidst the creaking of the treadle and the thumping of the batten, her step-mother’s persistent voice droning on:—

“An’ so ye hed yer say, an’ done yer preachin’, an’ he profited by it. I reckon he ’lowed ef ye jawed that-a-way afore ye war married, thar war no yearthly tellin’ what ye could say arterward. An’ now,” rising to the dramatic, “hyar kems along Ben Doaks, powerful peart an’ good enough ter satisfy ennybody; perlite, an’ saaft-spoken, an’ good-lookin’, an’ respected by all, an’ ready ter marry ye ter-morrer, ef ye’ll say the word. He owns cattle-critters”—

“An’ sheep,” put in an unexpected voice. A dawdling young woman, with a shallow blue eye and a pretty, inane soft face, had stepped into the back door, and heard the last words of the monologue which apparently had been often enough repeated to admit of no doubt as to its tenor. She had a slatternly, ill-adjusted look, and a snuff-brush in the corner of her mouth.

“An’ herds cattle in the summer season,” said Mrs. Sayles.

“He hev a good name ’mongst the cattle-owners,” observed the young woman, her daughter-in-law.

“An’ hev bought him right smart land,” added Mrs. Sayles.

“Down in Piomingo Cove! not h’isted up on the side o’ the mounting, like we-uns!” exclaimed the young woman, with more enthusiasm than one would have believed possible from the flaccid indifference of her manner.

“An’ he put in all the fair weather las’ winter a-raisin’ him a house,” Mrs. Sayles pursued.

“An’ he ’lowed ter me ez every log war hefted, an’ every pat o’ clay war daubed on the chinkin’, with the thought o’ Lethe!” cried the other.

[42]

“He hev been plantin’ round thar some, a’ready,” said the old woman.

“Corn, pumpkins, wheat, an’ terbacco,” supplemented the daughter-in-law.

“An’ he hev got him some bee-gums,—I never hearn how many bees,” said Mrs. Sayles.

“Down in Piomingo Cove!” the climax of worldly prosperity.

“Laws-a-massy!” exclaimed Mrs. Sayles, with a freshened realization of despair. “Lethe ain’t never goin’ ter live in that house! I dunno what ails the gal! She takes a notion ez she likes a man with sech ways ez she can’t abide, an’ she quar’ls with him mornin’ an’ evenin’. An’ then when a feller kems along, with all sort’n good ways ez she likes, she don’t like him! Gals never acted similar whenst I war young. I ’low it mus’ be the wiles o’ Satan on the onruly generation.”

“Lethe ’pears ter think the Lord hev app’inted the rocky way,” said the other. “She be always a-doin’ of what’s the hardest. An’ she can’t quit nowhar this side o’ nuthin’! Ef ever she’s condemned ter Torment she’ll kerry a leetle kindlin’ along, fur fear the fire won’t be het up hot enough ter burn her fur her sins.”

She was silent during a momentary activity of the snuff-brush.

“But ef I war you-uns, Lethe, an’ hed the chance o’ livin’ in my own house all ter myself”—she began anew.

“Plenty o’ elbow-room,” interrupted Mrs. Sayles; “not all jammed tergether, like we-uns hyar.”

Alethea, aware of her lack of logic, made an effort to effect a diversion.

“I never hearn o’ folks a-grudgin’ a gal house-room, an’ wantin’ her ter go off an’ marry fur a place ter bide,” she said, pausing in her weaving.

Mrs. Sayles, who piqued herself, not without some reason, on her kindness to her step-daughter, having her prosaic welfare, at least, at heart, retorted in righteous wrath. “An’ nobody ain’t never said no sech word,”[43] she declared, with amplest negation. “Grudgin’ ye house-room,—shucks!”

“One less wouldn’t be no improvemint ter we-uns, Lethe,” said the daughter-in-law. “We air jes’ like a hen settin’ on forty aigs: she kin kiver ’em ez well ez thirty-nine.”

“But I ain’t got no medjure o’ patience with this latter-day foolishness!” said Mrs. Sayles, tartly. “Whenst I war young, gals married thar fust chance,—mought hev been afeard they’d never git another,” she added, impersonally, that others might profit by this contingency. “An’ I don’t keer much nohow fur these hyar lonesome single wimmen. Ye never kin git folks ter b’lieve ez they ever hed enny chance.”

“Laws-a-massy, Lethe,” the daughter-in-law reassured her, still vaguely serene, “I ain’t wantin’ ter git shet o’ ye, nohow. Ye hev tuk mo’ keer o’ my chill’n than I hev, an’ holped me powerful. It’s well ye done it, too, fur Jacob Jessup ain’t sech ez kin content me with Wild-Cat Hollow. I war raised in the cove!”

“Thar’s L’onidas now, axin’ fur suthin’ ter eat,” said the uncompromising Alethea, whose voice was the slogan of duty.

The loom occupied a full third of the space on the little porch; two or three rickety chairs stood there, besides; a yoke hung against the wall; the spinning-wheel was shadowed by the jack-bean vines, whose delicate lilac blooms embellished the little cabin, clambering to its roof; on the floor were several splint baskets. A man was languidly filling them with peaches, which he brought in a wheel-barrow from the trees farther down on the slope. He was tall and stalwart, but his beard was gray, and he had assumed the manner and all the exemptions of extreme age; occasionally he did a little job like this with an air of laborious precision. He was accompanied both in going and coming by his step-son’s daughter, a tow-headed, six-year-old girl, and a gaunt yellow dog. The little girl’s voice, dictatorial and shrill, was on the air continuously, broken only by the low, acquiescent[44] refrain of the old man’s replies, carefully adjusted to meet her propositions. The dog paced silently and discreetly along, his appreciation of the placid pleasure of the occasion plainly manifested in his quiet demeanor and his slightly wagging tail. His decorum suffered a lapse when, as they came close to the porch, he observed Leonidas issue from the door,—a small boy of four, a plump little caricature of a man, in blue cotton trousers, an unbleached cotton shirt, and a laughably small pair of knitted suspenders. He held in his hand a piece of fat meat several inches square, considered in the mountains peculiarly wholesome for small boys, and a reliable assistant in “gittin’ yer growth.”

Tige paused not for reflection. He sprang upon the porch, capering gleefully about, and uttering shrill yelps of discovery with much his triumphant manner in treeing a coon. Leonidas shared the common human weakness of overestimating one’s own size. He thought to hold the booty out of Tige’s reach, and extended his arm at full length, whereupon the dog, with an elastic bound and extreme nicety of aim, caught it and swallowed it at a single gulp. Leonidas winked very fast; then, realizing his bereavement, burst into noisy tears. Tige’s facetiousness had a discordantly sudden contrast in the serious howl he emitted as he was kicked off the porch by the child’s father. This was an unkempt young fellow just emerging from the shed-room. He had a red face and swollen eyes, and there were various drowsy intimations in his manner that he was just roused from sleep. No natural slumber, one might have judged; the odor of whiskey still hung about him, and he walked with an unsteady gait to the end of the porch and sat down on the edge of the floor, his feet dangling over the ground. Tige, who had sought refuge beneath the house, and was giving vent to sundry sobbing wheezes, thrust his head out to lick his master’s boots. Upon this mollifying demonstration, the man looked down with the lenient expression of one who loves dogs. “What ails ye, then,” he reasoned, “ter be sech a fool as ter ’low ye kin be let ter rob a child the size o’ L’onidas thar?”

[45]

And forthwith the mercurial Tige came out, cheerful as before.

In the limited interval when Leonidas—who had been supplied with another piece of meat, but still wept aloud with callow persistence because of the affronts offered by Tige—was fain to pause for breath, and between the alternate creaking of the treadle of the loom and the thumping of the batten, the man’s ear caught that unwonted stir in the air, the sound of consecutive rifle-shots.

“Look-a-hyar,” he cried, springing to his feet, “what’s that a-goin’ on down in the cove? Lethe, stop trompin’ on that thar n’isy treadle, so ez I kin listen! Quit yellin’, ye catamount!” with a vengeful glance at the small boy.

But the grief of Leonidas was imperative, and he abated nothing.

Jacob Jessup stood for an instant baffled. Then suddenly he put both hands to his mouth, and roused all the echoes of Wild-Cat Hollow with a ringing halloo.

“Who be ye a-hollerin’ at?” asked his mother from her nook in the chimney corner.

“I ’lowed I viewed a man up yander ’mongst them woods,—mought be one o’ the herders.”

Alethea’s foot paused on the treadle. Her uplifted hand stayed the batten, the other held the shuttle motionless. She turned her head and with a sudden rich flush on her cheek and a deep light in her lifted eyes looked up toward the forests that rose in vast array upon the steep slopes of the ridge until they touched the sky. Accustomed to the dusky shadows of their long avenues, she discerned a mounted figure in their midst. There was a tense moment of suspense. The man had wheeled his horse on hearing the halloo. He seemed to hesitate; then in lieu of response he took his way down the hill toward the cabin. The trees were fewer on the edge of the clearing. Before he drew rein by the rail fence she had turned back to the loom, and once more the shuttle winged its short, clumsy flights, like a fledgeling[46] bird, from one side to the other, and the treadle creaked, and the batten thumped, and she spared not an instant from her work.

For it was only Ben Doaks dismounting, glad of a pretext, throwing the reins over a projecting rail of the fence, and tramping up to the house.

“Howdy,” he observed comprehensively. And the family, meditatively eying him, responded, “Howdy.”

“Keep yer health, Ben?” the old woman demanded. She had come to the door, and took a gourd of water from a pail which was on a shelf without. She drank leisurely, and tossed the surplus water from the gourd across the porch, where it spattered the half-grown pullet, which shunted off suddenly with a loud, shocked exclamation, as if it sported half a score of ruffled petticoats.

“Yes’m,” drawled Ben, seating himself on the edge of the porch, near Jacob, “I keeps toler’ble well.”

“I dunno how ye do it,—livin’ off’n what ye cooks yerse’f.” She manifested a truly mundane interest in the eligible young man. She did not return to her chair by the fireside, but sat down on the doorstep. “I’d look ter be p’isoned ef I hed ter live on yer cookin’.”

“Waal, I reckon ye couldn’t put up with it right handy, seem’ the sorter table ye set out hyar.”

Was the old woman more than human, to be untouched by this sincere tribute?

“Ye oughter kem down hyar oftener ye do, Ben, an’ bide ter meals,” she said, her spectacles turned upon him with a certain grave luminosity. “We’ll make ye powerful welcome ter sech vittles ez we hev got. Ye ain’t been hyar fur a right smart time.”

“I know that, but somehows I never kin feel right welcome comin’ so often,” said Ben. He had leaned back against the post of the porch. He could look, without moving, into Alethea’s grave, absorbed face as she worked.

“’Count o’ Lethe? Shucks! thar ain’t but one fool hyar. Mought kem ter see the rest o’ we-uns.”

[47]

Alethea’s face flushed. Ben Doaks, dismayed to be the indirect occasion of her anger, and secretly affronted by the breach of decorum which he considered involved in this open mention of his bootless suit, hastened to change the subject. “Did ye hev a word ter say ter me, Jacob?” he asked. “Ye ’lowed, day ’fore yestiddy, ye wanted ter sell yer steer.”

There was now no sound from the cove. The burnished glisters of the sunshine hung above it, holding in suspension a gauzy haze, through which the purple mountains were glamourous and darkly vague. Jacob, his senses yet in thrall, could hardly recall the question he had desired to ask concerning the rifle-shots that had trivially jarred its perfect serenity.

“Yes, yes,” he said hastily. “Buck, ye know,” with the manner of introduction. “Yander he be.” He pointed to a gaunt dun-colored ox with long horns and a joyless mien, standing within a few feet of a rude trough which the spring branch kept supplied.

“Jacob,” said Alethea, turning her head with a knitted brow, “ef ye sell Buck, how air we goin’ ter plough our craps? How air we goin’ ter live along?”

“Laws-a-massy!” exclaimed Mrs. Sayles. “I ain’t s’prised none ef the man ez marries Lethe at last will find out he hev got a turrible meddler. She jes’ ups an’ puts inter her elders’ affairs ez brash ez ef hern war the only brains in the fambly. Jacob’s a-savin’ ter buy a horse, child. Yer dad ’lowed Jacob mought use his jedgmint ’bout all the crappin’, bein’ ez yer dad’s old an’ ain’t long fur this worl’. So Jacob hev determinated ter buy a horse. Who wants ter work a steer when they ken hev a horse?”

Doaks looked intently at Alethea, loyally eager to range himself on her side. She was oblivious of his presence now; every faculty was on the alert in her single-handed contest against the family.

“Whar’s the money he hev saved?” she demanded.

Her step-brother seemed frowzier than ever, as he lifted his eyebrows in vain cogitation for an answer.

[48]

“Ye shet up,” he said, in triumphant substitution; “ye ain’t no kin ter me.”

Alethea, all lacking in the bland and mollifying feminine influences that subtly work their ends in seeming submission, bluntly spoke her inmost thought:

“Ez long ez thar’s a moonshine still a-runnin’ somewhar round Piomingo Cove, Jacob ain’t goin’ ter save no money.”

“Thar ain’t no still round hyar ez I knows on,” said Doaks, in surprise. “Over yander in Eskaqua Cove thar air a bonded still, I know.”

“That bonded still hev ter sell wholesale, hevin’ no license otherwise,” she retorted, “an’ Jacob hain’t saved enough yit ter buy by the five gallon. An’ though he may ’pear sober ter you-uns, he don’t ter me.”

Jacob bore her scathing glance with an admirable equanimity.

“Ye shet up, Lethe; ye dunno nuthin’ ’bout stills, bonded or no. Look-a-hyar, Ben, don’t ye want ter buy Buck? See him thar?”

“I don’t want him,” said Ben.

Jacob turned fiercely on Alethea. “Whyn’t ye hold yer jaw, ef ye know how; ye have done spiled my trade. Look-a-hyar, Ben,” he said alluringly, “it’s this hyar steer,”—there was but one,—“this hyar steer; he’s wuth money. I tell ye,” he vociferated, with a drunken wag of his head, “Buck’s a good steer. I dunno ef I kin git my cornsent ter trade Buck off, no-ways. Buck’s plumb like a member o’ the fambly. I tell ye we-uns fairly dote on Buck.”

“Waal, I don’t want him. Older ’n enny of ye, ain’t he?” drawled Ben. He was not a dull fellow, and he had taken his cue. He would decry the ox and forego his bargain, a consciously hopeless sacrifice to his affection.

Jacob straightened himself with an effort, and stared at his interlocutor.

“Who? Buck? Why, Buck ain’t much older than L’onidas thar.” He waved his hand toward the boy,[49] who had perched on the bench of the loom beside Alethea. Now and then she patted his shoulder, which effort at consolation he received with a distinct crescendo; he had begun to relish the sound of his vocal performance, evidently attempting new and bizarre effects.

“L’onidas air about four year old, ain’t he, Mis’ Jessup?” Doaks asked of the young matron, who seemed placidly regardless how the negotiation should terminate.

“I b’lieve he’s ’bout four,” she said, without animation.

“Waal, he be toler’ble bouncin’ fur that,” said Doaks, looking with the eye of speculation at the boy, as if he were about to offer a bid for Leonidas, “but I kin see a heap o’ diff’unce ’twixt his size an’ Buck’s.”

The drunken man turned and stared at the diminutive person on the bench. “Waal,” he said in a low-spirited way, as if he must yield the point, “I never knowed ye wanted a steer o’ that size. Wouldn’t be much use ter ye. Our’n ain’t.”

“He ’pears sorter jubious in his temper. Does he hook?”

“Who? Buck?”—with an air of infinite amazement. “Why, Buck’s ez saaft ez L’onidas thar.”

As Leonidas was just now extremely loud, the comparison was hardly felicitous.

“I don’t want no work-ox, nohow,” said Doaks. “I want cattle ter fatten.”

“Jes’ try Buck. He’ll lay on fat fur ev’y ear o’ corn fedded him. Ye dunno Buck. He hain’t laid on much yit, ’kase, ye see,”—Jessup’s voice took a confidential intonation, although it was not lowered because of the roaring Leonidas,—“we-uns ain’t hed much corn ter feed ter Buck, bein’ back’ard las’ year. The drought cotched our late corn, an’ so Buck, though he worked it, he never got none sca’cely. An’ that’s why he ain’t no fatter ’n he be.”

Logical of Buck, but it availed him as little as the logic of misfortunes profits the rest of the world.

[50]

Alethea had risen and turned half round, leaning against the great clumsy frame of the loom. Her posture displayed her fine height; her supple figure was slight, as became her age, but with a suggestion of latent strength in every curve. There was something strangely inconsistent in the searching, serious expression of her grave brown eyes and the lavish endowment of her beauty, which seemed as a thing apart from her. Perhaps only Ben Doaks noted, or rather felt in a vague, unconscious way, the fascination of its detail: the lustre of her dense yellow hair showing against the brown wall, where a string of red peppers hung, heightening the effect; the glimpse of her white throat under the saffron kerchief; the lithe grace of her figure, about which her sober-hued dress fell in straight folds. To the home-folks she gave other subjects to contemplate.

“Naw,” she drawled, in her soft, low voice, whose intonation only suggested sarcasm, “we didn’t plant much o’ nuthin’ las’ year,—hed no seed sca’cely, an’ nuthin’ ter trade fur ’em. The plenties’ o’ ennythin’ roun’ hyar-abouts war bresh whiskey, an’ ez Buck don’t drink it he ain’t no fatter ’n he be.”

“Waal,” said Doaks, feeling all the discomforts incident to witnessing a family row, incompetent to participate by reason of non-membership, “I ’lowed the mountings hed in an’ about done with moonshinin’, cornsiderin’ the way the raiders kep’ up with the distillers. It’s agin the law, ye know.”

“I ain’t a-keerin’ fur the law,” said Alethea loftily. “The law air jes’ the men’s foolishness, an’ they air a-changin’ of it forever till ’tain’t got no constancy. Ef I war minded ter break it I’d feel no hendrance in the sperit.”

Her eyes met his. He looked vaguely away. Certainly there was no reasoning on this basis.

“’Tain’t right,” she said suddenly. “Jacob sleeps an’ drinks his time away, an’ don’t do his sheer o’ the work. I done all the ploughin’ this year,—me an’ Buck,—an’ I ain’t one o’ the kind ez puts up with sech. I[51] ain’t a Injun woman, like them at Quallatown. Pete Rood,—he hev been over thar,—he ’lows the wimmen do all the crappin’ while the men go huntin’. I’ll kerry my e-end o’ the log, but when the t’other e-end draps ’pears ter me I oughter drap mine.”

“What ye goin’ ter do, Lethe?” said the old woman. “Goin’ ter take ter idlin’ an’ drinkin’ bresh whiskey, too?”

She laughed, but she sneered as well.

Alethea, all unmoved by her ridicule, drawled calmly on: “I dunno nuthin’ ’bout bresh whiskey, an’ I ain’t idled none, ez the rest o’ you-uns kin see; but ef Jacob don’t do his stent nex’ year, thar’ll be less corn hyar than this.”

It was hard for Doaks to refrain from telling her that there was a home ready for her, and one to share it who would work for both. Only futility restrained him. He flushed to the roots of his light brown hair, and as a resource he drew out a clasp-knife and absently whittled a chip as he listened.

“Waal, wimmen hev ter holp men along with thar work wunst in a while,” said Mrs. Sayles patronizingly. “Ye’ll find that out, child, whenst ye git married.”

“Ef I war married,” said Alethea, severely contemplating the possibility,—and Doaks felt a vague thrill of jealousy,—“I’d do his work ef he war ailin’ ennywise, but not ter leave him in the enjyement o’ bresh whiskey.”

“Ye shet up, Lethe,” said Jacob, nettled. “Ye ain’t no kin ter me,—jes’ a step-sister,—an’ ye ain’t got no right ter jow at me. Ye dunno nuthin’ ’bout bresh whiskey. Ye dunno whar it’s made nor who makes it.”

“Ef I did”—she began abruptly.

He looked up at her with a sober dismay on his face.

“Don’t go ter ’lowin’ ye’d gin the word ter the revenuers?” he said.

Mrs. Sayles dropped her knitting in her lap.

“Look-a-hyar, Lethe,” she exclaimed, “it’s ez much ez yer life’s wuth ter say them words!”

[52]

“I ain’t said ’em,” declared Alethea. She looked vaguely away with absent eyes, disregarding Jacob’s growling defense of himself, which consisted in good measure of animadversions on people who faulted their elders and gals who couldn’t hold their tongues. Suddenly she stepped from the porch.

“Whar be ye goin’, Lethe?” demanded Mrs. Sayles, ruthlessly interrupting Jacob’s monologue.

“Ter hunt up that thar lam’,” replied Alethea calmly, as if nothing else had been under discussion. “I ain’t seen nuthin’ of it ter-day, an’ some o’ the chill’n—I b’lieve ’twar Joe—’lowed its dam war down yander nigh Boke’s spring yestiddy, actin’ sorter cur’ous, an’ I reckon suthin’ ’s happened ter it.”

Doaks looked after her as she went, tempted to follow. She took her way down the path beside the zigzag rail-fence. All the corners were rank with wild flowers, vines and bushes, among which her golden head showed from time to time as in a wreath. She was soon without the limits of Wild-Cat Hollow. More than once she paused as she went, holding her hands above her eyes, and looking at the vast array of mountains on every side. A foreign land to her, removed even from vague speculation; she only saw how those august summits lifted themselves into the sky, how the clouds, weary-winged, were fain to rest upon them. There was a vague blurring at the horizon-line, for a shower was succeeded by mist. The woods intervened presently; the long stretches of the majestic avenues lay before her, all singularly open, cleared of undergrowth by the fiery besom of the annual conflagration. It was very silent; once only she heard the shrill trilling of a tree-frog; and once the insistent clamor of a locust broke out close at hand, vibrating louder and louder and dying away, to be caught up antiphonally in the distance. Often she noted the lightning-scathed trees, the fated of the forest, writhen and blanched and spectral among their flourishing kindred. There were presently visible at the end of the long leafy vista other dead trees: their blight was more prosaic;[53] they stood girdled and white in an abandoned field that lay below the slope on which she had paused, and near the base of the mountain. A broken rotting rail-fence still encircled it. Blackberry bushes, broom-sedge, a tangle of weeds, were a travesty of its crops. A fox, a swift-scudding tawny streak, sped across it as she looked. Hard by there was a deserted hut: the doors were open, showing the dark voids within; the batten shutters flapped with every changing whim of the winds. Fine sport they had often had, these riotous mountain sprites, shrieking down the chimney to affright the loneliness; then falling to sobs and sighs to mock the voices of those who had known sorrow here and perhaps shed tears; sometimes wrapping themselves in snow as in a garment, and reeling in fantastic whirls through the forlorn and empty place; sometimes twitting the gaunt timbers with their infirmities, and one wild night wrenching off half a dozen clapboards from the roof and scattering them about the door. Thus the moon might look in, seeing no more those whose eyes had once met its beam, and even the sunlight had melancholy intimations when it shone on the forsaken hearth-stone. A screech-owl had found refuge among the rafters, and Alethea heard its quavering scream ending in a low, sinister chuckle. There was a barn near at hand,—a structure of undaubed, unhewn logs, with a wide open pass-way below the loft to shelter wagons and farm implements; it seemed in better repair than the house. The amber sky above the dark woods had deepened to orange, to crimson; the waning light suffused the waters of the spring branch which flowed close by the barn, the willows leaning to it, the ferns laving in it. The place was incredibly solitary and mournful with the persistent spectacle of the deserted home, suggestive of collapsed energies, of the defeated scheme of some simple humanity.

A faint bleat rose suddenly. Alethea turned quickly. Amongst a patch of briers she caught a glimpse of something white; another glance,—it was the ewe, quietly nibbling the grass.

Alethea had no intention of moving softly, but her[54] skirts brushing through the weeds made hardly a sound. Her light, sure step scarcely stirred a leaf. The ewe saw her presently, and paused in feeding. She had been making the best of her woes, remaining near her lamb, which had fallen into a sink-hole, sustained by the earth, gravel and banks of leaves held in the mouth of the cavity. Its leg was broken, and thus, although the sheep could venture to it, the lamb could not follow to the vantage-ground above. Seeing that succor was at hand, the sheep lost all patience and calmness, and ran about Alethea in a distracting fashion, bleating, till the lamb, roused to a renewed sense of its calamities, bleated piteously too. As it lay down in the cavity upon the dead leaves, it had a strangely important look upon its face, appreciating how much stir it was making in the world for one of its size. Alethea noticed this, albeit she was too self-absorbed at the moment. These treacherous hopper-shaped sink-holes are of indefinite depth, and are often the mouths of caves. To reach the lamb she must needs venture half across the cavity. She stepped cautiously down the debris, holding fast the while to the branches of an elder-bush growing on its verge. She felt the earth sinking beneath her feet. The sheep, which had jumped in too, sprang hastily out. Alethea had a dizzying realization of insecurity. She caught the lamb up in one arm, then stepped upon the sinking mass and struggled up the side of the aperture, as with a great gulp the leaves and earth were swallowed into the cavity. She looked down with that sickening sense of a sheer escape, still holding the lamb in one arm; the other hand readjusted the heavy masses of her golden hair, and the saffron kerchief about the neck of her brown dress. The sheep, one anxiety removed, was the prey of another, and pressed close to Alethea, with outstretched head and all the fears of kidnapping in her pleading eyes.

Alethea waited for a moment to rest. Then as she glanced over her shoulder her heart seemed to stand still, her brain reeled, and but for her acute consciousness she would have thought she must be dreaming.

[55]

The clearing lay there all as it was a moment before: the deserted buildings, the weed-grown fields, the rotting rail fence; the woods dark about it, the sky red above it. Around and around the old barn, in a silent circuit, three men were solemnly tramping in single file. She stood staring at them with dilated eyes, all the mystic traditions of supernatural manifestations uppermost in her mind. Once more the owl’s scream rent the brooding stillness. How far that low, derisive chuckle echoed! A star, melancholy, solitary, was in the pensive sky. The men’s faces were grave,—once, twice, thrice, they made the round. Then they stood together in the open space beneath the loft, and consulted in whispers.

One suddenly spoke aloud.

“Oh, Tobe!” he called.

“Tobe!” called the echoes.

There was no answer. All three looked up wistfully. Then they again conferred together in a low tone.

“Oh, Tobias!” cried the spokesman in a voice of entreaty.

“Tobias!” pleaded the plaintive echoes.

Still there was no answer. The owl screamed suddenly in its weird, shrill tones. It had flown out from among the rafters and perched on the smokeless chimney of the hut. Then its uncanny laughter filled the interval.

Once more the men whispered anxiously to each other. One of them, a tall, ungainly, red-haired fellow, seemed to have evolved a solution of the problem which had baffled them.

“Mister Winkeye!” he exclaimed, with vociferous confidence.

The echoes were forestalled. A sneeze rang out abruptly from the loft of the deserted old barn,—a sneeze resonant, artificial, grotesque enough to set the blades below to roaring with delighted laughter.

“He mus’ hev his joke. Mister Winkeye air a mighty jokified old man,” declared the red-haired fellow.

[56]

They made no effort to hold further communication with the sneezer in the loft. They hastily placed a burly jug in the centre of the space below, and laid a silver half-dollar upon the cob that served as stopper. The coin looked extremely small in this juxtaposition. There may be people elsewhere who would be glad of a silver coin of that size capable of filling so disproportionately large a jug. Then they ran off fleetly out of the clearing and into the woods, and Alethea could hear the brush crackling as they dashed through it on the slopes below.

She was still pale and tremulous, but no longer doubts beset her. She understood the wiles of the illicit distiller, pursued so closely by the artifices of the raiders that he was prone to distrust the very consumers of his brush whiskey. They never saw his face, they knew not even his name. They had no faint suspicion where his still was hidden. They were not even dangerous as unwilling witnesses, should they be caught with the illicit liquor in their hands. The story that they had left a jug and a half-dollar in a deserted barn, and found the jug filled and the coin vanished, would inculpate no one. From the loft the distiller or his emissary could see and recognize them as they came. Alethea, having crept down the slope amongst the briers in search of the lamb, had been concealed from him. She was seized instantly by the desire to get away before he should appear. She coveted the knowledge of no such dangerous secret. She walked boldly out from the leafy covert, that he might see her in the clearing and delay till she was gone.

The lamb was bleating faintly in her arms; the sheep pressed close to her side, nudging her elbow with an insistent nozzle. The last flush of the day was on her shining hair and her grave, earnest face. The path led her near the barn. She hesitated, stopped, and drew back hastily. A man was swinging himself alertly down from the loft. He caught up the coin, slipped it into his pocket, and lifted the jug with the other hand. The[57] next moment he dropped it suddenly, with a startled exclamation. His eyes had met her eyes. There was a moment of suspense charged with mutual recognition. Then she ran hastily by, never pausing till she was far away in the deep obscurity of the woods.

The night came on. The dark summits of the great mountains were heavily defined against the sky. Here and there along those steep slanting lines that mark the ravines a mist hung, vaguely perceived. A point of red light might gleam in the dusky depths of Piomingo Cove where the flare of a hearth-stone flickered out. All the drowsy nocturnal voices joined in iterative unison, broken only when the marauding wolf of the Great Smoky howled upon the bald. The herders ruefully thought of the roaming yearlings, and presaged calamity. All the world was sunk in gloom, till gradually a rayonnant heralding halo, of a pallid and lustrous green, appeared above the deeply purple summits; in its midst the yellow moon slowly revealed itself, and with a visible tremulousness rose solemnly into the ascendency of the night.

It was high in the sky when Mink Lorey rode along the wild mountain ways. More than once he looked up earnestly at it, not under the spell of lunar splendors, but with a prosaic calculation of the hour. Suddenly he drew up the mare. He lifted his head, listening. Voices sounded in the depths of the woods,—faint, far, hilarious voices; then absolute silence. He struck the mare with his heels. The animal pushed on unwillingly, breaking through the brush, stumbling over the stones, scrambling up and down steep slopes. All at once, with a burst of laughter, there was disclosed an opening in the forest. A glory of pale moonlight suffused the mountains in the distance and the shimmering mists in the valley. In the flecking shadow of the great trees were half a dozen figures, with hairy moonlit faces and shining eyes, seated on logs or rocks, or lying upon the ground.

[59]

Not fauns nor satyrs; not Bacchus come again with all his giddy rout. Only the malcontents because of the bonded still.

“Hy’re, Mink!” exclaimed Jerry Price. “We fund the jug hyar ’cordin’ ter promise, hid in a hollow tree.”

“I hope,” said Mink with sudden apprehension, as he dismounted, “thar be some lef’ fur me.”

“A leetle, I reckon. Hyar, Mink, wet yer whistle.”

Mink sat down on the roots of a tree draped from its summit to its lowest bough with the rank luxuriance of a wild grapevine. The pendent ends swayed in the wind. The dew was upon the bunches of green fruit and the delicate tendrils, and the moonlight slanted on them with a glistening sheen.

Mink took the jug, which gurgled alluringly. He removed the cob that served as stopper, and smelled it with the circumspect air of those who drink from jugs. Then he turned it up to his mouth. A long bubbling sound, and he put it down with a sigh of satisfaction.

“Ye don’t ’pear ez riled ez ye did when ye rid out’n Piomingo Cove,” suggested Pete Rood.

He had a swaggering, triumphant manner, although he was lying on the ground.

Mink, leaning back against the bole of the tree, the moonlight full on his wild dark eyes, his clear-cut face, and tousled hair, gave no sign of anger or even of attention.

“Whar hev ye been all this time?” asked Jerry Price.

“Waal,” said Mink leisurely, “ye know that thar coon ez Tad gin me,—I won it at ‘five corn:’ arter I hed rid out’n Piomingo Cove an’ hed started up the mounting, I hearn suthin’ yappin’ arter me, an’ thar war Tad a-fetchin’ his coon. That thar idjit hed run mighty nigh three miles ter fetch me his coon! Waal, I hedn’t no ’casion fur a cap, an’ the coon war a powerful peart leetle consarn,—smiled mighty nigh ekal ter a possum,—an’ I ’lowed Elviry Crosby mought set store by sech fur a pet, an’ so I rid over thar an’ gin the coon ter her. She war mos’ pleased ter death ter git the critter.”

[60]

“Ye ain’t been thar ever sence!” exclaimed Jerry.

“Yes,” said Mink demurely. “I bided ter supper along of ’em,—the old folks bein’ powerful perlite an’ gin me an invite.”

Jerry poked him in the ribs. “Ye air a comical cuss! Ye hev got all the gals in the mountings crazy ’bout’n ye.”

Mink laughed lightly, and stayed the fleet jug, which was agile considering its bulk, and once more drank deeply. If he had needed zest for his draught, he might have found it in the expression of Pete Rood’s face. He had already revenged himself, but he must needs push the matter further. He smiled with reminiscent relish, as he leaned against the tree.

“Elviry axed mighty p’inted ef I war a-goin’ right straight up ter the herders’ cabin ter-night, an’ I tole her ez I hed a job on hand with a man named Tobias Winkeye ez I hed ter look arter fust. But she suspicioned suthin’, ’count o’ the name, I reckon, though she never drempt ’twar jes’ whiskey. She ’lowed she hed never hearn o’ nobody named sech. An’ I tole her she hed: her dad used ter like old Winkeye mightily, though she didn’t know him ez well ez some. She ’lowed I war a-goin’ off a-courtin’ some other gal. It war toler’ble hard ter pacify her,” with a covert glance at Rood. “I hed ter talk sixteen ter the dozen.”

“Waal, we hed better look out how our tongues wag so slack with that thar name,” said Price. “I lef’ old man Griff settin’ outside the mill door a-waitin’ fur old Winkeye ter ride by,—bein’ ez I hed gin the word he lives in Eskaqua Cove,—’kase he wanted ter warn him not ter let no job o’ work go ter Mink Lorey. He ’lowed he war goin’ ter gin Mink a bad name.”

Mink’s blood, fired by the liquor, burned at fever heat. His roving eyes were distended and unnaturally bright as the moonlight flashed into them. His cheek was deeply flushed. Despite the rare chill air of the heights, he was hot; often he took off his hat to let the wind play in his long tangled hair that hung down to his[61] shoulders, and lay in heavy moist rings on his forehead. Every fibre was strained to the keenest tension of excitement. He was equally susceptible to any current of emotion, to anger or mirth. He broke out indignantly:—

“Old man Griff hed better quit tryin’ ter spite me. I’ll fix him fur it. I’m goin’ by thar this very night an’ lift the mill gate an’ set the wheel a-runnin’. It’ll be ez good ez a coon-fight ter see him kem out’n his house an’ cuss!”

He burst into sudden laughter.

“Oh, ah! Oh, ah!” he sang,—

His mellow, rich baritone voice, hilarious and loud, echoed far and wide, and incongruously filled the solemn solitudes.

“Who air a-goin’ ter hear?” he demanded, when caution was suggested. “The herders on the mounting? Too fur off! Too high up! Asleep, besides.”

“They’d think ’twar a wolf,” said Peter Rood, still lying at length on the ground.

Mink had his sensibilities. On these harmonious numbers he piqued himself. He felt affronted.

“A leetle mo’, an’ I’ll break this jug over yer head. Nobody ain’t a-goin’ ter think ez my singin’ air a wolf.”

“Ye hand it hyar,” said Pete; “nobody gits a fair show at that jug but you-uns.” As he rose to his knees one foot caught in a grapevine, in his haste.

“Wait till it be empty,” said Mink, making a feint of lifting it to his mouth. Then turning suddenly, he faced Pete Rood as he staggered to his feet, and dealt a blow which sent that worthy once more prone upon the ground.

[62]

There was a jumble of excited protest from the others, each vociferously trying to quiet his companions. Mink was squaring off with clenched fists.

“Kem on,” he observed, “thar’s ground enough hyar fur ez many ez kin kiver it.”

“Look-a-hyar,” exclaimed Jerry Price, whose grief that the placidities of the festivity should be frustrated very nearly resembled a regard for law and order, “ye two boys hev jes’ got ter quit fightin’ an’ sech, an’ spilin’ the enjyement o’ the rest o’ we-uns. Quit foolin’, Mink. Ye ain’t hurt no-ways, air ye, Pete?”

“Laws-a-massy, naw,” said Pete unexpectedly. “Mink never knocked me down nohow. I jes’ cotched my foot in a grapevine. That’s all.”

But he lifted himself heavily, and he limped as he walked to a rock at a little distance and sat down.

Mink with his sudden change of temper let the encounter pass as a bit of fun. He referred to the jug frequently afterward, and again burst into song:—

The others joined tumultuously in the chorus. One sprang up, dancing a clumsy measure and striking his feet together with an uncouth deftness worthy of all praise in the estimation of his comrades. They broke into ecstatic guffaws, in the midst of which Mink’s “Oh, ah! Oh, ah!” heralding the next verse, seemed a voice a long way off. Down the ravine was visible a collection of great white trees, girdled and dead long ago, standing in some field, all so tiny in the distance that it was as if the fingers of a ghostly hand had pointed upward at the group of revelers on the ridge.

[63]

The shadows had shifted, slanted. The moon was westering fast. Every gauzy effect of vapor had its fascination in the embellishing beam, and shone vaguely iridescent All were drifting down the valley toward Chilhowee. Above them rose that enchanted mountain’s summit, with its long irregular horizontal line, purple and romantic, suggestive of its crags, its caves, its forests, and its wild unwritten poetry. A star was close upon it. Peace brooded on its heights.

The prophecy of dawn was momently reiterated with fuller phrase, with plainer significance. Even Mink, reluctant to recognize it, yielded at last to Jerry Price’s insistence. And indeed the jug was empty.

“Put the jug in the hollow tree, then, like we promised, an’ let’s go,” said Mink. “Mos’ day, ennyhow. ‘Oh, ah! Oh, ah! The daylight’s apt ter break,’ said the witch.”

The jug was thrust in the hollow of the tree, and the drunken fellows, in the securities of their fancied quiet, went whooping through the woods. The owl’s hoot ceased as their meaningless clamor rose from under the boughs. Now and then that crisp, matutinal sound, the vibrant chirp of half-awakened nestlings, jarred the air.

The group presently began to separate, some going down to Eskaqua Cove, where they would find their several homes if they could, but would at all hazards lay down their neighbors’ fences. Rood lingered for a time with Mink and one or two others who cherished the design of seeing old man Griff’s mill started before day. He turned off, however, when they had reached the open spaces of Piomingo Cove. It lay quiet, pastoral, encircled by the solemn mountains, with the long slant of the moonbeams upon it and the glister of the dew. The fields had all a pearly, luminous effect, marked off by the zigzag lines of the rail fences and the dark bushes that stood in corners. The houses, indicated by clumps of trees among which they nestled, were dark and silent. Not even a dog barked. When a cock crew the sudden note seemed clear and resonant as a bugle. “Crowin’ fur fower o’clock.” said Mink.

[64]

The road ran among woods much of the distance; through the trees could be caught occasional glimpses of the illuminated world without. But presently they gave way. A wide, deep notch in the summit of a mountain revealed the western sky. The translucent amber moon swung above these purple steeps, all suffused with its glamourous irradiation. Below, the shining breadth of the Scolacutta River swept down from the vague darkness. It was still night, yet one could see how the pawpaw and the laurel crowded the banks. The oblique line of the roof of the mill was drawn against the purple sky; its windows were black; its supports were reflected in the stream with a distinct reduplication; the water trickled down from crevices in the race with a lace-like effect, seeming never to fall, but to hang as if it were some gauzy fragment of a fabric. Beneath the great wheel, motionless, circular, shadowy, was a shoaling yellow light, pellucid and splendid,—the moon among the shallows. The natural dam, a glassy cataract, bursting into foam and spray, was whitely visible, with surging rapids below. The sound seemed louder than usual; it deadened the snap when Mink cut a pole from a pawpaw tree and hastily trimmed the leaves. He climbed gingerly upon the timbers of the race, then paused, looked back, and hesitated.

The others had reined in their horses, and stood, ill-defined equestrian shadows, on the bank watching him.

He placed the pole beneath the lever by which the gate was raised, its other end being within the building. There was no sound but the monotone of the river. Then with a great creak the gate was lifted. The imprisoned water came through with a tumultuous rush. Mink felt the stir beneath as the wheel began to revolve. There was a sudden jar, a jerk, the structure swayed beneath him, a crash among the timbers, a harsh, wrenching sound as they tore apart. He saw the faint stars reel as in some distraught vision. He heard the wild exclamations of the men on the bank. He could not distinguish[65] what they said, but with an instinct rather than any appreciation of cause and effect he tried to draw away the pole to let the gate down.

Too late. Through the sunken wreck of the race the water still poured over the madly plunging wheel. Mink sprang upon the bank, fell upon his hands and knees, and as he struggled to his feet he saw beneath the race the grotesque distortions of the simple machinery. Some villain’s hand had adroitly contrived a series of clogs, each of insufficient weight to stop the wheel with the water still pouring over it, but as it crushed them—first an empty barrel, then a pole, then a fence-rail—giving it a succession of shocks that were fast breaking it in pieces. Thus what was designed for jest should result in destruction. The mill itself was a rotten old structure at best. Jarring with every convulsive wrench and jerk of the bewitched wheel, its supports tottered feebly in the water, and when all at once the race came down, and the wheel and the heavy beams were driven against its walls, for an instant it quivered, then careened, crashed. There was a great cloud of dust rising from the tumbled wreck on the bank. In the water, floating away on the swollen floods, were timbers, and barrels, and boards, and parts of the clapboard roof.

And then, from their midst, as if the old building had an appreciated agony in its dissolution, a great cry of pain went up. Mink turned with a white face, as he put his foot in the stirrup, to stare over his shoulder. Surely he was drunk, very drunk. Had the others heard? A twinkling light sprang up beyond the orchard boughs. The house had taken the alarm. His companions were getting away in haste. Sober enough for flight and flapping their elbows, they crowed in mockery. Mink leaped into his saddle to ride as ride he must, still looking with a lingering fear over his shoulder, remembering that quavering cry.

Was he drunk, or did he hear? Could any creature have been in the mill, undisturbed,—for they were so craftily quiet,—asleep till awakened by those death[66] throes of the little building? Could it have been a pet fawn bleating with almost a human intonation in that common anguish of all life, the fear of death,—a pet cub? What! his heart ached for it,—he, the hardy hunter? Oh, was his conscience endowed with some subtle discernment more acute than his senses? It seemed a surly fate that had crept up on the unwitting creature in the dark, in the humble peace of its slumbers. And he was sorry, too, for the old man’s mill; and then a vague terror possessed him when he thought of the trickery with the wheel. Surely the hand of another had compassed its destruction, yet when or why he could not understand, could not guess; or was he himself the miscreant? He could not remember what he had done; he had been so very drunk.

Ah, should he ever again see Chilhowee thus receive the slant of the sunrise, and stand revealed in definite purple heights against the pale blue of the far west? Should he ever again mark that joyous matutinal impulse of nature as the dawn expanded into day? The note of a bird, sweet, thrilling with gladness, came from the woods, so charged with the spirit of the morning that it might have been the voice of the light. And the dew was rich with the fragrance of flowers, and as he galloped along the bridle-path they stretched their rank growth across his way, sometimes smiting him lightly in the face, like a challenge to mirth. When he climbed the steep ridge from which were visible the domes of the Great Smoky, all massive and splendid against the dispersing roseate tints in the sky, the sunlight gushing down in a crimson flood while the dazzling focus rose higher than the highest bald, he cared less to look above than into the shadowed depths of Piomingo Cove. Did he fancy, or could he see a stir there? An atom slowly moved down the lane, and across the red clay slope of a hill,—another, and yet one more. Was the settlement already roused with the news of the disaster to the mill? He turned and pressed his mare along the rocky road, up slopes and down again, still ascending and descending[67] the minor ridges that lie about the base of the Smoky. Sometimes he wondered at himself with a harsh, impersonal reprehension, as if his deed were another’s. “How’s the old man goin’ ter make out ter barely live ’thout his mill?” he demanded of himself; “an’ them gran’chil’n ter keer fur, an’ Tad, an’ all.”

Then would come again the recollection of that strange muffled scream, and though the sun was warm he shivered.

Often he drew up the mare and listened with a vague sense of pursuit. Stillness could hardly be more profound. Not the stir of a leaf, never a stealthy tread. Then as he started again down the rocky way, some vagrant echo, or a stone rolling under his mare’s hoof, would bring to him again that sudden affright, and he would swiftly turn to see who dogged him.

There were many curves in the path, and once in its opening vista he saw before him a girl with yellow hair outlined against the green and gold foliage of the sunlit woods, clad in brown homespun, partly leading and partly driving a dun-colored ox, with a rope knotted about his long horns.

She paused, swaying hard on it to check the animal, when she beheld the horseman, and her brown eyes were full of surprised recognition.

Mink gravely nodded in response to her grave salutation. He seemed at first about to pass without stopping, but when it was evident that she intended to let the ox trudge on he drew up the mare.

“Howdy, Lethe,” he said.

“Howdy,” returned Alethea.

“Enny news?”

She shook her head without speaking.

“Whar be ye a-goin’ with Buck?” he asked.

“Arter the warpin’ ars. They war loaned ter aunt Dely, an’ she hain’t got but one steer ter haul ’em home. So Buck hed ter go.”

The ox had reached up his dun-colored head for the leaves, all green and flecked with golden light. She[68] had loosed her hold upon the rope, and seriously gazed at Mink.

“I war down ter Crosby’s yestiddy evenin’,” he observed, watching her.

“I hopes ye enjyed yerse’f,” she said, with tart self-betrayal.

He laughed a little, and turned the reins in his hands. He relished infinitely the sight of the red and angry spot on either cheek, the spark in her eye.

“I did,” he said jauntily, noting the effect of his words. “I seen Elviry.”

She made an effort at self-control.

“Waal,” she returned, calmly, although her voice trembled a little, “I hope ye kin agree with her better ’n ye ever done with me. We warn’t made fur one another, I reckon, no-ways.”

“Oh, I hain’t never axed Elviry; ’tain’t never gone ez fur ez that. I ’lowed ez mebbe ye an’ me mought make it up some day.”

He was only trying her, but the vaunted feminine intuition did not detect this. Her cheek crimsoned. Her eyes were full of liquid lights. She laughed, a low gurgling laugh of happiness, that, nevertheless, broke into a sob.

“I dunno ’bout that,” she said, evasively, belying the rapture in her face.

She was very beautiful at the moment A cultivated man, versed in the harmonies of line and color, tutored to discriminate expressions and gauge feelings and recognize types, might have perceived something innately noble in her, foolish though the affection was which embellished her.

Even he was impressed by it. “I hev never axed nobody but ye,” he said. “Not even arter we quar’led.”

He was not bound by this, which he knew full well, and it promised nothing. But it held her love and loyalty for him, if ever he should want them.

Nevertheless, while he piqued himself on his domination, he was under her influence at the fleeting moment[69] when he was with her. Perhaps her presence induced some tender affinity for the better things. He said with a sigh, “I hev done gone an’ got in a awful scrape, Lethe. I reckon nobody never hed sech a pack o’ troubles in this worl’.”

With a sort of pitying deprecation of the wiles of old Tobias Winkeye she gravely listened. Once she unconsciously put up her hand and stroked his mare. He was petulant, like a spoiled child, when he told how he only meant a jest and such woful destruction had ensued. “An’ me so boozy I dunno what I done. An’ that thar pore old man! An’ his mill plumb ruined! An’ all his gran’chillen an’ Tad ter keer fur!”

Her face had become very pale. Her voice trembled as she said,—

“Ain’t sech agin the law, Reuben?”

She always called him by his name, rather than the sobriquet his pranks had earned. He was unfamiliar with himself thus dignified, and it gave him an added sense of importance.

“Yes, but ’tain’t nuthin’ but ten dollar fine, mebbe, an’ a few days in jail,”—she gasped,—“ef they ketches me.”

He looked at her with a swift, crafty brightness that was wonderfully like the little creature whose name he bore.

“I wouldn’t keer fur that, though,” he added after a pause. “Bein’ in jail fur rollickin’ roun’ the kentry jes’ fur fun ain’t a disgrace, like fur stealin’ an’ sech. What pesters me so is studyin’ ’bout the old man and his mill, plumb ruined. Lord! Lord! I’d gin my mare an’ hogs an’ gun ef it hed never happened!”

She stood meditative and motionless against the leafy background, all dark and restful verdure close at hand, opening into a vista of luminous emerald lightened in the distance to a gilded green where the sunshine struck aslant with a climax of gold.

“I reckon ye think so, Reuben, but ye wouldn’t,” she said at last, with her fatal candor.

[70]

He winced. He was both hurt and angry as he rejoined, “An’ why wouldn’t I?”

“Why, ye be ’bleeged ter know ef ye war ter gin the old man yer mare an’ gun an’ hogs, he’d be more ’n willin’ ter gin it up agin ye. The mill stones air thar yit under the water, an’ he could sell that truck o’ yourn an’ build ez good a shanty ez he hed afore,—better, ’kase ’twould be new.”

He looked down at her, tapping his heavy boot with the hickory switch in his hand.

“Ye ain’t changed none, since we war promised to marry,” he said slowly. “Then ye war forever a-jawin’ an’ a-preachin’ at me ’bout what I done an’ what I oughter do, same ez the rider. Ye talk ’bout jewty ez brash ez ef ye never hed none, same ez he does ’bout religion. He ain’t hurt with that, ef ye watch him fresk ’round when they air pourin’ him out a dram or settin’ out the table. That’s sech grace ez he hev got, but he kin talk powerful sober ter other folks; jes’ like you-uns. I’m sorry I ever tole ye about it, enny ways. I’m sorry I met up with ye this mornin’”—

The girl’s face was as visibly pained as if he had cruelly struck her. He went on tumultuously, aggregating wrath and a sense of injury and a desire of reprisal with every word.

“I’m sorry I ever seen ye! Ye ’mind me o’ that thar harnt o’ a Herder on Thunderhead the folks tells about Ef ye happen ter kem upon him suddint, an’ don’t turn back but ketch his eye, that year air withered. Nuthin’ ye plant will grow, an’ ef the craps air laid by they won’t ripen. He can’t kill ye; he jes’ spiles yer chance. An’ ye ’minds me o’ him.”

“Oh, Reuben!” the girl cried, in deprecation.

“Ye do,—ye do! I tole ye, ’kase I lowed mebbe ye mought holp me,—more fool me!—leastways ye mought be sorry. Shucks! And now I’m sorry I tole ye.”

He struck the mare suddenly and slowly rode past. He glanced back once. If Alethea had been looking[71] wistfully after him he might have paused. He expected it; he had even listened for her to call. The light fell with a rich tinge on her golden hair and her delicate profile as she reached up to adjust the rope on the long horns of the dun-colored ox. The vacillating color of the leaves shoaling in the wind and the sunshine seemed the more fantastic for the sober hue of her brown gown and the crude red clay path. Even when the ox resumed his journey she did not once look back, and presently the fluctuating leaves hid her from sight.

Mink’s gust of temper had served to divert him for the moment from the contemplation of his perplexities. Now they reasserted themselves. Before, however, he had seen no hope of extrication. But Alethea’s words had given him something. He began to appreciate the necessity of a definite plan of action. If he should go up to Piomingo Bald he would be taken at the herders’ cabin by the officers of the law. His home could be no refuge. He felt a respite essential. He craved the time to think of Alethea’s suggestion, to canvass the ground, to judge what was possible. At last he dismounted and turned his mare out; even here he could hear the occasional jangling bells of the herds, and the animal would soon follow the familiar sound. He took his way on foot down the mountain and through Eskaqua Cove. “The news’ll travel slower ’n me,” he said.

He hardly felt hunger; he did not realize his fatigue. The red clay roads were vacant, the few daily passers were not yet astir. He avoided, as far as he might, the possibility of meeting them by taking short cuts over the mountains and through valleys. His instinct was to remove himself from his accustomed haunts. Nevertheless, he had no definite intention of hiding, for after traversing Hazel Valley, he struck boldly into the county road that leads up the eastern slope of Big Injun Mountain. He had no thought of resisting arrest. He walked along meditatively, hardly conscious even of the company of his shadow climbing the mountain with him, until he suddenly found that it had skulked away and he[72] was bereft of this vague similitude of a comrade. For the sun was already west of Big Injun. A pensive shade lay far down the slope, but below there was again the interfulgent play of sunshine itinerant with the wind among the leaves.

Once he sat down on a rock close by the road, with his head in his hands and his elbows on his knees, and sought again to adjust his course to the best interests of conscience and policy. A woman with a bag of fruit on her back passed him presently. He replied to her “howdy;” then after a time rose and trudged up and up the road. He had known repentance before, for he was plastic morally. But in his experience there had been no perplexity. It seemed to him, with the urgency of decision and the turmoil of doubt pressing upon him, that it was happier to be resolutely reckless. The harassments of uncertainty had affected his nerves, and he gave a quick start when the abrupt jangle of a bell smote the air. On the opposite side of the road, among the great craggy steeps, there was a wide, low niche in the face of the cliff, with a beetling roof and a confusion of rocks and bushes below. Sheep had climbed into it; some were standing looking down at him, now and then stirring and setting the bell to clanking fitfully; others lay motionless in the shadowy nook. He was about to go on; suddenly he turned and began to scale the huge fragments of rock to the niche in the cliff.

“Ye clar out,” he said to the sheep as they scuttled away at his approach; “ye hev got the very spot I want.”

They huddled together as he crept in; two or three hastily ran out upon the rocks,—only a little frightened, for they began presently to nibble the grass growing in the rifts. He lay down, pillowing his head upon his arm, and turning his eyes on the scene without. He could see far below into the depths of Hazel Valley, with hill and dale in undulatory succession. The light glanced here and there on the minute lines of a zigzag fence; on a field in which the stark and girdled trees stood in every[73] gaunt attitude of despair; on a patch striped with green where tobacco grew in orderly ranks,—all amongst the dense forests, upon which these tiny suggestions of civilization seemed only some ephemeral incident, ineffective, capable of slightest significance. Beyond, the wooded mountains rose in the densities of unbroken primeval wilderness, with irregular summit-lines, with graduating tones from bronze-green to blue-gray, with a solemnity that even the sunshine did not abate. Still further, the Great Smoky, veiled with mist and vague with distance, stood high against the sky,—so high that but for the familiar changeless outline it must have seemed the fiction of the clouds.

The sheep came back and crowded about him,—he lay so still. Once he was conscious of their motion; he intended to rouse himself in a moment and drive them off. And once afterward he was vaguely aware of the tinkle of the bell. Then he heard no more.

The afternoon wore on. The sunlight deepened to orange and burned to red. The mountains were all garbed in purple. The sky above that splendid summit-line of the Great Smoky caught the reflection from the west and was delicately roseate. Cow-bells were clanking in Hazel Valley, faintly, faintly. A star, most serene, was at the zenith.

The sheep in the dark niche of the crags stirred, and huddled together again, and were quiet. The moon came and looked coyly in, as if she sought Endymion. The face of the mountaineer, its reckless spirit all spent, was gentle and young in the soft, shy light.

All at once he was awake. The sheep were crowding timorously about him. A voice broke with sudden discord into the harmonies of the night.

“Nuthin’ but sheep, I reckon.”

There was a great scuffling among the rocks and bushes, and Mink ventured to lift his head.

He saw the mist-filled valley below; the glister of the moon in the skies above; the infinite expanse of mountain forms all along the background; and in the stony[74] road on the verge of the precipice an equestrian group standing motionless in shadow and sheen.

He recognized the sheriff of the county among them, and the constable from Piomingo Cove was in the act of clambering up the rocks.

The officer laid his hand on the jagged lower ledge of the niche. His hat and its shadow, like some double-headed monster, slowly appeared above the verge as he climbed the crag. The sheep shrank back precipitately into the cavernous place, their hoofs crowding over the young mountaineer. He lay at full length in motionless suspense.

There was a moment’s pause. A cloud crossed the moon. Its shadow fell in Hazel Valley. A gust of wind stole along the mountain slopes, sighing as it went, as if its errand were of sorrow. Then, silence. The brilliant lustre burst forth again, suffusing the heights above and the depths so far below. In the midst of the craggy steeps the huddled sheep looked mildly down, with bright, apprehensive eyes, at the constable.

“Nuthin’ but sheep,” he said, scanning the interior of the niche.

It seemed to Mink, hidden by his fleecy comrades, that the stone walls of his refuge resounded with the loud throbbing of his heart, which must betray him.

“D’ ye reckon,” said the sheriff below, “ez that woman could hev made a mistake ’bout hevin’ seen him on this road?”

“Mrs. Beale knows Mink Lorey ez well ez I do,” declared the constable.

“Mought hev been foolin’ us some,” suggested the sheriff, suspiciously.

“She hain’t got no call,” the constable reasoned. As he partly stood on a sharp projection, and partly hung by one arm to the ledges of the niche, he took a plug of tobacco from his pocket and perilously gnawed at it.

[76]

“Waal, I reckon he ain’t round hyar-abouts,” said the sheriff, with an intonation of disappointment “We hed better push on.”

The double-headed monster, chewing as he went, the action reproduced in frightful pantomime on the floor of the cavern, slowly withdrew. There was heavy breathing; the sound of falling clods and fragments of rock, and of straining bushes and roots as the descending officer clutched them. A sudden final thud announced that he had sprung upon his feet on level ground.

A momentary interval, a clatter of hoofs, and the file of horsemen, with their mounted shadows erect upon the vertical cliffs of the rock-bound road, passed slowly along the wild, narrow way. Long after they had disappeared the sound of the hoof-beats intruded upon the stillness, and died away, and again smote the air with dull iteration, reverberating from distant crags of the winding road.

When all was still, Mink’s mind turned again to his perplexities with a sharpened sense of the necessity of decision. The project which Alethea had suggested began to shape itself in his mind in full detail, as he lay there and thought it over. The alternative of skulking about to avoid arrest was too doubtful and limited to be contemplated.

“The sheriff air a-ridin’ now,” he said, “an’ the constable too—an’ what made ’em fetch along fower other men ez a posse?” he broke off suddenly, recognizing the incongruity.

His lip curled with satisfaction. “They mus’ hev been powerful ’feared o’ me,” he said, his heart swelling with self-importance, “ter think ’twould take six men ter arrest me fur a leetle job like that.”

He appreciated, however, that the midnight caper at the mill had shaken all the securities of the mountain community, and it was to the immediate personal interest of every man within twenty miles that he should be dealt with as harshly as the law would allow. But if, he argued, without waiting for arrest, he should go down[77] to-morrow,—not to old Griff (bold as he was, he hardly dared encounter the miller’s rage), but to some man of influence, some mediator, old Squire White, perhaps,—and tell what he had done, and offer in reparation to give the miller all he possessed, his mare, his gun, his hogs, might he not thus avert the more serious phases of a prosecution, or perhaps escape altogether?

Turn as he might, he could see only the sacrifice of his little all as the price of his orgy.

“I’d hev ter pay it ter the lawyer ter defend me; or mebbe old Griff could git it out’n me ez damages ennyhow. I can’t holp losing it. I’ll gin it up, an’ begin over, an’ make it up with Lethe,—I don’t keer a straw fur all the t’others,—an’ git married an’ be stiddy. I never war so wild nohow when me an’ her war promised. Mebbe bein’ jawed at, an’ sech, air good fur folks, an’ holped ter keep me quiet in them days,—leastwise ez quiet ez I war able ter be,” he qualified, the recollection of sundry active vagaries constraining him.

Although doubts and fears still lurked in his mind, he found himself waiting for dawn, not with hope or impatience, but with the dull resolution of reluctant decision. He could hardly have said why, but he experienced a disappointment as he noted the weather signs. The mists thickened and pervaded the moonbeams in gigantic wavering spectral effects. Over toward the Great Smoky they slowly tended, those veiled mystic figures, with diaphanous trailing garments, and with sometimes a lifted hand as if to swear by the heaven it almost touched. He watched the throngs grow denser, lose the similitude of individuality, take on the aspect of lowering clouds. The moonbeams glittered faintly and failed. When the day broke at last, the light expressed itself only in the dull visibility of the enveloping vapors. Not the depths of Hazel Valley, not the slopes of Big Injun Mounting, could be seen as he clambered out of the niche and down upon the road. Even the log at its verge serving as a curb seemed a sort of defense against the usurping immateriality which had engulfed the rest[78] of the world. He heard the moisture dripping from the summit of the craggy heights; sometimes, too, the quick, tumultuous patter of a shower in Hazel Valley, as if a cloud had lost its balance on the brink of the mountain and had fallen into the depths beneath.

He trudged along, seeing nothing but the blank inexpressiveness of the encompassing fog, with only the vaguest divination of the locality and the distance.

“I wouldn’t feel so weighted ef the weather would clear,” he said.

Once he paused, suddenly recollecting that the county court was in session, and that Squire White was doubtless at Shaftesville. When he thought of the unaccustomed scenes of the town, the people, their questions and comments, he wavered again. Then he remembered Alethea. “She ’lowed ’twould be jestice an’ the bes’ ez I could do ennyhows, an’ somehows the critter ’pears ter be right in her jedgmints. So I reckon I’ll jes’ ’bide by Lethe’s word.”

Presently the mists began to lift. He could see along the green aisles of the forest how they wavered and shifted in the tops of the trees. Everywhere the flowers were blooming,—the trumpet blossom and the jewel-weed, the delicate lilac “Christmas flower,” the “mountain snow,” the red cardinal blossoms, and, splendid illumination of the woods, the Chilhowee lily. All along the wayside, silvery cascades tumbled over the rocks amongst fantasies of ferns, and the laurel and the ivy crowded the banks of the torrent. When he was fairly in the valley, fences bordered the road, with poke-berries darkly glittering in corners crowded with weeds. He was nearing Shaftesville now. A little house appeared here and there, a stretch of open land, stacks of fodder, an occasional passer.

High up in the air were suggestions of sunshine, yellow, diffusive, but not penetrating the vapors below. All at once the beams burst through. The mists dallied for a moment longer; then with a suggestion of spreading wings they rose in slow, shining, ethereal flights. Among[79] them, as he skirted the crest of a hill, appeared the roofs of the little town, the tower of the court-house, the church steeple, all dissolving into invisibility like some vain vagary of the mist, as he descended into the intervenient dale.

The grass-grown streets were astir with jeans-clad countrymen already in with wagons drawn by oxen, or with a flock of bleating sheep running helter-skelter, and demonstrating their bucolic proclivities by a startling lack of adaptation to the thoroughfares of Shaftesville; a few loungers were sitting on the barrels and boxes in front of the doors of the stores; Mink met no one he knew as he went. One man on the rickety steps of the court-house knew him, perhaps, for he looked hard at him as he passed; then turned and stared after him with an expression which Mink could hardly analyze. He scowled fiercely in return, and took his way into the room in which several of the justices sat, amicably chatting together, for the day’s proceedings had not yet been inaugurated. With a sudden irritation and bewilderment Mink beheld upon each countenance, the moment they caught sight of him, the same amazed intentness which had characterized the look of the man on the steps. He felt a sort of dull ache in his heart, a turbulence in his blood pulsing fast, a heavy, dazed consciousness which gave the scene the dim unreality of a dream: the sunshine, pale and flickering, outlining the panes of the windows on the dirty floor; the stove, that stood in its place winter and summer; the circle of bearded, jeans-clad justices, all their faces turned toward him, seeming not unlike, with the same expression upon each.

Mink began abruptly, but with an effort, addressing the chairman. “I kem over hyar, Squair,” he said, “’kase I wanter leave ter men what I done. I ain’t goin’ ter hide nuthin’ nor run away from nuthin’. I ain’t sayin’ what I done war right, but I’m willin’ ter abide by my deed ez fur ez leavin’ it ter men, an’ furder.”

He was fluent now. There was an exhilaration in this[80] close attention from these men whom he esteemed mighty in the law, in this pose of importance before them, in the generosity of the offer he was about to make. He spoke responsive to the respectful surprise with which his fancy had endowed them.

“I war drunk, Squair. I ain’t denyin’ it none. Naw, sir, I ain’t.”

He nodded his head, and pushed his broad hat further back on his long, auburn locks.

“I’ll jes’ tell ye how it war, Squair.” He shifted his weight upon one stalwart leg, and bent over a little, and looked down meditatively at his boots as he arranged his ideas in his mind. “I war drunk, Squair,” he reiterated, as he rose once more to the perpendicular. “How I kem so, it don’t consarn me to say. But me an’ old man Griff, we hed hed words ’bout my l’arnin’ Tad ter play ‘five corn’; he ’lowed ’twar a gamblin’ game,—mighty old-fashioned game, ye know yerself, Squair,—an’ ez I kem along back that night I ’lowed I’d start the mill an’ see him run out skeered. An’ I dunno what I done ter the wheel, but it jes’ seemed ter be plumb ’witched when I lifted the gate. It jes’ performed an’ cavorted round like it hed the jim-jams;—ye never seen nuthin’ act like it done sence ye war born, Squair. An’ I tried ter let the gate down, but war plumb shuck off’n the race. An’ the mill begun ter shake, Squair, an’ fust I knowed down it went inter the ruver. An’ ez I seen a light in the old man’s house I ’lowed he war a-comin’ fur me.” He laughed a little. “Old Griff be a powerful survigrous old man when his dander hev riz, so I jes’ rid off ez fas’ ez I could.”

There was no responsive smile upon the stony, staring faces turned toward him. But he was quite at ease now. He hardly cared to notice that a man went hurriedly out of the room and came back. “I’m mighty sorry fur the old man, Squair,” he resumed, “surely I am. An’ ter prove it, me an’ the gal I’m a-goin’ ter marry, we-uns ’greed tergether ez I’d gin him my mare, an’ my hogs, an’ a gun, an’ fower sheep, an’ ’twould build him another[81] mill better ’n the one he hed, ef he could git the mill-stones hefted. I’d go holp myself.”

Still not a word from the justices. Other men had begun to come in. They, too, stood silently listening. Mink was all debonair and cheery again, so fairly had he exploited his mission. As to the man who had gone out and returned, Mink stared hard at him, for he was not an acquaintance, yet he approached and held out his hand. Mink slowly extended his own. A sudden grip of iron encircled the unsuspecting member; the other hand was caught in a rude grasp. A harsh, grating sound, the handcuffs were locked upon his wrists, and the deputy sheriff lifted a countenance scarlet with repressed excitement. He passed his hands quickly all along the prisoner’s side to make sure that he carried no concealed weapons, then ejaculated, “Now ye’re all right!”

The young mountaineer’s head was in a whirl. His heart beat tumultuously. His voice sounded to him far away. His volition seemed to rebel. Surely he did not utter the stammering, incoherent, foaming curses that he heard. They terrified him. He strove with futile strength to tear off these fetters, every muscle strained. For the first time in his life, he, the wild, free creature of the woods, felt the bonds of constraint, the irking touch of a man he could not strike. Old Squire White, who had moved out of the way with an agility wonderful in a man of his years, exhorted the deputy to his duty.

“Ye mus’ gin him the reason fur his arrest, ez he hev axed fur it, Mr. Skeggs, sech bein’ the law o’ Tennessee. Ye’d better tell him, sence the sher’ff hev kerried off the warrant, that he air arrested fur the drownding o’ Tad Simpkins.”

Mink hardly heard. He did not heed. He only tore desperately at the handcuffs, every cord standing out, every vein swelled to bursting; stamping wildly about while the scuttling, excited crowd nimbly kept out of his way. He turned the glare of reddened eyes upon the[82] deputy, who mechanically repeated the justice’s words, still following the prisoner with soothing insistence. Suddenly Mink made a burst toward the door; he was seized by a dozen willing hands, thrown down and pinioned. He fainted, perhaps, for it was only the free outer air that roused him to the knowledge that he was borne through the streets, followed by a gaping, hooting crowd, black and white. Then ensued another interval of unconsciousness. When he came to himself he stared blankly at his unfamiliar surroundings.

He was alone. He felt weak, sore. He turned his bewildered eyes toward the light. The window was barred. He sprang up from the bed on which he lay, and tried the door. He beat upon it and shouted in baffled rage. Stealthy footsteps sounded outside from time to time, excited whispers, and once a low titter.

Somehow, ridicule conquered him as force could not. He slunk back to the bed, and there he lay quiet, that no stir might come to the mocker without. Sometimes he would lift his head and listen with a sort of terror for the step, for the suppressed breathing, for the low laugh. Often his eyes would rest, dilated, fascinated, on the door. Then he would fall back, reviewing futilely the scenes through which he had passed. What was that strange thing they had said? It was indistinct for a time; he could not constrain his reluctant credulity. But those terrible words, the drowning of Tad Simpkins, beset his memory, and came back to him again and again. And then he recalled that weird cry from out the crash of the falling timbers of the mill. Could the ill-treated little drudge have slept there? He had a vague idea that he had once heard that when the old man was angry he would swear that he would not give Tad house-room, and would cast him out into the night, or shut him into the mill and lock the door upon him. And remembering that cry of despair, so anguished an echo rose to Mink’s lips that he turned and buried his head in the pillow because of the scoffer in the hall without.

[83]

The room darkened gradually; shadows were glooming about him. The moon rose after a time. The beams in radiant guise came slanting in, and despite the bars stood upon the floor, a lustrous presence, and leaned against the wall. It reminded him of the angel of the Lord,—tall, ethereal, fair, and crowned with an amaranthine wreath,—who burst the bars and appeared to the disciple in prison. With that arrogation of all spiritual bounties, so pathetically human, he perceived no incongruity that such a similitude should appear to him. In some sort it comforted him. It moved from time to time, and slowly crossed, pace by pace, the floor of the cell.

That terrible isolation of identity, the burden of individuality which every man must bear alone, is never so poignantly appreciated as when some anguish falls on the solitary soul, while those who would wish to share it are unconscious and others uncaring.

News, the worldling, was never a pioneer, and hangs aloof from the long stretches of the wildernesses of the Great Smoky Mountains. It seemed afterward to Alethea that she had lacked some normal faculty, to have been so tranquilly uncognizant, so heedlessly placid, in the days that ensued. The glimpse of the world vouchsafed to Wild-Cat Hollow was silent, peaceful, steeped in the full, languorous sheen of the midsummer sun. To look down upon the cove, with its wooded levels, its verdure, its silver glint of waters, and its sheltering mountains, it might have seemed only the scene of some serenest eclogue—especially one afternoon when the red west flung roseate tints upon the strata clouds and the delicate intervenient spaces of the pale blue heavens, and suffused the solemn ranges and the quiet valley with a tender glamour. The voices projected upon this mute placidity had a strident emphasis. There was the occasional clamor of guinea-fowls about the barn, and some turkeys were flying up to roost on the naked boughs of a dead tree, drawn in high relief and sharp detail against the sky; they fluttered down often, with heavy wings, and ungainly flappings, and discordant cries, in[85] their vain efforts to settle the question of precedence that harassed them. The lowing of the homeward-bound cows had fugue-like communings with their echoes. Alethea, going out to meet them, doubted within herself at times whether they had crossed the mountain stream that coursed through Wild-Cat Hollow. The blackberry brambles swayed full fruited above it; in the lucid, golden-brown, gravelly depths a swift shadow darted, turned, cleft the surface with a fin, and was gone. A great skeleton tree, broken half-way, hollow long ago, stood on the bank, rotted by the winter’s floods that ceaselessly washed it when the stream was high, and bleached by the summer’s suns to a bone-like whiteness. A great ball of foam, mysterious sport of the waters, caught in an eddy, was whirling giddily. One could fancy a figure of some fine ethereal essence might just have been veiled within it. The woods, dense, tangled with vines, sombre with shadows, bore already the downcast look of night. Alethea eyed them languidly as she came down to the lower fence, her piggin on her head, one hand staying it, while the other gave surreptitious aid to the efforts of L’onidas and Lucindy to take down the bars, as they piqued themselves upon rendering her this stalwart service. Tige had come too, and now and then he pawed and pranced about the calves, that were also expectantly waiting at the opening of the inclosure. One of them who had known him of yore only lifted his ears and fixed a remonstrant stare upon him. But the other, young and of an infantile expression, ran nimbly from him, and bleated plaintively, and pressed in between Alethea and the children, in imminent danger of having his brains knocked out in the wild handling of the bars.

“That’s enough,” she drawled presently, moderating their energies; “the calf’ll git out ef ye take down enny mo’. The cow kin step over sech ez be left.”

The faint clanging of cow-bells stirred the air. The little house on the rise at one side was darkly brown against the irradiated mountains seen in the narrow vista[86] of the gap. The martins fluttered from the pendulous gourds and circled about the chimneys, and were gone again. The sky cast its bright gold about the Hollow, on the tow heads of the barefoot children, and multiplied the shimmers in the swirls of the stream.

Alethea looked once more toward it, hearing again the far-off lowing. A sudden movement attracted her eye. Against the great hollow whitened tree a man was leaning, whittling a stick with a clasp-knife, and now and then furtively eying her.

For a moment she did not move a muscle. The color surged into her face, and receded, leaving it paler than before. A belated humming-bird, its breast a glistening green, beat the air with its multiplied suggestions of gauzy wings close to her golden head, and was gone like a flash. The children babbled on. Tige was afraid of a stick which L’onidas had brought to keep off the calf while the cow was milked, and he yelped before he was struck, without prejudice to yelping afterward.

The man presently drew himself erect, closed his knife with a snap, and walked up slowly toward the fence.

“Howdy?” he said, as he came.

She leaned one elbow on the rails, and with the other hand she held the empty piggin. She only nodded in return.

He had an embarrassed, deprecatory manner. He was tall and lank, and clumsy of gait. He had an indifferent, good-natured expression, incongruous with the gleam of anxiety in his eye. His face was almost covered by a long, straggling brown beard.

“What made ye run off so t’other night down yander ter Boke’s Spring? I hed a word ter say ter ye.”

“I war sorry I seen ye.”

He fixed a keen look upon her.

“What fur?”

“I didn’t want ter know who ’twar a-moonshinin’,” she said.

“Waal, ye air the only one,” he declared.

[87]

He looked about him dubiously.

“I ain’t keerin’ none,” he added. “Me an’ yer mother war kin somehow; I disremember how, edzac’ly—through the Scruggses, I reckon. Ef she war alive she’d gin ye the word ez she air kin ter Sam Marvin, sure. Nobody ain’t ’spicioned nuthin’ ’bout moonshinin’ but you-uns, ’cept them ez be in it.”

He put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the fence. The clanking of the cow-bell was nearer. The little calf bleated, and thrust its soft head over the bars.

“I wanted ter say a word ter ye,” he continued, still more ill at ease because of her silence. “I seen ye comin’ along o’ all them chill’n,” nodding at Leonidas and Lucinda, who seemed to deserve being accounted more numerous than they were, having engaged in a wordy altercation over the bars; the little fellow dragging them off to some special spot which he had chosen, of occult advantage, while the girl, older and wiser, insisted that they should lie handy where they were. Only Tige listened to the conversation, slowly wagging his tail. “I ’lowed I couldn’t talk ter ye ’thout bein’ hendered, but I reckon I’ll try. I’m kin ter ye,—that be a true word. An’ I’m moonshinin’. Ye ain’t tole nobody ’bout seein’ me an’ the jug thar in Boke’s barn?”

He fixed his eyes, eager with the query, upon her face.

She slowly shook her head in negation.

“An’ ye won’t, eh?”

He smiled beguilingly, showing his long, tobacco-stained teeth.

“Ef nobody axes me.”

His countenance fell suddenly.

“Look-a-hyar, Lethe Sayles, don’t ye fool with me, a-doublin’ on yer words like a fox on his tracks,” he said roughly. Then, more temperately, “I’m afeard o’ that very thing,—ef somebody axes ye.”

“’Tain’t likely,” said Alethea.

“I dunno,” he insisted, wagging his big head in doubtful pantomime. “I want ye ter ’low ye won’t tell.”

[88]

“I don’t b’lieve in sech ez moonshinin’ an’ drinkin’ liquor.”

“What fur?” he demanded, with an air of being ready for argument.

“’Tain’t religion.”

“Shucks!” exclaimed Sam Marvin contemptuously. “D’ ye reckon ef ’twarn’t religion I’d plant corn an’ raise my own damnation, an’ sit an’ bile wrath, an’ still fury, an’ yearn Torment, by sech? Naw, sir! Ye oughter go hear the rider read the Bible: every one o’ them disciples drunk low wines in them days, an’ hed it at weddin’s an’ sech; the low wines is on every page.”

Alethea was for a moment overborne by this argument.

Then, “’Tain’t right,” persisted the zealot of Wild-Cat Hollow.

“Will ye listen at the gal!” he exclaimed, in angry apostrophe. But controlling himself, he added quietly, “Ye let older heads ’n yourn jedge, Lethe. Yer brains ain’t ripened yit, an’ livin’ off in Wild-Cat Hollow ye ain’t hed much chance ter see an’ l’arn. Yer elders knows bes’. That’s what the Bible says.”

Down the shadowy vista of the path on the opposite side of the stream the long horns and slowly nodding heads of the cows appeared. The little calf frisked with nimble joy on legs that seemed hardly bovine in their agility. Lucinda ran to bring the pail of bran, and Leonidas produced a handful of salt in a small gourd. The moonshiner saw that his time was short.

“What ails ye, ter think ’tain’t right, Lethe?” he asked.

“Look how good-fur-nuthin’ it makes Jacob Jessup, an’—an’ Mink Lorey, an’ all them boys in Piomingo Cove.”

“It’s thar own fault, not the good liquor’s. Look at me. I ain’t good-fur-nuthin’. Ever see me drunk? How be I a-goin’ ter keer fur sech a houseful ez we-uns hev got ’thout stillin’ the corn? Can’t sell the corn ’n the apples nuther, an’ can’t raise nuthin’ else on the side[89] o’ the mounting, an’ I’m too pore ter own lan’ in the cove.”

The cows were fording the stream. The water foamed about their flanks. Their breath was sweet with the mountain grasses.

He looked at Alethea, suspiciously.

“Ye ain’t goin’ ter promise me ye won’t tell ef ye be axed?” he said, with an air of finality.

In her heart the compact of secrecy was already secure. Somehow she withheld the assurance. It was all wrong, she felt. And if in fear he should desist, so much the safer for him, so much the better would the community fare.

“I ain’t a-goin’ ter promise nuthin’,” she said, slowly, her lustrous eyes full upon his face. “I ain’t goin’ ter do nuthin’ ter holp along what ain’t right.”

“Waal, then, Lethe Sayles, ye jes’ ’member ez ye war warned,” he said, in a low, vehement voice, between his set teeth, and coming up close to her. “An’ ef ever we-uns air fund out an’ raided, we-uns will keep in mind ez nobody knowed but you-uns; an’ whether we be dragged off ter jail an’ our still cut up an’ sech or no, ye won’t git off scot-free. Ye mark my words. Ye air warned.”

She had shrunk from his glittering eyes and angry gestures. Nevertheless, she struck back with ready sarcasm.

“Then, mebbe I won’t tell,” she said, in her soft drawl, “fur I be toler’ble easy skeered.”

He stared at her in the gathering dusk; then turned, and took his way across the mossy log that bridged the stream and down the path through the woods.

For a moment she had an overwhelming impulse to call him back. Long afterward she had cause to remember its urgency. Now she only leaned upon the rail fence, even her golden hair dim in the closing shadows, and gazed with uncomprehended wistfulness after him as he disappeared down the path, and reappeared in a rift of the foliage, and once more disappeared finally.

And here the cow’s great head was thrust over the[90] bars, and L’onidas was on hand in full force to engage in combat with the little calf, and Lucindy was alert with the bucket of bran. All through the milking Alethea was sensible of a yearning regret in her heart. And although she had the testimony of good conscience and could say in full faith, “’Tain’t right,” she was not consoled.

She lifted the pail of milk to her head, and as they went back to the log cabin the moon projected their grotesque shadows as a vanguard, and for all Leonidas ran he could not overtake the quaint little man that led the way.

Stars were in the sky, aloof from the moon. A mocking-bird sang on an elder-bush among the blossoms, fragrant and white; and from time to time, as he joyously lifted his scintillating wings, the boughs seemed enriched with some more radiant bloom. The rails of the fence had a subdued glimmer,—the moonlight on the dew.

Her heart, with its regretful disquiet, was out of harmony with the nocturnal peace of the scene; she had somehow an intimation of an impending sorrow before she heard the sound of sobbing from the porch.

The vines that clambered about it were drawn upon the floor with every leaf and tendril distinct. The log cabin was idealized in some sort with the silver lustre of the moon, the glister of the dew, the song of the bird, and the splendid suggestions of the benighted landscape; yet there was the homely loom, the spinning-wheel and its shadow, the cat in the doorway, with the dull illumination of the smouldering fire behind her, eying a swift, volant shadow that slipped in and out noiselessly, and perhaps was a bat. A group of figures stood in the tense attitudes of listening surprise. But a girl had flung herself upon the bench of the loom, now leaning against the frame and weeping aloud, and now sitting erect and talking with broken volubility.

“Hyar be Elviry Crosby,” Mrs. Sayles said, as Alethea stepped upon the porch and set the piggin on the shelf.

The visitor looked up, with her dark eyes glistening[91] with tears. Her face was pale in the moonbeams. She had short dark hair, thin and fine, showing the shape of her delicate head, and lying in great soft rings about her brow and neck. As she spoke, her quivering red lips exhibited the small, regular white teeth. She was slight and about the medium height, and habited in a yellowish dress, from which the moonlight did not annul the idea of color.

“I ain’t got no gredge agin Lethe,” she said, gazing at her with a certain intentness, “but I hev got my feelin’s, an’ I hev got my pride, an’ I ain’t goin’ ter hev no jail-bird a-settin’ up ter me! I’m sorry I ever seen him!” she declared, with a fresh burst of tears, throwing herself back against the loom. “But ez Lethe never hed nobody else, she mought put up with the raccoon ez he fetched me,—fur I won’t gin the critter house-room, now.”

As Alethea gazed at her, amazed and uncomprehending, a sudden movement on the loom caught her attention. About the clumsy beams a raccoon was climbing nimbly, turning his eyes upon her, full of the peculiar brightness of the night-roaming beast. She noticed his grin as he hung above the group, as if he perceived in the situation humor of special zest.

“I ain’t a-goin’ ter keep it!” cried Elvira. “All the kentry will be tellin’, ennyhow, ez I hev kep’ company with a murderer.” A low, muffled cry escaped from Alethea’s lips. “He kem a-makin’ up ter me till I went an’ turned off Pete Rood, ez war mad ez hops. I can’t hender ’em from knowin’ it. But I ain’t a-goin’ ter hev that thar spiteful leetle beast a-grinnin’ at me ’bout’n it, like he war makin’ game o’ me fur bein’ sech a fool. I’d hev killed it, ’ceptin’ I ’lowed thar hed been enough onnecessary killin’ along o’ Mink Lorey.”

“Elviry!” exclaimed Alethea, her voice so tense, so vibrant, so charged with anguish, that, low as it was, it thrilled the stillness as a shriek might hardly do, “what hev Reuben done?”

“Oh, ‘Reuben,’ ez ye calls him,” cried the other, sitting[92] upright on the bench of the loom, her dark eyes flashing and dry,—“yer fine Reuben tore down old Griff’s mill, an’ drownded his nevy, Tad, an’ war put in jail, an’ air goin’ ter be tried, an’ hung, I reckon. That’s what ‘Reuben’ done! He’s Mink by name an’ Mink by natur’—an’ oh! I wish I hed never seen him.”

She once more leaned on the loom behind her, and bowed her head on her hands.

“No!—no!” cried Alethea. She caught her breath in quick gasps; for one moment she seemed losing consciousness. The mountains in the background, the faint stars in the sky, the shadowy roof, the swaying vines, the raccoon in their midst with his grotesque grin, were before her suddenly as if she had just awakened. She had sunk into a chair.

“Ye kin call me a liar! So do!” cried Elvira, lifting her head defiantly. “But he went hisself down ter the court-house an’ told it hisself, an’ wanted ter gin his gun an’ mare ef they’d let him off.” She laughed—a dainty little laugh of scorn. “That’s what he ’lowed the idjit war wuth. But my dad ’lows ez the law sets store on the idjit’s life same ez folks ginerally.”

Alethea felt as if she were turning to stone. Was it her advice that had led him into danger? Was it her fatal insistence that he should see the right as it was revealed to her?

She sprang to her feet, the eager questions crowding to her lips.

“Ye shet up, Lethe!” said her step-mother, entertained by the unwonted spectacle of Elvira’s dramatic grief, and not caring to hear again the news of the tragedy already recited. As to Mink, he had only been overtaken by the disasters which must have fallen upon him sooner or later, and he was in many ways a good riddance. This phase was uppermost in her mind when she said, “Ye see now what gals git fur goin’ agin thar elders’ word. I’ll be bound, Elviry, ’twarn’t yer mother’s ch’ice fur ye ter take Mink an’ gin Pete Rood the go-by.”

[93]

“That it warn’t!” cried the repentant Elvira, with a gush of tears. “I wish I hed bided by her word! I reckon I war born lackin’! I hev been sech a fool!”

Mrs. Sayles turned to look at Alethea and nod her head in triumphant confirmation. Then she remarked consolingly, “Waal, waal, I reckon ye kin toll Pete Rood back.”

“I dunno,” sobbed Elvira. “I met him yestiddy at the cross-roads in Piomingo Cove, an’ he jes’ turned his head aside an’ walked by ’thout nare word. I wish—oh, I wish I hed never seen that thar minkish Mink.”

“Waal,” said Mrs. Sayles, who was very human, and who, despite her sympathy for Elvira, had a rankling recollection of her taunt for Alethea’s paucity of the material for “keeping company,” “I hopes Lethe’ll take warning’, an’ not fling away her good chance, fur the sake o’ the wuthless, like Mink an’ sech.”

“Who be her good chance?” exclaimed Elvira, the jealousy nourished on general principles checking her grief.

“Shucks, child! ye purtendin’ not ter know ez Ben Doaks hev mighty nigh wore out his knee-pans a-beggin’ an’ a-prayin’ Lethe ter listen ter him!”

Elvira was meeker after this, and presently rose to go.

“I hed ter kem arter dark, else I couldn’t hev hed Sam an’ the mare, bein’ ez she hev been workin’ in the field ter-day,” she remarked.

There was the mare dozing at the gate, and Sam, a boy with singularly long legs and arms, looking something like an insect of the genus Tipula, was waiting too. She mounted behind him, and together they rode off in the moonlight, taking their way over the nearest ridge, and so out of sight.

“Waal, waal, sir!” exclaimed Mrs. Sayles, as she reseated herself on the porch, with her knitting in her hand, “that thar Mink Lorey never hed no jedgmint no-ways. He couldn’t hev tuk ch’ice of a wuss time ter git fetched up afore a court ’n jes’ now. Squair White tole[94] me ez our Jedge Averill hev agreed ter exchange with Jedge Gwinnan from over yander in Kildeer County nex’ term, ez he can’t try his cases, bein’ kin ter them ez air lawing. So Gwinnan will hold court in Shaftesville nex’ term. I’d hate mightily fur sech a onsartin, onexpected critter ez him ter hev enny say-so ’bout me or mine. But shucks! Men folks ennyhow,” she continued, discursively, her needles swiftly moving, as if they were endowed with independent volition, and needed no supervision, “air freakish, an’ fractious, an’ sot in thar way, an’ gin ter cur’ous cavortin’. It never s’prised me none ez arter the Lord made man he turned in an’ made woman, the fust job bein’ sech a failure.”

There was a pause. The regular metre of the katydid’s song pulsed in the interval. The dewdrops glimmered on the chickweed by the porch. The fragrance of mint and ferns was on the air, and the smell of the dark orchard. Now and then an abrupt thud told that a great Indian peach had reached the measure of ripeness and had fallen. Through the open window and door the moonlight lay in glittering rhomboids on the puncheon floor. All the interior was illuminated, and the grotesque figure of the pet cub was distinctly visible to Jacob Jessup, who was lounging on the porch without, as the creature stole across the floor, and rose upon his hind legs to reach the pine table. As he thrust his scooping claw into the bread trough,—the long, shallow, wooden bowl in which batter for corn-dodgers was mixed,—he turned his cautious head to make sure he was unobserved, and his cunning, twinkling eyes met Jessup’s. Somehow the sudden consciousness of the creature, his nervous haste to be off, appealed to Jessup’s lenient mood. He listened to the scuttling claws on the puncheon floor as the beast hurried out of the back door, and while he debated whether or not he should play informer, his wife, sitting on the doorstep with the baby in her arms, asked suddenly,—

“’Pears like ye air sorter sot agin this Jedge Gwinnan, mother. I never hearn afore ez ye knowed him[95] whenst ye lived in Kildeer County. What sorter man be he?”

Mrs. Sayles wagged her head inside her sun-bonnet to intimate contempt.

“A young rooster, ’bout fryin’ size,” she said, laughing sneeringly, the scorn accented by her depopulated gums. It seemed very forlorn to be laughed at like that.

“Waal, a man can’t be ’lected jedge till he’s thirty,” said Jessup, consciously imparting information. “He’s been on the bench right smart time, too.”

Mrs. Sayles looked at him over her spectacles, still knitting, as if her industry were a disconnected function.

“What air thirty?”

“Waal”—began Jessup, argumentatively, puffing at his cob pipe. Thirty seemed to him a mature age. And the constitution of the State evidently presumes folly to be permanent if it is not in some sort exorcised before reaching that stage of manhood. He did not continue, however, seeing that thirty was held to be very young by Mrs. Sayles, who, to judge from her wrinkles, might be some four or five hundred.

“I ain’t ’quainted with the man myself,” she went on presently, “an’ what’s more I ain’t wantin’ ter be. But,” impressively, “I know a woman ez knowed that man’s mother whenst he war a baby. She ’lowed he war a powerful cantankerous infant, ailin’ an’ hollerin’ all night an’ mighty nigh all day; couldn’t make up his mind ter die, an’ yit warn’t willin’ ter take the trouble ter live.”

Jessup felt it a certain injustice that the nocturnal rampages of infancy should be as rancorously animadverted upon as the late hours of a larger growth.

“Waal, Jedge Gwinnan is powerful pop’lar now’days,” he urged. “He made a mighty fine race when he war ’lected.”

“Shucks! ye can’t tell me nuthin’!” said his mother, self-sufficiently. “I know all ’bout him, an’ Jedge Burns too, ez war on the bench afore Jeemes Gwinnan. Whenst[96] I war a widder-woman an’ lived in Kildeer County we-uns useter hev Jedge Burns on the circuit. He war a settled, middle-aged man ’bout fifty, an’ the law war upheld, an’ things went easy, an’ he war ’lected time arter time, till one year they all turned crazy ’bout this hyar feller, ez war run by his party through fools bein’ sca’ce, I s’pose. Jeemes war ’lected. I tell ye I know all ’bout him. He war born right yander nigh Colbury, an’ I know a woman ez useter be mighty friendly with his mother.”

“What fambly in Colbury did he marry inter?” asked her daughter-in-law, more interested in items of personal history than in his judicial record.

“Bless yer soul, he air a single man. His heart air set on hisself. He wouldn’t marry no gal ’thout she hed some sorter office she could ’lect him ter, ez be higher’n jedge. He be plumb eat up with scufflin’ an’ tryin’ ter git up in the world higher’n the Lord hev set him, an’ ’tain’t religion; that ’tain’t. He minds me o’ Lucifer. He’ll fall some day. Not out o’ heaven, mebbe, ’kase he ain’t never goin’ ter git thar, but leastwise out’n his circuit. Somebody’ll top him off, an’ mebbe I’ll live ter see the day. I dunno, though, I—Laws-a-massy!” she exclaimed, so suddenly that both her listeners started, “look-a-yander at that thar perverted tur-r-key hen an’ her delikit deedies, ez air too leetle ter roost! She’s a-hoverin’ of ’em in that thar tall grass, wet with the dew, an’ it’ll be the death o’ ’em! Whyn’t Lethe tend ter ’em when she kem up from milkin’? Lethe! Lethe! Whar’s that gal disappeared ter?”

With the vagrant instinct of the wild fowl still strong in the domesticated turkey, she had distrusted the hen-house, and because of her brood she was prevented from roosting high up in the old dead tree.

There was no answer to Mrs. Sayles’s call. The daughter-in-law made a feint of busily rocking the baby, and after a doubtful glance at her Mrs. Sayles got up briskly, putting her knitting-needles into her ball of yarn, and thrusting them both into her deep pocket. She[97] clutched her bonnet further forward on her head, took up a splint basket, and presently there arose a piping sound among the weeds, as she darted this way and that in the moonlight with uncanny agility, catching the deedies one by one and transferring them to her basket. The turkey hen, her long neck stretched, her wings outspread, ran wildly about, now and then turning and showing irresolute, futile fight for a moment, and again striving to elude the whole misfortune with her long, ungainly strides. When Mrs. Sayles in triumph unbent her back for the last time and started toward the house, the fluttered mother following, clamoring hysterically, she exclaimed:

“Whar be that thar triflin’ Lethe?”

“’Pears like ter me ez I hearn Lethe go up the ladder ter the roof-room a consider’ble while ago,” said the old man slowly, speaking for the first time during the evening.

Once more Mrs. Sayles paused irresolute.

“Laws-a-massy, then, ef the gal’s asleep I reckon I mought ez well put the tur-r-key an’ deedies inter the hen-house myse’f; but ’pears ter me the young folks does nuthin’ nowadays but doze.”

She took a step further, then suddenly bethought herself. “Hyar, Jacob,” she said to her son, handing him the basket, “make yerse’f nimble. I reckon ye hev got sense enough ter shet that thar tur-r-key an’ deedies up in the hen-house. Leastwise I’ll resk it.”

Sleep was far from Alethea that night. For hours she sat at the roof-room window, looking out with wide, unseeing eyes at the splendid night. And so she had given her counsel freely in the full consciousness of right, and the man she loved had done her bidding. What misery she had wrought! She winced to know how his thoughts must upbraid her. She remembered his petulant taunts, his likening her to the Herder on Thunderhead, whose glance blights those on whom he looks; and she wondered vaguely if the harnt knew the woe it was his fate to wreak, and if it were grief to him as he rode in the clouds on the great cloud-mountain.

[98]

“I reckon I know how he feels,” she said.

An isolated star blazing in the vast solitudes of the sky above the peak of Thunderhead burst suddenly into a dazzling constellation before her eyes, for she felt the hot tears dropping down one by one on her hand.

Alas, Alethea! one needs to be strong to attain martyrdom for the sacred sake of the right.

Her tears wore out the night, but when the sun rose she was fain to dry them.

The site of the old mill continued the scene of many curious groups long after all efforts for the recovery of the body had ceased. The river was dragged no more, and hope was relinquished. There had never been any strong expectation of success. The stream was abnormally high considering the season of the year, and running with great impetuosity. Though with the aggregations of its tributaries swollen by the late rains it had the volume of a river, it retained all the capricious traits of the mountain torrent which it had been. It was full of swirling rapids, of whirlpools, of sudden cataracts. Its bed was treacherous with quicksands and rugged with bowlders. Hitched to the miller’s orchard fence were rows of horses, dozing under their old Mexican saddles or the lighter weight of a ragged blanket or a folded quilt; teams of oxen stood yoked under the trees of the open space beyond; children and dogs sat on the roots or lay in the grass, while the heavy, jeans-clad figures of the mountaineers explored the banks as they chewed their quids with renewed vigor, and droned the gossip in drawling voices.

The same faces were seen day after day,—often enough to excite no particular remark that, whoever came or was absent, Peter Rood was here with the dawn, and night found him still strolling along the banks, looking upon the swollen floods with gloomy, insistent dark eyes, as if he were seeking to read in the writhing lines of the current the inscrutable secret of the Scolacutta River. Sometimes, with his hands in his pockets, his lowering face shadowed by his broad hat, he would silently listen to the speculations of those who found[100] solace for the futility of the undertaking in the enlarged conjectural field which failure afforded, discussing the relative probabilities whether the body had floated down to the Tennessee River, or whether it had been engulfed by the quicksands and buried forever, or caught among the rocks of the jagged bank and wedged in, to be found some day—a ghastly skeleton—by a terrified boy, fishing or wading at low water.

It was only when these bootless surmises had palled at last, through many repetitions and lack of further developments, that the ruins of the old mill asserted an interest. There seemed a strange hush on the landscape, here where the wheel would whir no more. A few timbers scattered about, a rotten old stump that had served as part of the foundation, the hopper washed up by the waters, several of the posts which had upheld the race, were all that was left of the old mill, so long the salient feature of the place that more than one mountaineer was beset with bewilderment at the sight,—the recollection of the oblique line of the roof against the mountain, the open door, the reflections in the water, having more reality than the bereft bank of the river.

And now the old miller—seeming older than before—was wont to come tottering out with his stick, the gay sunshine on his long, white hair, and sit on the broken timbers, forlorn amidst the ruins of his poverty. At first his appearance created renewed excitement, and his old customers and friends pressed up to speak to him and hear what he would say, feeling a certain desire to mark the moral phenomena of loss and the fine processes of grief. But he held his clasped hands upon the stick, and silently shook his bowed gray head in his ragged old hat.

“I reckon ye’d better leave him alone,” his pretty granddaughter said; for she always accompanied him, and stood, as radiant as youth may ever be, twirling the end of her tattered apron between her fingers, her tangled yellow hair, like skeins of sunshine, hanging down on her shoulders, and her blue, undismayed eyes looking[101] with a shallow indifference upon the scene. It was replete with interest and curiosity, not to say awe, to the little four-year-old sister who hung upon her skirts, or thrust a tow head from behind her grandfather. Sometimes her lips were wreathed with a smile as she saw some child in the crowd, but if the demonstration were returned she straightway hid her head in the old man’s sleeve and for a while looked out no more.

Once old Griff spoke suddenly. “’Gustus Tom,” for his favorite kept beside him, “ye wouldn’t treat nobody mean, would ye?”

“Would ef they treated me mean,” said ’Gustus Tom, with an unequivocal nod, which intimated that his code of ethics recognized retribution. “’Thout,” he qualified, “’twar sister Eudory thar,”—he glanced at the little girl,—“I’d gin ’em ez good ez they sent.”

“’Tain’t religion, ’Gustus Tom,—’tain’t religion,” said the old man brokenly. ’Gustus Tom, with his fragment of hat on the side of his tow head, hardly looked as if he cared.

A grizzled old mountaineer in jeans, with a stern, square face and a deep-set eye, that was lighted suddenly, spoke abruptly in a sepulchral voice.

“Ye oughter go ter camp, Brother Griff,” he said in a religious twang,—“ye oughter go ter camp, an’ tell yer ’speriunce! Ye hev lived long. Ye hev wrastled with the devil. Ye hev seen joy, ye hev knowed sorrow, ye hev fund grace. Yes, sir! Yes, sir! Ye air full o’ ’speriunce, brother, an’ ye oughter go ter camp an’ comfort yerse’f, an’ sing, an’ pray.”

“I pray no mo’,” said the old man, lifting his aged, piteous face. “I’m ’feared the Lord mought hear me an’ answer my prayer.” He smote his breast. “I ain’t keerin’ fur the mill. I ain’t keerin’ for the chill’n,—they’ll make out somehows. But ef my prayers could take back every word o’ wrath I ever spoke ter the idjit, every lick I struck him, I’d weary the very throne o’ grace. Ef I could git him back an’ begin over—but I can’t! An’ I won’t pray fur myself, fur the Lord mought[102] hear me. An’ I want ter remember every one o’ them words an’ every lick, an’ pay back fur ’em, wropped in the flames o’ Torment.”

He got up and tottered away toward the house, followed by his grandchildren, leaving the by-standers staring after him, strangely thrilled.

“Waal, I hopes they won’t hear at the camp-meetin’ o’ his talkin’ sech ez that,” remarked the elderly adviser in dismay. “They hev been a-sermonizin’ a good deal ’bout Tad’s early death an’ Mink Lorey’s awful crime, an’ sech, ter them young sinners over yander ter camp, an’ it ’peared ter be a-sorter skeerin’ of ’em, a-sorter a-shooin’ of ’em inter the arms o’ grace. An’ I hopes none o’ ’em will hear ’bout the old man a-repentin’ an’ wantin’ ter burn, an’ sech, fur the boy’s hevin’ been c’rected by his elders; they air perverted enough now agin them ez hev authority over ’em.”

“Old Griff would change his mind ’bout burnin’ ef he seen the fire one time,” said another, winking seriously, as if he spoke from pyrotechnic experience. Then with a sudden change of tone, “What ails Pete Rood?”

For Rood was leaning against a tree, his swarthy face overspread with a sallow paleness, his lips blue, his eyes half closed, his hand clutching at his heart.

He said it was nothing much; he had been “tuk” this way often before; he would be better presently. Indeed, he was shortly able to walk down to the bank of the river, and sit and listen to the surmises of a half dozen idle fellows, lying in the grass, as to the drowning of Tad and the fate of Mink, and the terrible illustrations that both had furnished in the sermons at the camp-meeting in Eskaqua Cove.

And when he left them at last it was to the camp-meeting he went.

The afternoon brought a change in the weather. Rood noted it as he rode his raw-boned horse over the ranges and down the red clay roads into Eskaqua Cove. Clouds had gathered, obscuring the sun. There were no shadows, no gradations of light, no point of brilliant climax.[103] The foliage was heavy masses of solid color. Only in certain plumy silver-green boughs lurked a subdued glister, some luculent enchantment; for if ever the moonlight were enmeshed by a tree it is in the branches of the white pine.

Silence had fallen, as if the source of light were also source of sound. There was wind in the upper atmosphere, but no breath stirred the leaves. Twilight had sunk upon the cove before he turned off into a road leading up a wooded hill. In the dusk, sundry equine figures loomed up. The head of a horse was clearly defined against a patch of the pale sky, and a shrill neigh jarred the quiet. There were wagons, too, under the trees, empty, the teams unharnessed, and the poles lying on the ground. A dim light, deeply yellow, shone among the boles of the trees further on, a little misty, because already large drops were falling. All unmindful of the rain, a row of young men and half-grown boys perched on a rail fence in crouching attitudes, not unlike gigantic roosting fowls. Now and then a subdued, drawling voice sounded from among them, and a smothered laugh was attestation of callow humanity. They were not devoid of interest in the proceedings of the camp-meeting, but it was in the impersonal quality of spectator, and they held aloof from the tabernacle as if they had no souls to be saved. They turned to look down at Rood as he dismounted and hitched his horse, and he heard his own name passed along the row, it being a self-constituted register of all who came and went. The little gate dragged and creaked on its hinges, and resisted as if it grudged the spiritual opportunities to which it gave access, and desired to point the fact that salvation was not easy to come by. As it yielded and Rood entered the inclosure there were more yellow lights showing with misty halos in the olive-green dusk. They came from the doors of a row of shanties, floorless and windowless, which served as quarters for the crowd at night. There was a great flaring flame in the rear of each cabin, with leaping red tongues, surrounded by busy, hovering figures[104] that cast huge distorted shadows against the encompassing foliage, as if some uncanny phenomenal beings were stalking a solemn round among the trees. These fires had uncomfortable spiritual suggestions. But they issued merely from the kitchens, the most cheerful things at camp, and here saint and sinner were equally heartily represented. Supper was over, however. The hymn rising even now from the tabernacle was far from cheerful: one of the long-drawn, melancholy songs, with wild, thrilling swells and sudden falls and monotonous recitative passages, sometimes breaking into a strange, ecstatic chant. The serried vertical lines of rain seemed to vibrate with it like the strings of a harp. Far away the thunder rolled in its pauses. More than once the sudden lightning illumined the grounds with a ghastly gleam, and the rhythmic solemn song went on like a part of the storm. It was a grave assemblage under the great roof of the rude structure, shown in the dim light of six or eight kerosene lamps fixed against the posts. At one end was a platform with a bench, on which sat some five or six of the preachers participating in the exercises. Brother Jethro Sims, a hoary-headed patriarch, was walking slowly up and down the main aisle, clapping his hands and singing with a look of ecstasy in his upturned eyes which a sophisticated religionist might vainly wonder at, finding that his superior attainments and advanced theories had bereft him of the power to even comprehend such faith, such piously prescient joys. The ground was covered with a deep layer of straw, deadening the stir among the rows of benches. Many of these, having no backs, served to acquaint their occupants with martyrdom and to offer a premium to the naturally upright. There were numbers of little children present, for as yet the lenient rule of the mountain churches tolerates their babble and even their crying in reason. Here and there one of the humbly clad young women, with her sleeping infant in her arms, the yellow light falling upon its head and on her solemn, listening, almost holy face, might remind one of another peasant mother whose Child is the[105] hope of the world. The extreme seriousness, the devout aspiration, the sublimity of the unquestioning faith, that animated the meeting, could annul ignorance, poverty, uncouthness.

There were many canine figures on the outskirts of the crowd, now and then peering with wolfish green eyes and weird effect from the darkness among the laurel, which was beginning to sway and sound with the wind. Those in the full light, standing even beneath the roof and, with lolling tongue and wagging tail, looking upon the proceedings, seemed peculiarly idle here and to incur the imputation of loafers, despite that they are never very busy elsewhere. Others were more selfishly employed, creeping about under the benches and among the feet of the congregation, searching in the straw for the bits of bread and meat thrown aside by the frequenters of the meeting who did not camp on the grounds, but brought their lunch for the midday, and went home at night. One little dapper yellow dog had bounded on the end of the mourners’ bench, and sat there, gravely gazing about him with small, affable eyes, all unnoticed by the elders, but threatening the gravity of an urchin, who grinned and coughed to hide the grin, breaking out with a wild, uncontrollable vocalization, relic of the whooping-cough, not long over-past. He was finally motioned out of the tabernacle, and scudded across in the rain to the shanty, while the little dog sat demure and unmolested on the mourners’ bench.

Larger sinners were gathering there presently, albeit slowly.

“Come! come!” cried the old man sonorously over the singing. “Delay not! My brethren, I hev never seen a meetin’ whar the devil held sech a strong hold! Come! Hell yawns fur ye! Come! Yer time is short! Grace beckons! Come! The fires o’ perdition air kindled! The flames air red!”

And as his voice broke forth once more in the chanting, the thunder rolled as a repetition of his summons, the lightning glared, all the mountains became visible[106] over the woods of the abrupt declivity toward the east; and higher still above the summits was revealed a vast cloud-vista in the midst of the black night, vividly white, full of silent surging motion, with strange suggestions of bending forms, of an awful glister at the vanishing point,—darkness enveloped it, and once more the thunder pealed.

As the gathering storm burst, the monotonously chanting voices seemed keyed to an awed undertone, lisping with this mighty psalm of nature,—the thunder and its echo in the mountains, the tumultuous cry of the wind, and the persistent iteration of the rain. In the intervals of its splendid periods, one might feel it a relief to hear the water timidly splashing in the little ditches that served to drain the ground on either side of the tabernacle, and the continual whisper in the pines above the primitive structure. Here and there two or three boughs hung down further than the rest, fringing the eaves. Ben Doaks noted, when the lightning flared again, that just between them the distant peak of Thunderhead loomed dimly visible,—or was it a cloud? Strain his eyes as he might, he could hardly say.

For Ben Doaks was there, the first to respond to the earnest exhortations to the sinners to come forward. He had a shamefaced look as he shambled up and took his seat on the mourners’ bench, while the little dog sat unnoticed at the other end. Doaks was quick, however, to observe that one of the preachers eyed him sharply, and spoke to another, who shook his head with a gesture indeed of negation, but an expression of reluctant affirmation, and he felt sure that they recognized how often he had sat there, and that they were saying to each other that it was of no use,—he was evidently rejected by grace.

Now and then low voices sounded in the midst of the singing,—the Christians urging those convicted of sin to go up and be prayed for. Others came forward. There was more stir than before; a vivid curiosity was on many faces turning about to see who was going up,[107] who was resisting entreaty, who ought to be convicted of sin, being admirably supplied with obliquity of which to repent.

Pete Rood sat, his black eyes on the ground, intent, brooding, deeply grave. Elvira Crosby thought at first that he affected to overlook her. Then, with a sinking of the heart, she realized that indeed he did not see her. The tears welled up to her eyes. The past was not to be recalled. When was he ever before unaware of her presence? He had been so eager, so devoted, so unlike the capricious lover for whom she had lightly flung him away. It was all over, though. She looked about her to divert her mind, to preserve her composure. She noted Mrs. Sayles in the congregation, identifying her by her limp sun-bonnet. Mrs. Sayles had long been saying that she intended to put splints in it some day when time favored her; but it still hung over her eyes, obscuring her visage, except her mouth, as she sang, and she was an edifying spectacle of a disregard of earthly pomps and a lack of vain interest in baubles and bonnets. Alethea’s face, like some fair flower half enfolded in its sheath, was visible in the funnel-shaped depths of her own brown bonnet, with a glistening suggestion of her gold hair on her forehead, and one escaped tress hanging down beneath the curtain on her dark brown homespun dress. She did not sing, and she looked downcast.

In the aisle between the two benches reserved for the mourners the brethren were crowding, talking individually to the contrite sinners, sometimes with such effect that sobs and tears broke forth; and then the hymn was renewed, with the rhythmic sound of the clapping of hands, while the thunder crashed and the forked lightnings darted through the sky. The lurid scenic effects added their impressiveness to the terrible word-painting of another preacher, who was less interesting though not less efficient than that gentle old man, Brother Jethro Sims. He described hell with an accurate knowledge of its topography, its personnel, and its customs, which was a triumph of imagination, and made one feel that he had[108] surely been there. A young woman suddenly broke into wild screams, shouting that she had found her salvation, and clapping her hands, and crying, “Glory!” finally fainting, and being borne out into the rain.

In the aisles they all often knelt, praying aloud in turns: sometimes, the voice of one failing in a whispered Amen! another would cry out insistently, “Let us continue the supplication!” And once more the prayer would go up.

There were no more conversions. Over and again the brethren announced in pious dudgeon that it was a stubborn meeting, and hell gaped for the sinner. It was evidence of the sincerity of the mourners, and their anxiety not to deceive themselves and others, that they could thus resist the urgency of the impassioned appeals, that with quivering nerves they could still withhold all demonstrations of yielding until the spirit should descend upon them.

Presently persons who desired the prayers of the congregation were requested to rise and make known their wish. It might be feared that some of the compliances did not tend to preserve domestic harmony. One woman asked prayers for her husband, whose heart, she stated, was not in his religion, and the defiant contradiction expressed in the face of a man seated beside her suggested that she had thus publicly made reprisal for sundry conjugal differences. Nevertheless, old Brother Sims said, “Amen!” Mrs. Sayles rose and begged prayers for the “headin’ young folks o’ the kentry, that they’d be guided by thar elders, an’ not trest thar own green jedgmints, an’ finally be led ter grace.” And all the old people said, heartily, “Amen!” Many turned to look at Alethea, whose face had become a delicate pink.

And suddenly Peter Rood rose. “I want the prayers o’ the godly,” he said, now and then casting a hasty glance at Brother Sims, who stood listening intently, his chin in the air, his hands arrested in the gesture of clapping, “fur light ter my steps. I reckon I’m a backslider, fur I git no light when I pray. It’s all dark,—mighty[109] dark!” His voice trembled. He was beginning to lose his self-control. “My actions tarrify me! I ’lowed wunst I hed fund grace, but in trouble I hev no helper.”

The lightnings flashed once more. The swift illumination seemed to blanch his swarthy face, and lighted his uplifted black eyes with a transient gleam. “I’m in sin an’ great mis’ry. I hev done wrong.” He was about to sit down.

“Make reparation, brother, an’ free yer soul in prayer,” said the old man.

“I can’t!” he cried, shrilly. “I’m ’feard! I’m ’feard o’ my life. I wouldn’t hev done sech ’ceptin’ I war drunk,—drunk with liquor an’ drunk with spite.”

He felt that he was saying too much. He sat down, biting his lip till the blood started. Then he rose and faltered, “I want yer prayers fur light.”

“Amen!” said Brother Sims.

Rood had recovered himself abruptly. He was looking about with furtive sharpness through the congregation, seeking to gauge the effect of what he had said when under the strong spell of religious excitement that had swayed the crowd. Fearful as he was, he detected only curiosity, interest, nothing more marked; for in the rhetoric of frenzied repentance these good men often apply to themselves language that seriously entertained could only grace an indictment.

The rain had ceased; the quiet without seemed to conduce to a calmer spirit within. The fervor of the meeting had spent itself. Only a few of the brethren were “workin’” with Ben Doaks; his face was troubled and perplexed, his anxious eyes turned from one to another.

“Can’t ye feel ye air jes’ a wuthless worm a-crawlin’ round the throne o’ grace? Can’t ye feel that only mercy kin save ye?—fur ye richly desarve damnation.”

“Laws-a-massy, naw,” said poor, candid Ben, greatly harried. “I think mighty well o’ myself!”

And so they left him in his sins. The crowd was[110] breaking up, chiefly seeking their several camps, as the shanties were called. But a few had come merely to participate in the exercises of the evening, and these were busy in harnessing their horses or yoking their oxen into their wagons on the hillside without the inclosure. The declivity was veined with rivulets, into which the heavy feet of the men and beasts splashed; the leaves continuously dripped; frogs were croaking near at hand in the sombre woods,—not so dark now, for the melancholy waning moon shone among the breaking clouds. The rumble of wheels presently intruded upon the low-toned conversation, the burden of which was the meeting and reminiscent comparison with other meetings. Several of the boys, not burdened with immortality, took leave less decorously, whooping loudly at each other as they galloped past the vehicles, and were soon out of sight and hearing.

The red clay road was presently lonely enough as Alethea trudged along it. There was no room for her in the little wagon which Buck drew in single harness, as might be called the ropes by which the ox, fastened between the shafts, was made to dispense with a yoke-fellow. A rope tied to his horn was intended to guide him along any intricacies of the road with which he might not be acquainted. Mrs. Sayles, her daughter-in-law, and several of the children were seated in the wagon, and sometimes Alethea walked in advance, and sometimes fell into the rear. It was no great distance that they were to travel,—their destination being her aunt’s house in Eskaqua Cove, where they were to spend the night before wagoning up the Great Smoky.

Alethea was beset with her own unquiet thoughts; the remorse that would not loose its hold; the strange wrong which the right had wrought. Her conscience, forever on the alert—serving, if need were, as proxy—could find no flaw in what she had counseled; and thus perverse fate, in the radiant guise of rectitude, had led Reuben Lorey to despair, and delivered her to grief.

She hardly noted the incidents of the wayside,—the[111] foot-bridge over the creek; the stars amongst the ripples; the sound of the insects; the zigzag fences on either hand; the mists that lurked among the trees, that paced the turn-rows of the corn-fields, that caught the moonbeams, and glittered against the dark mountain side. It was another gleam that struck her attention; she looked again,—the slant of the rays against the windows of a little school-house. There was a deep impression of silence upon it, vacant in the night, dark but for the moonbeams. The pines that overhung it were sombre and still. The vapors shifted about it, fringing even the rotten palings that inclosed it. Her feet had followed her gaze. She was near the edge of the narrow road, as she paused to wait for Buck and the wagon to come up. She heard nothing as she listened. She said to herself that she must be a long way ahead. She was sensible of fatigue presently; the excitements of the evening were superimposed on the work of the day. She leaned against the tottering fence. Her bonnet had fallen back on her shoulders; she rested her head on her hand, her elbows on the low palings. She might have dreamed for a moment. Suddenly something touched her. She turned her head quickly; her shriek seemed to pierce the sky, for there in the inclosure,—did she see aright?—the idiot’s face! white with a responsive terror upon it, vanishing in the mist. Or was it the mist? Did she hear the quick thud of retreating footsteps, or was it the throbs of her own plunging heart? As she turned, wildly throwing up both arms, she beheld Buck and the wagon on the crest of the hill, with the worshipers from the camp-meeting, and the sight restored to her more mundane considerations.

In those long days while Mink languished in jail, he wondered how the world could wag on without him. He hungered with acute pangs for the mountains; he pined for the sun and the wind. Sometimes he stood for hours at the window, straining for a breath of air. Then the barred aspect of the narrow scene outside of the grating maddened him, and he would fling himself upon his bed; and it would seem to him that he could never rise again.

He speculated upon Alethea with a virulence of rage which almost frightened him,—whether she had heard of his arrest, how she had received the news.

“Mighty pious, I reckon,” he sneered. “I know ez well ez ef I hed seen her ez she be a-goin’ ’round the kentry a-tellin’ ’bout my wickedness, an’ how she worried an’ worked with me, an’ couldn’t git me shet o’ my evil ways.”

He thought of Elvira, too, with a certain melancholy relish of her fancied grief. His heart had softened toward her as his grudge against Alethea waxed hot. “She tuk it powerful hard, I know. I’ll be bound it mighty nigh killed her,—she set so much store by me. But I reckon her folks air glad, bein’ ez they never favored me.”

It seemed to him, as he reflected on the probable sentiment of his friends and neighbors, that he had lived in a wolfish community, ready with cowardly cruelty to attack and mangle him since fortune had brought him down.

“I’m carrion now; I’ll hev ter expec’ the wolves an’ buzzards,” he said bitterly to his lawyer, as they canvassed[113] together what witnesses they had best summon to prove his general good character, and whom they should challenge on the jury list. There was hardly a man of the number on whom Mink had not played some grievous prank calculated to produce a rankling grudge and foster prejudice. He recited these with a lugubrious gravity incongruous enough with the subject matter, that often elicited bursts of unwilling laughter from the perplexed counsel.

This was a bluff, florid man of forty, with a hearty, resonant voice, a light blue eye, thick, yellow hair, which he wore cut straight across beneath his ears, showing its density, and thrown back without parting from his forehead. When the locks fell forward, as they often did, he tossed them back with an impatient gesture. He had a long mustache and beard. His lips were peculiarly red. Altogether he was a high-colored, noisy, confident, blustering fellow, and he inspired Mink with great faith.

“I done a better thing ’n I knowed of whenst I voted an’ electioneered so brash fur you-uns ez floater in the legislatur’,” said Mink one day, in a burst of hopefulness. When he had sent for the lawyer to defend him, he had based his appeal for aid partly on his political services, and relied on them to atone for any deficiency of fees.

“Do it again, Mink, early and often!” And the floater’s jolly laughter rang out, jarring against the walls of the bare room, which was, however, far more cheerful for the sound.

Mink had found in the requirements of the approaching trial, urged upon his attention by the lawyer, a certain respite from his mental anguish. But in the midst of the night, griefs would beset him. In his dreams the humble, foolish individuality of the idiot boy was invested with awe, with a deep pathos, with a terrible dignity. It seemed often that he was awakened by the clutch of a hand to an imperative consciousness of the crime of which he was accused, to a torturing uncertainty[114] of his guilt or innocence. His conscience strove in vain to reckon with him.

“Mebbe, though, the jury kin tell?” he said one morning, piteously, to his counsel, who had come cheerily in, to find him wild-eyed and haggard.

“A jury,” said the lawyer sententiously, “is the cussedness of one man multiplied by twelve.”

He had flung his somewhat portly bulk into a chair which creaked beneath his weight, and he was looking at his client with calculating keenness. He had supplemented a fair knowledge of the law with a theory of human motives, deduced from his experience among men both as a politician and before the courts. In their less complex expressions he was quick to detect them. But he was devoid of intuition, of divination. His instincts were blunt. His moral perceptions were good, but elementary. His apprehension of crime was set forth in its entirety and in due detail by the code of Tennessee with the consequent penalty prescribed by the statute. He recognized no wrong unpunishable by law. The exquisite anguish of a moral doubt, the deep, helpless, hopeless affliction of remorse, the keen, unassuaged pangs of irreparability,—he had no spiritual sense to take cognizance of these immaterial issues. If Mink, escaping by his counsel’s clever use of a technicality, should ever again think of the miller, dream of the boy weltering in the river, wake with the sound of that weird scream in his ears, Mr. Harshaw would wonder at him as a fool. As to the bar of conscience, how could that vague essence assume all the functions of a court under the constitution?

And still conning his simple alphabet of the intricate language of emotions, he interpreted the prisoner’s wan cheek and restless eyes as the expression of fear. This induced a secret irritation and an anxiety as to how he had best conduct the case, in view of his professional reputation. He had besought Mink in his own interests to be frank, and now he was perplexed by doubts of his client’s candor.

It required only a few moments’ reflection to assure[115] himself that he had best assume, for the purposes of defense, the guilt of the prisoner until proved innocent. As he placed both hands on his knees he pursed up his lips confidentially, and with a quick sidelong glance he said,—

“We’ve got some time, though, before we have to face ’em, Mink. We’re entitled to one continuance, on account of the inflamed state of public sentiment.”

The brooding, abstracted look passed suddenly from Mink’s face, leaving it more recognizable with its wonted bright intentness.

“Air ye ’lowin’ ye’d put off the trial furder ’n the day be set fur, Mr. Harshaw?” he asked, with the accents of dismay. “Fur Gawd’s sake, don’t let ’em do that. I wouldn’t bide hyar, all shet up”—his eyes turned from wall to wall with the baffled eagerness of a caged beast—“I wouldn’t bide hyar a day longer ’n I’m ’bleeged ter, not ter git shet o’ damnation. Lord A’mighty, don’t go a-shovin’ the day off; hurry it up, ef ye kin. I want ter kem ter trial an’ git back ter the mountings. I feel ez ef I be bound ter go.”

The lawyer still looked at him with his keen sidelong glances.

“The jury stands ’twixt you and the mountains, Mink. Mightn’t get out, after all’s said and done.”

Mink looked at him with a sudden alarm in his dilated eyes, as if the contingency had been all undreamed of.

“They’ll be bound ter let me out,” he declared. “I ain’t feared o’ the jury.”

“If you don’t know what you did yourself, you can’t expect them to be much smarter in finding it out,” reasoned the lawyer.

“I ain’t done nuthin’ ter keep me jailed this hyar way,” said Mink, hardily. “I feel it in my bones I’ll git out. I never try them bars,” nodding at the window, “but what I looks fur ’em ter break in my hand.”

“See here,” said the lawyer, sternly, “you let ‘them bars’ alone; you ain’t going ter do yourself any good breaking jail.”

[116]

He looked down meditatively at his feet, and stamped one of them that his trousers might slip further down over his boot-leg, which deported itself assertively and obtrusively, as if it were in the habit of being worn on the outside.

“I don’t know,” he said reflectively, “if you want to be tried speedily, but what it’s best, anyhow. We won’t have Averill to preside; he’s incompetent in a number of civil cases, and Jim Gwinnan will hold court. He’s a”—he pursed up his red lips again, and looked about with an air intimating a high degree of contempt; Mink hung upon his words with an oppressive sense of helplessness and eagerness, that now and then found vent in an unconscious long-drawn sigh—“well, he’s a selfish, ambitious sort of fellow, and he’s found out it’s mighty popular to make a blow about cleaning up the docket, and avoiding the law’s delays, and trotting the lawyers right through. He’ll hold court till twelve o’clock at night, and he just opposes, tooth and nail, every motion for delay. I reckon he’d make it look as if we were afraid to come to trial, if we wanted a continuance; so it’s just as well, if you feel ready, for we mightn’t get it, after all.”

Mink experienced a new fear. “Ain’t he a mighty bad kind of a jedge ter hev?” he faltered, quaking before the mental vision of the man who held his fate in the hollow of his hand.

“No,” said Harshaw musingly, “he ain’t a bad judge for us for this reason,—though he’s mighty apt to lean to public opinion, he’s a sound lawyer, and he’s mighty careful about his rulings. He don’t get reversed by the S’preme Court. That’s what he sits on the bench for: not to administer justice,—he don’t think about justice once a week,—but to be affirmed by the S’preme Court. He’s more particular than Averill in little things, and he won’t let the attorney-general walk over him, like Averill does,—sorter spunky.”

“I hev seen the ’torney-gineral,—hearn him speak wunst. They ’lowed he war a fine speaker,” submitted[117] Mink, anxious concerning the untried, unmeasured forces about to be arrayed against him.

“Mighty fine,” said Harshaw, derisively. “Got a beautiful voice—for calling hogs!”

He laughed and rose. “Oh, bless my soul, I plumb forgot!” he exclaimed. “There’s a girl out here wanting to see you. Don’t know but what she may be your sweetheart;” he winked jocosely. “Perkins said she might come in if you want to see her. Looks like she’s walked about forty mile,—plumb beat out.”

Mink was flattered. Instantly he thought of Elvira, and he remembered the journey with his offering of the raccoon that fateful night.

“She hev got dark hair an’ eyes, an’ air toler’ble leetle ter be growed up?” he asked. The remark was in the form of a question, but it was uttered with the conviction of certainty.

“Lord, no! Sandy hair, big brown eyes, and tall, and”—

He paused, for Mink had risen suddenly.

“Ye go tell her,” he said, passionately, pointing at the door,—“go straight an’ tell her ter keep in mind what I said bout’n the harnt on Thunderhead, an’ how I ’lowed she favored him; ef she can’t kill, she sp’iles yer chance.”

“Why, look here, Mink,” remonstrated the lawyer.

“Go ’long an’ tell her!” cried Mink, imperatively. “Tell her I want her ter cl’ar out from hyar. Tell her I can’t breathe ef she’s nigh.” He clutched at his throat, tearing open his collar with both hands. “’Twar her ez brung me hyar. ’Twar her ez got me locked an’ barred up. An’ now I don’t want ter see her no mo’ ez long ez I live. Gin her that word from me,—an’ the Herder on Thunderhead what she favors.”

The lawyer, with a gesture of expostulation, left the cell, appreciating that it was an unpleasant job to tell the travel-stained apparition at the door that her journey was in vain.

She was sitting upon the doorstep, in the sunshine, her[118] brown bonnet hanging half off her golden head; her homespun dress seemed dark upon the rough gray stone. She watched absently, with her serious brown eyes, the gauzy wings of a blue-bottle that droned slumberously by. She held with idle hands the yellow blossoms of the golden-rod that she had plucked by the way. There was no passing in the street, hardly a sound; so still she sat that a lizard, basking in the sun, did not scruple to run across her motionless feet. She had taken off her coarse shoes to ease them after her long walk, for they were swollen and bruised.

She looked up with a start when the lawyer stood in the door. “No, sis,” he said in a debonair fashion, glancing about the street. “Mink ain’t in a good humor to-day, and you can’t see him.”

She cast up to him her haggard eyes, full of appeal, of fear, of woe. He had no intention of stabbing her with the cruel words of the message. “You can’t see him to-day; some other day.” He waved his hand with a promissory gesture, and was turning away.

She sprang up with a cry. “They hendered him! They wouldn’t let him!” she said, with quivering lips.

“Yes, yes. They hindered him,” he kindly prevaricated.

Her eyes were suddenly all on fire. As he caught their gleam he hesitated, looking at her. Her cheeks were flushed. Her teeth were set. She raised her clenched hand.

“He lied ter me, that thar jailer. He ’lowed I mought see Reuben. He lied! he lied! I’ll—I’ll”—She dropped her threatening hand. “Lord! Lord! what kin I do!”

“Look here, girl,” said the lawyer, alarmed at the idea of an indignant demonstration on the part of any of his client’s friends. “’Tain’t the jailer’s fault. Mink said he wouldn’t see you.”

She stood as if stunned for a moment. Then, her confidence in Mink rebounding, “I don’t b’lieve ye!” she said, bluntly.

[119]

“Well, then, maybe you will when I tell you that he told me to ask you to clear out, and to remind you of the ‘harnt’ on Thunderhead that he said you favored.”

She shrank back as if he had struck her. He eyed her indignantly. “I reckon you’ll believe me now. Well, begone. We’ve had enough of you.”

He turned and walked off briskly. He heard the court-house bell jangling out its summons, for the chancery court was in session, and he quickened his pace. He gave a start of irritation when he became aware that she was following him. He turned and faced her.

“What do you want?” he said, abruptly.

“I want ter tell ye su’thin’,” she gasped. She leaned forward as if to touch his arm. He moved suddenly back, and she almost fell. She showed no anger, but came a faltering pace nearer, with the same imploring gesture. “I mus’ tell ye suthin’ ’bout Reuben, soon ez I git my breath,—suthin’ ye’d never b’lieve.”

Perhaps it was an unreasoning anger which possessed him, but he was late, and she had cast the lie in his teeth, and somehow her presence irked him, and he vaguely sought to forecast what she had to say.

“No, you won’t, for I ain’t going to listen. You just take yourself off, and stay at home if you know how, and satisfy yourself with the harm you have done already. You’d better put out, and so I tell you.”

He turned once more and strode away rapidly. He heard a faint cry behind him, and, for a time, pursuing steps. He quickened his own. In fact, he presently ran lightly,—marvelously lightly for a man of his bulk,—laughing within himself the while at the absurdity and incongruity of the episode, should it be noticed by any one in the sleepy streets. After a little he looked over his shoulder, half in relenting, half in curiosity.

She was not following him. She was limping back toward her shoes, that lay on the steps of the jail.

It was close upon nightfall when Alethea, on her homeward journey, reached the banks of the Scolacutta River. It still had a melancholy version of the sunset imprinted upon its surface. It was full of dreamy crimson tints, and olive-green shadows, and gentle pensive effects of undistinguishable lustres. Its ceaseless monotone was on the air; its breath was of freshness and fragrance; the bluffs that towered above it gave the austerity of rugged rocks and the dignity of great heights to the incidents of its margin. Stunted trees clung to the niches of these splintered cliffs; everywhere along the banks the leaves of the sourwood were red and gay as a banner, the tassels all gleaming and white; the dogwood showed a flaunting ochreous tint, but the sweet-gum was as yet only a dull purple, and the sumach had merely hung out its garnet tufts. An amethystine haze rested on the nearest mountains, softening the polychromatic richness that glimmered all along the great slopes; further away they wore the softened blue of autumn. The scene was familiar to her, for she had already passed through the gap of the mountain down into Eskaqua Cove, and her aunt Dely’s house lay among the tawny corn-fields on the other side. Very lonely this habitation was among the great company of the mountains; they rose about the cove on every side with a visible immensity of wilderness which belittled the slight hold of humanity expressed in the house, the fields, the road that seemed itself a vagrant, for there was no bourne in sight of the wide landscape to which it might be supposed to tend.

The log cabin had heard the river sing for nearly a century. It appeared for many years the ready prey of[121] decay: the chimney leaned from the wall, the daubing was falling from the chinking, there were holes in the floor and the roof. Suddenly a great change came over it. The frivolity of glass enlivened the windows where batten shutters had formerly sufficed; a rickety little porch was added; a tiny room was partitioned off from this, and Mrs. Purvine rejoiced in the distinction of possessing a company bedroom, which was far from being a haven of comfort to the occasional occupant of those close quarters. She had always been known to harbor certain ambitions. Her husband’s death, some two or three years before, had given her liberty to express her tastes more fully than when hampered by his cautious conservatism. And now, although the fields might be overrun with weeds, and the sheep have the rot, and the poultry the cholera, and the cow go dry, and the “gyarden truck” defer to the crab-grass, and the bees, clever insects, prepare only sufficient honey for their own use, Mrs. Purvine preserved the appearance of having made a great rise in life, and was considered by the casual observer a “mighty spry widder woman.” Such a one as Mrs. Sayles shook her head and spared not the vocabulary. “Dely,” she would observe, “air my husband’s sister, an’ I ain’t goin’ ter make no words about her. Ef she war ennybody else’s sister, I’d up an’ down declar’ ez she hev been snared in the devices o’ the devil, fur sech pride ez hern ain’t godly,—naw sir! nur religion nuther. Glass in the winder! Shucks! she’d better be thinkin’ ’bout gittin’ light on salvation,—that she hed! Folks ez knowed Dely whenst she war a gal knowed she war headin’ an’ sot agin her elders, an’ run away from home ter git married, an’ this is what kem of sech onregenerate ways. Glass in the winder! I’ll be bound the devil looks through that winder every day at yer aunt Dely whenst she sets thar an’ spins. He gits a glimge o’ her when she ain’t a-lookin’. The pride o’ the yearth is mighty strong in her. Ye oughter sati’fy yerse’f with ’sociatin’ with her in this life, fur ye ain’t a-goin’ ter meet up with her in heaven. Naw, sir, yer aunt Dely’ll[122] remember that winder in the darkness o’ Torment, an’ ef she war ennybody else’s sister than my own husband’s I’d say so.”

Mrs. Purvine was standing on the porch, so fine a manifestation of her pride, and gazing with unrecognizing curiosity at Alethea as the girl came up the stony hillside.

Mrs. Purvine hardly looked the woman of a vaulting worldly ambition. She had a broad, moon-like face and blue eyes with much of the whites showing, the more as she had a trick of peering over her spectacles. She had no teeth; despite her social culture she had never heard of a false set, or her mouth would have been a glittering illustration of the dentist’s art. She held in her hand a short clay pipe, from which the smoke slowly curled. She wore a blue-checked homespun apron, but a calico gown, being, according to report, “too triflin’” to do very much weaving at home, and the cross-roads store was only ten miles from her house, on the road to Shaftesville. She had journeyed even to the town, twice or thrice in her life, mounted on a gray mare with a colt at her heels, and had looked from beneath her sun-bonnet at the metropolitan splendors and habits with a starveling’s delight in such of the meagre conventional graces of life as the little village possessed, and as were vouchsafed to her comprehension. Nobody knew whence she derived her “vagrantin’ ways;” for these excursions earned for her the reputation of an insatiate traveler, and her frivolous disposition and pride were the occasion of much reprehension and comment. They could hardly take the form of remonstrance, however, without open rupture; for Mrs. Purvine, right well aware of them, with an acumen and diplomacy grafted like some strange exotic upon her simple character, was always bewailing the frivolous tendency of the times, the pride of “some folks,” the worthless nature of women nowadays, and foisting herself upon her interlocutor as an example of all homely and primitive tastes and virtues.

Her moon face suddenly assumed an expression of recognition[123] and of stern reprobation as she came solemnly down from the door, a feat which it was difficult to perform with stateliness or even safety; for the two or three plank steps were only set against the wall, and although far more imposing than the hewn logs or rough stones customary elsewhere, they were extremely insecure. Often when a foot was placed upon the lowest of the number they careened forward with the weight.

Mrs. Purvine accomplished the descent with dignity, and as she held the gate open she addressed her niece, looking full in her tear-stained face:—

“I knowed it would kem ter this,—I knowed it, sooner or later. What’s that thar step-mother o’ yourn been doin’ ter ye?”

Albeit Mrs. Sayles had few equals as a censor, Mrs. Purvine, with a secret intuition of her animadversions, returned them as best she might, and Mrs. Sayles’s difficult position as a step-mother rendered her as a shorn lamb to the blast.

“Nuthin’,” sobbed Alethea,—“nuthin’ ez I knows on.” She started up the steps, which bounded forward with a precipitancy that had a startling effect as if the house had jumped at her. Alethea stumbled, and Mrs. Purvine commented upon her awkwardness:—

“Look at the gal,—usin’ her feet with no mo’ nimbleness ’n a cow. Laws-a-massy, young folks ain’t what they war in my day. Whenst I war a gal, ’fore I jined the church an’ tuk ter consortin’ with the saints, ye oughter hev seen me dance! Could shake my foot along with the nimblest! But I ain’t crackin’ up bran dances, nuther. I’m a perfessin’ member,—bless the Lord! Satan hides in a fiddle. Ye always remember yer aunt Dely tole ye that word. An’ ef ever ye air condemned ter Torment, don’t ye up an’ ’low ez ye hed no l’arnin’; don’t ye do it.” Then looking over her spectacles, “What ails ye, ef ’tain’t that step-mother?”

“I hev been ter Shaftesville. I bided all night at Cousin Jane Scruggs’s in Piomingo Cove, an’ next day I footed it ter town.”

[124]

This announcement would have surprised any one more than the roving Mrs. Purvine. Even she demanded, as in duty bound, with every intimation of deep contempt, “Laws-a-massy, what ye wanter go ter Shaftesville fur?”

“I went ter see Reuben Lorey in jail,” replied Alethea.

Mrs. Purvine looked at her with an expression of deep exasperation. “Waal,” she observed sarcastically, “I’d hev liked ter seen him thar, too. I ain’t seen ez good a fit ez Mink Lorey an’ the county jail fur this many a day. Kem hyar one night, an’ tuk them bran’ new front steps o’ mine, an’ hung ’em up on the martin-house. An’ thar war a powerful deep snow that night, an’ it kivered the consarn so ez nex’ mornin’ we couldn’t find out what unyearthly thing hed fell on the martin-house, an’ we war fairly feared ’twar a warnin’ or a jedgmint till we missed them front steps. They ain’t never been so stiddy sence.”

Alethea had laid aside her bonnet and bathed her face. She was going about the house in a way which was a tribute to Mrs. Purvine’s hospitality, for she felt much at home there. She had glanced toward the great fireplace, where the ashes piled on the top of the oven and the coffee-pot perched on the trivet over the coals told that the work of preparing supper was already done. She suddenly took down the quilting frame, suspended to the beams above by long bands of cloth, produced thread and thimble from her pocket, and, seating herself before it as before a table, began to quilt dexterously and neatly where Mrs. Purvine’s somewhat erratic performance had left off long before. The smouldering firelight touched her fine, glistening hair, her pensive, downcast face; there was still light enough in the room through the pernicious glass window to reveal the grace of her postures and her slender figure. Aunt Dely, with some instinct for beauty native in her blood along with her “vagrantin’ ways” and her original opinions, contemplated her for a time, and presently commented upon her.

[125]

“I’m yer father’s own sister,” she averred. “I ain’t denyin’ it none, though he did go an’ marry that thar Jessup woman, ez nobody could abide; an’ I hate ter see a peart gal like you-uns, ez air kin ter me, a-sp’ilin’ her eyes an’ a-cryin’ over a feller ez her folks don’t favor no-ways. Yer elders knows bes’, Lethe.”

“Why, aunt Dely, you-uns married a man ez yer elders never favored; they war powerful sot agin him.”

Mrs. Purvine was clad in logic as in armor.

“An’ look how it turned out,—him dead an’ me a widder woman!”

Alethea stitched on silently for a moment. Then she observed with unusual softness, for she feared being accounted “sassy,” “I ’lowed I hed hearn ye say he war fifty-five year old, when he died.”

“What’s fifty-five?” demanded Mrs. Purvine aggressively. “I knowed a man ez war a hunderd an’ ten.”

And so Alethea was forced to acquiesce in the proposition that Mrs. Purvine’s consort had been cut off in the flower of his youth as a judgment for having some thirty years previous eloped with the girl of his heart.

Both women looked conscious when a sudden step sounded in cautious ascent of the flight before the door, which illustrated so pointedly the truism that pride goes before a fall, and a tall, lank, stoop-shouldered, red-headed fellow strode in at the door.

“Air yer eyesight failin’ ye, Jerry Price?” Mrs. Purvine admonished him. He was her husband’s nephew. “Thar’s Lethe Sayles.”

Being called to order in this manner might well embarrass the young man, who had not expected to see Alethea, and who was rebuked for the dereliction before he was well in the room.

He shambled up to shake hands with her with a somewhat elaborate show of cordiality.

“Waal, Lethe,” he exclaimed, “ye air a sight fur sore eyes! Ain’t seen ye fur a month o’ Sundays.”

“Looks like she hed sore eyes herself, bound with red[126] ferretin’,” commented Mrs. Purvine gruffly. She often had a disposition, as she averred, to knock these young people’s heads together,—a sufficiently dangerous proceeding, for according to her account there were not two such hard heads in all Eskaqua Cove and Piomingo to boot. She had cherished an earnest desire to make a match between them, frustrated only by their failure to second the motion. They were well aware of this, and it impaired the ease of their relations, hampering even the exchange of the compliments of the season.

“Young folks take the lead!” Mrs. Purvine often exclaimed, oblivious of her own sentimental history. “Ef nobody war wantin’ ’em ter marry they’d be runnin’ off with one another.”

She had considered this breach of obedience on the part of her husband’s nephew a special instance of filial ingratitude, and had begun to remind him, and in fact to remember, all that she had done for him.

“Folkses ’lowed ter me, whenst Jerry Price’s mammy died, ez I hed better leave him be, an’ his aunt Melindy Jane would keer fur him. An’ I hedn’t been merried but a few years, an’ bein’ ez I runned away my folks wouldn’t gin me nuthin’, an’ me an’ my old man war most o’ the furniture we hed in the house. But law! we hed plenty arter a while, an’ ter spare!” cried the rich aunt Dely. “An’ they all ’lowed I hed better not lumber myse’f up with other folkses chill’n. Waal, I never expected ter, when I went ter the fun’el. But thar on the floor sot the hardest-featured infant I ever seen, red-headed, blinkin’ eye, lean, an’ sucked his thumb! An’ all them folks war standin’ ’round him, lookin’ down at him with thar eyes all perverted an’ stretched, like a gobbler looks at a deedie ’fore he pecks him on the noodle. An’ they were all pityin’ Melindy Jane fur hevin’ ter keer fur him. Thar she war settin’ wropped in a shawl, an’ ’pearin’ ez ef she could bite a ten-penny nail in two, sayin’ she mus’ submit ter the Lord! Waal, ’peared ter me ez I jes’ could view the futur’, an’ the sorter time Red-head would hev along o’ a woman ez war[127] submittin’ on account o’ him ter the Lord! An’ I jes’ ups an’ lied afore ’em all. I sez, ‘That’s the purties’ child I ever see. Surely he is!’ An’ I sez right hearty ter the b’reaved husband, ‘Ephr’im, ef ye’ll gin him ter me, I’ll keer fur him till he’s able ter keer fur me.’ An’ Eph looked up ez s’prised an’ pleased, and says, ‘Will ye, Dely?’ An’ ef ye’ll b’lieve me, arter I hed called him ‘purty’ Melindy Jane ’lowed she wanted him, an’ hed nuthin’ ter say ’bout the Lord. But I jes’ stepped inter the floor an’ snatched him up under my arm, an’ set out an’ toted him five mile home. An’ lean ez he ’peared, he war middlin’ heavy. I rubbed some pepper on his thumb that night. He ain’t sucked it sence.”

Jerry Price used to listen, calmly smoking, hardly identifying himself—as what man would!—with the homely subject of the sketch; and yet with a certain sense of obligation to Mrs. Purvine, returning thanks in some sort in behalf of the unprepossessing infant.

“Ye an’ me made a right good trade out’n it, ain’t we, aunt Dely?” he would say.

She formerly accorded jocund acquiescence to this blithe proposition. But now she would exclaim, “Did ennybody think ye’d grow up ter set yerse’f ter spite me, an’ won’t do nuthin’ I ax ye? ’Kase I hev sot my heart on hevin’ Lethe Sayles ter live along o’ me, ye won’t go courtin’ her.”

The specious Price would demand, “How d’ye know ez I won’t?”

And hope would once more gleam from the ashes of Mrs. Purvine’s disappointments.

“Lethe’s been ter Shaftesville,” she said, nodding triumphantly, sure to impress Jerry with this statement, for he was as worldly as she. Then, with sudden animation, she turned to her niece: “Lethe, did ye see enny lookin’-glasses thar like mine?” She pointed to a cherry-framed mirror, some ten or twelve inches square, hung upon the wall at a height that prevented it from reflecting aught but the opposite wall. It was as well, perhaps, for glass of that quality could only return a corrugated[128] image that might have induced depression of spirit in one gazing on the perversions of its surface. The walls were pasted over with pictures from almanacs and bright-tinted railway advertisements; for her husband had once been postmaster of the invisible neighborhood, and these were the most important trophies and emoluments of the office. They quite covered the mellow brown logs and the daubing between, and were as crude and gairish a substitute as well might be. They were the joy of Mrs. Purvine’s heart, however, and as she dwelt upon them and committed them to memory they assumed all the functions of a literature. She valued hardly less a cheap clock that stood upon a shelf, and gave no more intimation of the passage of time than a polite hostess. Whether it had no works, whether it had sustained some internal injury, whether the worldly nephew and aunt had not sufficient knowledge of the springs of its being to wind it up, Alethea never speculated and Mrs. Purvine did not care. It was more than was owned by any one else in her acquaintance, and she rejoiced without stint in its possession.

“An’ I’ll be bound ye never seen no clock like mine!” she said.

“Naw’m,” said Alethea; “but I jes’ went ter the jail.”

“What fur?” demanded Jerry. He was leaning against the door, and did not notice that he kept the light from Alethea’s work, but she was unwilling to remonstrate, and sewed on in the shadow.

“She went ter see Mink Lorey,” said his aunt. “I hope he ’lowed he war sorry fur his sins,—though ’twon’t do him no good now; oughter hev been sorry fust.”

“I never seen him,” said Alethea.

Mrs. Purvine had knelt before the fire for the purpose of investigating the baking of the egg-bread; she held the lid of the oven up with a bit of kindling, while she turned half around to fix an astonished gaze on the girl.

[129]

“In the name o’—Moses!”—she produced the adjuration as if she thought it equal to the occasion,—“what did ye kem hyar lyin’ ’bout’n it, Lethe, an’ sayin’ ye hed been ter see him? Ye’ll git yer nose burnt, an’ I’ll be glad of it.” She broke off suddenly, addressing a hound that, lured by the appetizing odor gushing out from under the lid of the oven, had approached with a sinuous, beguiling motion, and was extending his long neck. “Ye’d look mighty desirable with a blister on it.”

“I never said I seen Reuben,” returned Alethea, regardless of this interlude. “He wouldn’t see me.”

“What fur?” asked Jerry excitedly.

The lid fell from Mrs. Purvine’s hand upon the oven with a crash. She was speechless with amazement.

Alethea sat, her hands clasped on the quilting frame, the glow of the firelight full on her golden hair; her beauty seemed heightened by the refined pathos which weeping often leaves upon the face when it is once more calm. It was hard to say the cruel words, but her voice was steady.

“He ’lowed I favored the harnt on Thunderhead what sp’iles folkses’ prospects. I hed ’lowed ter him, when I las’ seen him, ez he oughter gin what he hed ter old man Griff. An’ he went ter Shaftesville. An’ they jailed him.”

Mrs. Purvine’s moon face turned scarlet. “Now, ain’t ye up an’ down ’shamed o’ yerse’f, Lethe Ann Sayles? Ter set store by a man ez talks ter you-uns like that!” She rose, with a toss of her head. “The kentry hev got my cornsent ter hang him!”

She began to move about more briskly as she placed the plates on the table. The fact of this breach between Alethea and Mink was auspicious to her darling scheme. “Naw, child,” she said as the girl offered to assist, “ye set an’ talk ter Jerry ’bout Mink; he wants ter hear ’bout Mink.”

“I wisht I could be witness fur Reuben,” said Alethea, feeling an intense relief to be able to mention this without[130] revealing her secret. “I b’lieve I could holp Reuben some.”

“Whyn’t ye go ter his lawyer?” asked Jerry. “Harshaw, they say, he hev got ter defend him.”

“He wouldn’t listen; he fairly run from me.”

“In Moses’s name!” cried Mrs. Purvine, with sibilant inversion of her favorite exclamation, “what ails them crazy bucks in Shaftesville? All of ’em got the jim-jams, in jail an’ out!”

“Waal,” said Jerry coolly, “ef ye want ter tell him sech ez ye know, I’ll make him listen ter ye. I hev been summonsed on the jury fur the nex’ term, an’ I’ll hev ter go ter Shaftesville or be fined. An’ ef ye air thar I’ll see Harshaw don’t run from ye,—else he won’t run fur, no mo’. He’ll lack his motions arter that.”

“Ai-yi! When Jerry talks he ain’t minchin’ his words!” cried aunt Dely admiringly.

Alethea was very grateful for this stalwart championship. She said nothing, however, for she had no cultured phrases of acknowledgment. Her spirits rose; her flagging brain was once more alert; she was eager to be alone,—to think what she would say to the lawyer, to Mink, on the witness-stand. She hardly noticed Mrs. Purvine’s manner of self-gratulation, or her frequent glances toward her young people as they sat together before the dull fire. Alethea was very beautiful, and Jerry—Mrs. Purvine never deluded herself with denials of her adopted son’s ugliness—was good and manly, and as sharp as a brier. Any man might be esteemed a poor match for looks, unless it were the worthless Mink, so safe in jail.

The feat a woman’s imagination can accomplish in a given time is the most triumphant illustration of the agility of the human mind. Before either spoke again Mrs. Purvine had elaborated every detail of the courtship and engagement, pausing from time to time, as she placed the dishes on the table, and looking about the room in complete abstraction, planning how to arrange the furniture to give space for the dancing at the infair.

[131]

“Set out the supper in the shed-room, an’ take these hyar two beds an’ thar steads up-steers inter the roof-room,” she muttered, measuring with her eye. “The loom kin jes’ be h’isted out ’n the shed-room inter the yard—an’ I don’t keer ef I never see it agin—an’ the spinning-wheels set in the bedroom.” As to Satan, she had forgotten that he was quite capable of making himself small enough to hide in the fiddle.

The light was growing dull out of doors; the stridulous voices of the September insects sounded ceaselessly, scarcely impinging upon the sense of quiet, so monotonous was the iteration of their song. The strokes of an axe, betokening activity at the wood-pile, seemed to cleave the silence, and reverberated from the mountains, as if the echoes were keeping a tally. Alethea had rolled up the quilting frame, and it swung from the beams. Presently the children were trooping in, three great awkward boys, who evidently formed themselves upon Jerry Price’s manner, except the youngest, a lad of fourteen, whose face had a certain infantile lower, saved over from his juvenile days, and concentrating readily into a pout. Even his mother admitted that he was “sp’iled some.” Together they made short work of the egg-bread and “br’iled bacon.”

They tarried not long afterward, but trooped noisily up the ladder to the roof-room; and as they strode about on the floor, which was also the ceiling of the room below, it seemed momently that they would certainly come through.

Jerry lighted his pipe and sat on the doorstep; the fashionable Mrs. Purvine lighted hers and took a chair near. All the doors stood open, for the night was sultry. The stars were very bright in the moonless sky. The dogs lolling their tongues, sat on the porch, or lay in the dewy grass; making incursions now and then into the room, climbing cavalierly over Jerry’s superfluity of long legs, and nosing about among the ashes to make sure that none of the scraps had escaped.

“Don’t ye know I never waste nuthin’, ye grisly gluttons?”[132] demanded Mrs. Purvine, the model housekeeper. But their fat sides did not confirm this statement, and, bating a wag of homage in the extreme tip of their tails, they paid no attention to her.

“What I’m a-honin’ ter know,” said Jerry Price presently, “air how them boys ez war along o’ Mink an’ war summonsed ez witnesses air goin’ ter prove he war drunk. Ef they ’low Mink war drunk the ’torney-gin’al ’ll try ter make out he war sober. He’s a-goin’ ter ax, ‘Whar’d he git the whiskey, bein’ ’s all the still thar is air a bonded still, an’ by law can’t sell less ’n five gallons. Then them boys’ll be afeard ter tell whar they got the whiskey, ’kase folks mought think they knowed who war makin’ it. An’ ef the moonshiners war raided, they mought declar’ ez some o’ them boys war aidin’ an’ abettin’ ’em, an’ the revenuers would arrest them too.”

“Don’t ye know who air makin’ it?” Alethea asked, a vivid picture in her mind of Boke’s barn, and Jerry Price and his cronies stalking their fantastic rounds about it.

“Naw, sir! an’ don’t wanter, nuther. I war along o’ ’em in the woods that night. I holped tote the jug. We lef’ it empty in Boke’s barn an’ fund it filled, but I dunno nuthin’ mo’.”

“Lethe,” said Mrs. Purvine, handing her a ball of gray yarn, the knitting-needles thrust through an ill-knit beginning of a sock, “I wish ye’d try ter find out whar I drapped them stitches, an’ ravel it out an’ knit it up agin. I hate ter do my work over, an’ I hev ter be powerful partic’lar with Jerry’s socks,—he wears ’em out so fas’. Ye’d ’low he war a thousand-legs, ef ye could see the stacks of ’em I hev ter darn.”

Alethea drew up a great rocking-chair, and now and then leaned over its arms toward the fire to catch the red glow of the embers upon her work, as her deft hands repaired the damages of Mrs. Purvine’s inattention. Suddenly she said in a pondering tone, “Why would the ’torney-gineral ruther prove Reuben war sober?”

“’Kase ef he war proved drunk the jury would lean ter him,” said Jerry.

[133]

She laid her work down in her lap, and gazed intently at him. His face had the transient glow of his pipe upon it, and then, as he took it from his lips, was as indistinct as his long, lank figure disposed in the doorway.

“They oughtn’t ter do it,—but they do. I ain’t never seen nare jury hold a drunk man ez up an’ down ’sponsible ez ef he war sober. They’ll lean ter him ef he could be proved drunk.”

Alethea said nothing. Her mental attitude was one of intense receptivity. Her keen appreciation of how much depended on her comprehension, her desire that no point should escape her attention, were positive pain in their acute consciousness.

The discerning Jerry went on with that acumen and cogency which were such odd concomitants of his ignorance and uncouthness:—

“It makes me laff every time I see a witness swore ter tell ‘the truth, the whole truth, an’ nuthin’ but the truth.’ Folks is so apt ter b’lieve the truth air jes’ what they wanter b’lieve. Git them boys skeered up right smart ’bout the revenuers on one side an’ the moonshiners on t’ other, an’ they’ll feel the truth war ez none o’ we-uns hed ennythin’ ter drink that night; mought hev hed a dram o’ cider, or mebbe nuther stronger ’n yerb tea, but nobody war bodaciously boozy. Then they don’t know sure enough whar the liquor kem from; mos’ folks don’t b’lieve thar’s no still round ’bout the mountings now.”

Alethea leaned back in the rocking-chair, her nerveless hands falling idly upon the work in her lap. The crude mosaic of advertisements on the walls started out with abnormal distinctness, as a tiny flame rose from the embers and fell into sudden extinction among the ashes, leaving the only picture in the room the dusky night-scene dimly painted in purple and dove color upon the panes of the window.

It was only she who could remedy the deficiency in this valuable testimony. She knew full well the source[134] of their secret supply. She it was who had seen the jug left in the barn by the roistering blades, and the moonshiner swing down from the loft to seize upon it. She had his full confession from his own lips. She appreciated the distinctions the jury would make between hilarious drunken sport and coolly intentional malice in the prisoner, and that it was in her hands to sacrifice one of these men to the other.

For the first time she was quick to distrust her own intuitions. Her tyrant conscience, hitherto always ready to immolate every cherished wish on the altar of the right, seemed now the suavest mentor, urging that her lover’s liberty, his life for aught she knew, should not be jeopardized to protect a man whose vocation she accounted a curse to the community. She felt a secret amaze that her first vague project should expand into a fully equipped plan, with hardly a conscious process of thought to give it shape and detail. Her natural doubts, her efforts at alternatives, were flouted by some inner imperious determination. It was in the nature of a concession from this suddenly elate and willful power that she obtained her own consent, as she would have phrased it, to warn Sam Marvin, for the sake of his “houseful,” that he might elude capture, and perhaps save his still and appliances from destruction. And she would warn Jerry, too, despite that triumphant, tumultuous consciousness which held all else so slight since she had knowledge that could aid in proving Mink’s irresponsibility for what he had really done, and his innocence of the graver crime of which he was accused.

“Jerry,” she said, observing that Mrs. Purvine had fallen asleep in her chair, her moon face all askew, her idle hands neatly rolled up in her apron,—“Jerry, I reckon ye wouldn’t want me a-goin’ testifyin’ ter Shaftesville ef ye knowed I seen you-uns leave the jug that evenin’ in Boke’s barn. I sca’cely b’lieved ’twar ye, at fust, all of ye acted so cur’ous; I ’lowed ’twar sperits in yer likeness. An’ I seen the distiller kem an’ git the jug. An’ he seen me.”

[135]

“Look-a-hyar, Lethe!” exclaimed Jerry, seriously. “Don’t joke ’bout sech ez that. Ye know the moonshiners mought fairly kill ye, ef they fund out ye knowed an’ tole on ’em. They hev done sech afore now. Ye keep yer mouth shet an’ yer tongue ’twixt yer teeth, ef ye knows what’s healthy fur ye.”

“I ain’t jokin’,” said Alethea.

“Ye mind what I say,” declared Jerry. “I ain’t afeard myself o’ the moonshiners nor the revenuers, nare one,—ain’t got no call ter be,—but words sech ez ye air speakin’ air powerful ticklish an’ techy kind o’ talk. Ye better tend ter the cows an’ sheep an’ weavin’ an’ sech, an’ leave the men’s business alone. I hev never knowed,” continued Jerry, a trifle acrimoniously, “a woman git ten steps away from home but what she acts ez ef she hed tuk off her brains an’ lef’ ’em thar along of her every-day clothes.”

“I jes’ went ter git the lam’ out’n a hole,” said Alethea, in no wise daunted, and ready with her retort. “His leg’s mendin’, though he hops some yit. An’ I war in the cow-pen when the moonshiner kem an’ talked ter me.”

“Listen at ye, a-settin’ talkin’ ’bout law-breakers,” said the fastidious Mrs. Purvine, who had abruptly waked. “I ain’t kin ter none o’ ’em. Naw, sir, an’ I wouldn’t own it ef I war. Mind me o’ yer uncle Pettin Guyther, ez war always talkin’ ’bout murder an’ robbery: every tale he told they killed the folks a diff’ent way,—spilled thar blood somehows, an’ cracked thar skulls bodaciously; an’ whenever he’d git hisself gone from hyar I useter be ’feared lawless ones would kem hyar of a night ter thieve an’ kill, knowin’ ez I hed consider’ble worldly goods. The Bible say riches ain’t no ’count. Mebbe so, but I ain’t so sure ’bout that.”

Perhaps it was her clock which she had in mind, for—without any monition from it, however—she added, “Time ter go ter bed, chill’n,—time ter go ter bed.”

She did not rise from her chair at once. She admonished Jerry to “kiver” the fire with ashes, and watched[136] him as he did it. Then he tramped up the ladder to the roof-room, noisily enough to wake the dead, perhaps, but not aunt Dely’s boys.

She gave a long, mournful yawn of sleepiness and fatigue, and stretched her arms wearily above her head. Then with sudden cheerfulness she exclaimed, “Lethe, ye hain’t never hed a chance ter sleep in the bedroom!”

She spoke as if there were but one on the face of the earth.

“Ye hev never been down hyar ’thout yer elders an’ sech, ez ye hev hed ter show respec’ ter, an’ stan’ back fur,—yer step-mam, an’ Jacob Jessup’s wife, an’ sech; but ye shell sleep in the bedroom one time, sure, instead o’ in this room, ez be het up so hot with cookin’ supper in it.”

She rose bustlingly to stir up the fire, that there might be light enough to make the requisite preparations. Alethea’s heart failed her when she thought of the tiny apartment partitioned off at the end of the porch, and beheld her aunt lighting a little tin lamp without a chimney at the fire. The mountain girl, with all the conservatism of her class, possessed the strength of prejudice against innovation which usually appertains to age. The characteristic of years seemed reversed as she looked on with reluctance, and the old woman flustered about, full of her experimental glories and her eager relish of a new fashion. “Ye kem along, child!” she exclaimed, her moon face wreathed with a toothless smile and the redolent emanations of the smoking and sputtering lamp. It was placed on a shelf in the little room, and as Alethea buttoned the door it gave out less light than a suffocating odor. It served, however, to reveal the timbers that formed the sides of the room, for it was built after the treasures of the post-office had been exhausted in the decoration of the main house. Upon them hung an array of Mrs. Purvine’s dresses, suspended by the neck, and suggesting the uncheerful idea of a row of executed women. The bed was high, huge with feathers and heaped with quilts. There were no means of ventilation,[137] unless sundry cracks incident to mountain architecture might be relied upon. Alethea made haste to extinguish the lamp. When she had climbed the altitudes of the feather bed she could not sleep. The roof-room at home, with its windows and its sweeps of high air, was not so fine, it might be, but as she smothered by slow degrees she thought poorly of fashion. Her brain was hot with the anxious, strenuous thoughts that seethed through it. She was much less cheerful as the hours wore on. The recollections of the sad day bore heavily upon her spirit. Over and again Mink’s cruel words, the ridicule to which the lawyer had subjected her in her own estimation, the affront to her dignity,—she had no such fine name for it, she could only feel,—came back to her, and she could but marvel that the evening had passed so placidly; she wondered that she even lived, so acute were the pangs of her wounded pride. She had an ineffable repugnance to the idea of ever seeing Harshaw again; for herself alone, for her life, she felt, she would have made no further effort. “I’ll do it fur Reuben, though,” she said. The thought of him, too, was very bitter. Her wakeful eyes were hot, but they harbored no tears. Once she slipped down from the bed and unbuttoned the door, hoping to sleep with the influx of air. It came in fresh, sweet, full of the sense of dew. The night was not black; only a subdued gray shadow lay over all the land: how its passive, neutral aspect expressed the idea of rest! Looking out from the cavernous overhanging portal of the little porch, she could see the Great Smoky, darkly rising above the cove. She heard the stir of a bird roosting in an althea bush by the gate, and then a scuttling noise under the house. She had moved very softly, but the vigilant Towser bounded upon the porch. He knew her—for she spoke to him instantly—as well as he knew his name, but for some unexplained affectation of his nature he would not recognize her, and sat before her door and barked at her with a vehemence that made the roof ring, the sound reverberating from the mountains as if a troop of wolves were[138] howling in the melancholy woods. Twice he tired of this pastime, and withdrew under the house, coming out once more to renew it. She shut the door, finally, and again and again he threw himself against it, at last lying down before it and growling at intervals. She fell asleep after a time, through sheer fatigue, regardless of the lack of air in the little dungeon; waking heavy-eyed and fagged in the morning, able to acquiesce only faintheartedly when Mrs. Purvine triumphantly saluted her: “Waal, Lethe, now nobody kin never say ez ye ain’t slep’ in the bedroom.”

All day she felt the effects of her vigil. She thought it was this which had touched her courage. She stood still with a quaking at her heart, when, climbing the Great Smoky, she reached the forks in the road where she should turn off to go to Sam Marvin’s house. There was no view of the valley. The woods were immeasurable about her, all splendid with the pomp and state of autumn. Those great trees, ablaze with color,—the flaming yellow of the hickory, the rich, dull purple of the sweet-gum, the crimson of the oaks,—reached up in endless arches above her head, all boldly painted against the blue sky. An incredible brilliancy of effect was afforded by the long vistas, free of undergrowth, and carpeted with the poly-tinted leaves. Among the boughs often the full purple clusters of the muscadines hung, the vines climbing to the tops of the trees, and then trailing over to the ground. As she stood she heard a creaking and straining of the strong cables,—a fox in their midst as they lay tangled upon the earth. She noted, too, the translucent red globes of the persimmon hanging upon trees denuded of all but a few yellow leaves.

She sat down on a log at the forks of the road, feeling greatly perturbed and anxious. To do what she proposed to do was to take her life in her hands. Not her step-mother alone, but Jacob Jessup, had warned her, and Jerry Price had repeated what they had said, almost in their very words. But they had only sought to curb her foolish tongue. They had never dreamed of the[139] reckless temerity of going into the moonshiner’s den to defy him, proclaim herself the informer, and warn him to save himself. He had already threatened her; she remembered his stern, vehement face in the closing dusk. She wondered that her mind should balk from the decision so imperatively urged upon it. She seemed, as it were, to catch herself in lapses of attention. Often she looked, first at one, then at the other, of the roads,—neither visible for more than a few yards up the steep ascent,—as if she expected some diversion, some extraneous aid, in her dilemma, something to happen to decide it for her.

What, she said to herself, if never again she should behold this place? What if, in taking choice of the forks of the road, she should take a path she might never tread again?

And then she wondered that she should notice that the log on which she sat was a “lick log,” should speculate whether the cattle often came here for salt, should look idly into the cleft within it to see if perchance there were still salt there.

It would be safer, it might be better for all, to give her testimony if it should be called for, and leave Sam Marvin to the law. “I’m fairly feared o’ him, ennyways. I’m feared ter go thar an’ let him know that he’ll git fund out, mebbe, fur I’ll tell on him ef I’m summonsed ez a witness. My step-mother’s always sayin’ I’m a meddler, an’ mebbe I be.”

She listened to the sound of an outgushing roadside spring. She looked up at the new moon, which seemed to follow the lure of the wind beckoning in the trees. They shook their splendid plumes together like an assemblage of bowing courtiers, gayly bedight.

She remembered the “houseful,” the pinching poverty, the prison, the destruction of the still. She rose reluctantly and turned to the left. Her eyes were bright; her cheeks were flushed; her red lips parted. She listened intently from time to time: not a sound but her own slow, light footfall. She had thought to hear[140] the dogs barking, for the place was now near at hand. When she saw a rail-fence terminating the vista her heart gave a great bound; she paused, looking at it with dilated eyes. Then she went on, up and up, till the house came in view,—a forlorn little cabin, with a clay and stick chimney, smokeless! She stared at it amazed. There was no creature in the hog-pen, which was large for the pretensions of the place,—the distillery refuse explained its phenomenal size, perhaps; the door of the house swung loose in the wind. There were several slats nailed across the entrance low down, evidently intended to keep certain vagrant juveniles from falling out of the door. No need for this now. The place was deserted. Alethea walked up to the fence,—the bars lay upon the ground,—and stepped over the slats into the empty room. The ashes had been dead for days in the deep chimney-place; a few rags in a corner fluttered in the drafts from crannies; the whole place had that indescribable mournfulness of a deserted human habitation that had so pathetically appealed to her in the little house at Boke’s Spring. Here it pierced her heart. It was from fear of her that they had fled,—and whither? A poor home at best, where could they find another? She need not have quaked, she said to herself; they had not sought to still her tongue, lest it should wag against them. They had uprooted their home, and had withdrawn themselves alike from the informer and the law that threatened them. The tears sprang into her eyes. She deprecated their bitter feeling, their saddened lives, their deserted hearth-stone. And yet it was all wrong that they should distill the brush whiskey, and could she say she was to blame?

A faint scratching sound struck her attention. It came from behind the closed door of the shed-room. She stood listening for a moment, unable to account for it. Then she went forward and unlatched the door.

A starved cat, emaciated and forlorn to the last degree, forgotten in the removal, shut by some accident into the room, crept quivering out. It went through the[141] dumb show of mewing; it could not walk; its bones almost pierced its skin. Its plight served to approximate the date of the flitting. It had been there for days, weeks perhaps.

She picked up the creature, and carried it home in her arms.

The little brick court-house in Shaftesville had stood for half a century in the centre of the village square, as impassive as an oracle to the decrees which issued from it. Even time seemed able to make but scant impression upon it. True, the changes of the day might register on its windows, flaring with fictitious fires when the sun was in the west, or reflecting the moonlight with pallid glimmers, as if some white-faced spectre had peered out into the midnight through the dusty pane. Mosses clung to its walls; generations of swallows nested in its chimneys, soaring up from them now and then, bevies of black dots, as if the records below had spewed out a surplusage of punctuation marks and blots; decay had touched a window-sill here and there. But it was still called the “new court-house,” in contradistinction to the primitive log building that it had replaced; and despite some inward monitions of its age once in a while, its long experience of various phases of life, its knowledge of the coming and going of many men who would come and go no more, it was enabled to maintain an air of jaunty unconsciousness, as it was still the handsomest edifice in Shaftesville and of a somewhat imposing architectural pretension. It had beheld many a “State’s day” dawn like this, with fitful gusts of wind and rain, with a frenzied surging of the boughs of the hickory-trees about it as if some sylvan grief beset them, with a continual shifting of the mists that veiled the mountains and hung above the roofs of the straggling little town.

The few stores, all of which faced the square, were early full of customers clad in jeans, with heavy cowhide boots deeply bemired by the red clay mud of the streets, and with gruff faces that expressed surly disapproval of[143] the frills and frippery of civilization as exhibited in Shaftesville. Canvas-covered wagons, laden with produce and drawn by oxen, stood before the doors, and among the piles of corn and bags of apples and chestnuts children’s wide-eyed, grave faces looked out cautiously from behind the flaps at the inexplicable “town ways.” In the intervals of the down-pour there was much stir in the streets. Men with long-skirted coats and broad hats and stern, grizzled faces rode about on gaunt mountain horses. Now and then one would be accompanied by an elderly woman in homespun dress, a shawl and sun-bonnet, wearing a settled look of sour disaffection, and chirruping a sharp warning rather than encouragement to her stumbling, antiquated gray mare. There were many horses hitched to the palings of the court-house fence, and numbers of men lounged about the yard, all crowding up the steps as the tuneless clangor of the bell smote the air. Around the door of the jail boys and rowdyish young men assembled, waiting with an indomitable patience, despite the quick, sharp showers, to see the prisoner led out.

The people of Shaftesville regarded the swarm of visitors as somewhat an encroachment upon their vested rights. “Leave anybody in the mountains?” was a frequent raillery.

“Ye town folks jes’ ’lowed ye’d hev all the fun ter yerselves o’ seein’ Mink Lorey tried, ye grudgin’ half-livers,” the mountaineers would retort; “but from what I kin see, I reckon ye air sorter mistook this time, sure.”

And indeed the court-room was crowded as it had seldom been in the fifty years that justice had been meted out here. In the space without the bar the benches groaned and creaked beneath the weight of those who had taken the precaution to secure seats in advance, and had occupied them in dreary waiting since early in the morning. The forethought of one coterie had come to naught, for the bench succumbed beneath twenty stalwart mountaineers; its feeble supports bent, and as the party collapsed in a wild mingling of legs and arms,[144] waving in frantic efforts to recover equilibrium, Shaftesville was “mighty nigh tickled ter death,” for the first time that day. As the sprawling young fellows sheepishly gathered themselves together, a burst of jeering laughter filled the room, only gradually subdued by the sheriff’s “Silence in court!”

The attorney-general was already piling his books and papers on the table, consulting his notes and absorbed in his preparations. He was a man of fifty, perhaps, with a polished bald head that might have been of interest to a phrenologist (for it had sundry marked protuberances), blunt, strong features, a heavy lower jaw, an expression of insistent common sense, and a deep bass voice. He was sonorously clearing his throat just now, and was wiping from his thick, short, grizzled mustache drops of some fluid that gave a pervasive unequivocal odor to his breath. It had only rejoiced his stomach, however, and did not affect the keen acumen for which he was famous, and he was settling to his work with an evident intention of giving the defense all they would be able to wrestle with. The old miller, in his rags and patches, sat beside him as prosecutor. His face wore a strange meekness. Now and then he lifted his bleared eyes with an intent look, as if hearing some unworded counsels; then shook his head and bowed it, with its long white locks, upon his hands clasped on his stick. There were many glances directed toward him, half in commiseration, half in curiosity; but these sentiments were bated somewhat by familiarity, for there was hardly a man in Cherokee County who had not visited the ruins of the mill and heard much gossip about the old man’s uncharacteristic humility and submissive grief.

A stronger element of interest was added to the impending trial by the circumstance that it was a stranger on the bench. Comparatively few of the assemblage had been in attendance the preceding days, during the trial of the civil cases, and in the preliminary moments, throughout the opening of the court, the reading of the[145] minutes, the calling of the roll, the miscellaneous motions, until the criminal docket was taken up and the case called, the judge sustained the fixed gaze of one half the county.

He did not embody the sleek, successful promise of his reputation. He had the look of a man who has fought hard for all that he has won, and, unsatisfied, is ready to fight again. It was a most unappeased, belligerent spirit expressed in his eyes. They were of a dark gray, and deeply set. He had straight black hair, cut short about his head. His face wore a repressed impatience; sharp lines were drawn about it, making him seem somewhat older than his age, which was thirty-five or six; his nose had a fine, thin nostril; his chin was round and heavy. He wore a long mustache; now and then he gnawed at the end of it. He sat stiffly erect before the desk, his elbow upon it, his chin resting in his hand. His blue flannel suit hung negligently on his tall, slender figure, and they were lean, long fingers that held his chin.

He was looking about with a restless eye. The great round stove in the room was red hot. Snow had been seen on the summits of the distant Smoky, and was not this sure indication that winter was at hand? The sheriff was a man of rigid rule and precedent, and the fire had been built accordingly.

The judge spoke suddenly. He had a singularly low, inexpressive voice, a falling inflection, and a deliberate, measured manner. “Mr. Sheriff,” he said, “hoist that window, will you?”

All the windows were occupied by men and boys, some of them standing that they might obtain a better view of the prisoner when he should be led in. From the sill of the window indicated they descended with clumsy hops and thumps upon the floor, as they made way for the sheriff to admit the air. There was a half-suppressed titter from those more fortunately placed, as the dispossessed and discomfited spectators crowded together against the wall. The judge glanced about with displeasure in his eyes.

[146]

“I’ll have you to understand,” he said in his unimpassioned drawl, “that a trial before a court of justice is not a circus or a show. And if there’s not more quiet in this court-room, I’ll send one half of this crowd to jail.”

There was quiet at once. The gaze fixed upon him was suddenly an unfriendly look. To be sure, he was not a visiting clergyman, but one expects a certain degree of urbanity from the stranger within one’s gates, however lofty his mission and imperious his authority. Their own judicial magnate, Judge Averill, was a very lenient man, fat, and bald, and jolly. The frequenters of the place could but be impressed with the contrast. If Judge Averill found the room or the weather too warm, he took off his coat, and tried his cases clothed in his right mind, and in little else. Everybody in the county was familiar with the back of his vest, which had a triangular wedge of cloth let into it, for the judge had become more expansive than when the vest was a fit. He was a sound lawyer and an excellent man, and his decisions suffered no disparagement from his shirt sleeves.

The pause of expectation was prolonged. The stove was cracking, as it abruptly cooled, as if with inarticulate protest against these summary proceedings. The autumnal breeze came in dank and chill at the window. The spectators moved restlessly in their places. There was a sharp contrast between the townspeople—especially the lawyers within the bar, in their dapper store clothes, and with that alert expression habitual with men who think for a living—and the stolid, ruminative mountain folks, with unshorn beards and unkempt heads, habited in jeans, and lounging about in slouching postures.

There was a sudden approach of feet in the hall,—the feet, to judge by their nimble irresponsibility, of scuttling small boys. A thrill of excitement ran through the crowd as a heavier tramp resounded. The sheriff in charge of the prisoner, who was accompanied by his[147] counsel, came into the room so swiftly as almost to impair the effect of the entry, and Mink and his lawyer sat down within the bar.

Oddly enough, Mink’s keen, bright eyes were elate as he glanced about. He looked so light, so alert, so elastically ready to bound away, that those cautious souls, who like to be on the safe side, felt that it would conduce to the public weal if he were still ironed. He was visibly excited, too; his expression conveyed the idea of an inadequate recognition of everything that he saw, but he stood up and pleaded “Not guilty” in a steady, strong voice, and with his old offhand, debonair, manly manner. He held his hat in his hand,—a long time, poor fellow, since he had had need of it; his clothes still bore the rents of the struggle when he was captured; his fine hair curled down upon his brown jeans coat collar; and his face had an unwonted delicacy of effect, the refined result of the prosaic “jail-bleach.” He seemed most thoroughly alive. In contrast any other personality suggested torpor. His strong peculiarities had a certain obliterative effect upon others; he was the climax of interest in the room. The judge looked at him with marked attention.

Harshaw had flung himself back in his chair, that quaked in every fibre beneath him. He mopped his flushed face with his handkerchief, sighed with fatness and anxiety, and pulled down his vest and the stubs of his shirt sleeves about his thick wrists, for he wore no cuffs. He leaned forward from time to time, and whispered with eager perturbation to the prisoner, who seemed to listen with a sort of flout of indifference and confident protest. Mink’s conduct was so unexpected, so remarkable, that it attracted general attention. The members of the bar had taken note of it, and presently two or three commented in whispers on Harshaw’s preoccupation. For he, a stickler at trifles, a man that fought on principle every point of his case, had allowed something to slip his notice. The names of the jury were about to be drawn. The sheriff, seeking, according[148] to the law, that exponent of guilelessness, “a child under ten years of age,” had encountered one in the hall, and came back into the room, beckoning with many an alluring demonstration some small person, invisible because of the density of the crowd. It once more showed a disposition to titter, for the sheriff, a bulky, ungainly man, was wreathing his hard features into sweetly insistent smiles, when there appeared, in the open space near the judge’s desk, a little maiden, following him, beginning to smile, too, under so many soft attentions. Her blowzy, uncovered hair was of a sunny hue; her red lips parted to show her snaggled little teeth; her eyes, so fresh, so blue, were fastened upon him with an expression of blandest favor; her plump little body was arrayed in a blue-checked cotton frock; and despite the season her feet were bare. It was perhaps this special mark of poverty that attracted the attention of one of the lawyers. He was a man of extraordinary memory, a politician, and well acquainted in the coves. He looked hard at the little girl. Then he whispered to a crony that she was the miller’s granddaughter. For it was “Sister Eudory.” They watched Harshaw with idle interest, expecting him to identify the small kinswoman of the drowned boy, and to derive from the fact some fine-spun theory of incompetency. He did not recognize her, however,—perhaps he had never before seen her; he only gave her a casual glance, and then turned his eyes upon the jury list in his hands.

The scrolls bearing the names of the proposed jurors were placed in a hat, and the sheriff, bowing his long back, extended it to “Sister Eudory.”

She held her pretty head askew, looked up, smiling with childish coquetry at the judge, put in her dimpled hand with a delicate tentative gesture, took out a scroll, and under the sheriff’s directions, handed it to the clerk with an elaborate air of bestowal. He looked at it, and read the name aloud.

Her charming infantile presence, as she stood by the judge’s desk among the grave, bearded men, drawing[149] the jury with her dimpled hands, won upon the crowd. There were laughing glances interchanged, and no dissenting opinion as to the prettiness and “peartness” of “Sister Eudory.” She was evidently under the impression that she was performing some great public feat, as she again thrust in her hand, caught up another scroll, and smiled radiantly into the face of the judge, who was visibly embarrassed by the blandishments of the small coquette. He hardly knew how to return her gaze, and instead he glanced casually out of the window close by.

The defense frequently availed themselves of their right of peremptory challenge. This was a matter of preconcerted detail with the jury list before them. Whenever it was possible they challenged “for cause” until the venire was exhausted. Then jurors were summoned from the by-standers. It was not exactly the entertainment for which the crowd had been waiting, but they found a certain interest in seeing Mink, no longer indifferent, lean forward, and with acrimonious eagerness whisper into the counsel’s ear presumable defamations of the juror, who looked on helplessly and with an avidity of curiosity as to what was about to be publicly urged against him. Over and again the sheriff made incursions into the streets, summoning talesmen wherever he could lay his hands on suitable persons. Men of undoubted integrity and sobriety were scarce at the moment, for the good citizens of Shaftesville, averse to the duty, and hearing that he was abroad on this mission, disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them. Plunging into the stores, the baffled official would encounter only the grins of the few callow clerks—proprietor and customers having alike fled. Once he pursued the flying coat-tails and the soles of the nimble feet of one of the solid men of the town around a corner, never coming nearer. It was a time-honored custom to respond thus to one’s country’s call, and engendered no bitterness in the sheriff’s breast. Perhaps he considered this saltatory exercise one of the official duties to which he had been dedicated.

[150]

The difficulty of securing a jury was unexampled in the annals of the county. Many, otherwise eligible, confessed to a prejudice against Mink, and had formed and freely expressed an opinion as to his guilt. One old codger from some sequestered cove of the mountains, never before having visited Shaftesville, and desirous of adding to the strange tales of his travels the unique experience of serving on the jury, dashed his own hopes when questioned as usual, by replying glibly in the affirmative. He said, too, that the “outdacious rascality of the prisoner showed in his face, an’ ef they locked him up for life he’d be a warnin’ ter the other mischievious young minks, fur the kentry war a-roamin’ with ’em.” His look of blank amazement and discomfiture when told to “stand aside” elicited once more the ready titter of the crowd and the sheriff’s formula, “Silence in court!”

As such admissions were made, Mink sat, his head thrust forward, his bright, intent eyes flashing indignantly, a fluctuating flush on his pallid cheek, his whole lithe, motionless figure seeming so alert that it would scarcely have astonished the community if he had sprung upon the holder of these aggressive views of his guilt. His lawyer sneered, and now and then exchanged a glance of scornful comment with him,—for Harshaw had recovered his equanimity in the exercise of that most characteristic quality, his pugnacity, during his wrangles with the attorney for the State in challenging the jurymen.

The crude gray light of the autumn day waned. A dim shadow fell over the assemblage. Gusts of wind dashed the rain against the grimy panes, the drops trickling down in long, irregular lines; the yellow hickory leaves went whirling by, sometimes dropping upon the window-ledges, and away again on the restless blast. The mists pressed against the glass, then quivered and disappeared, and came once more. Occasionally a great hollow voice sounded from the empty upper chambers of the building and through the long halls; the doors left[151] ajar slammed now and then, and the sashes rattled as the wind rose higher.

It was not more cheerful when the lamps were lighted, for the court did not adjourn at the usual hour. A strong smell of coal oil and of ill-trimmed wicks pervaded the air; a bated suffusion of yellow radiance emanated from them into the brown dimness of the great room. The illumined faces were dull with fatigue and glistening with perspiration, for the stove was once again red-hot,—an old colored man, with a tropical idea of comfort, appearing at close intervals with an armful of wood. Old Griff’s long white hair gleamed among the darker heads within the bar. He had fallen asleep, his forehead bowed on his hands, his hands clasped on his stick. Strange shadows seemed to be attending court. Grotesque distortions of humanity walked the walls, and lurked among the assemblage, and haunted the open door, and looked over the shoulder of the judge.

It began to be very apparent to the spectators, the bar, the prisoner, the attorney-general, and the sheriff, that Judge Gwinnan had the fixed purpose of sitting there without adjournment until the requisite competent dozen jurors should be secured. It was already late, long past the usual hour for supper, and although the lawyers and the crowd, who could withdraw and refresh themselves as they wished, might approve of this ascetic determination neither to eat nor to sleep until the jury was achieved, the sheriff, his deputy absent, felt it a hardship. He was a bulky fellow, accustomed to locomotion only on horseback. He had taken much exercise to-day on foot, a sort of official Diogenes,—searching for a mythical unattained man of an exigent mental and moral pattern,—with not even a tub as a haven to which he might have the poor privilege of retiring. When he next darted out with a sort of unwieldy agility into the hall, which was lighted by a swinging lamp, the wick turned too high and the chimney emitting flames tipped with smoke, he was not easily to be withstood. He seized upon a man leaning idly against[152] the wall, his hands in his pockets, whom he had not seen before to-day. “Ye air the very feller I’m a-lookin’ fur!” he cried, magnifying the accident into a feat of intention.

Peter Rood drew back further against the wall, with a shocked expression on his swarthy face and in his glittering black eyes. “I can’t!” he cried. “Lemme go!”

“Why can’t ye?” demanded the sheriff.

“I ain’t well,” protested Rood, more calmly.

“Shucks!” the officer incredulously commented. “Ef all I hev hearn o’ that sort to-day war true, thar ain’t a hearty, whoppin’ big man in Cherokee County but what’s got every disease from the chicken pip ter the yaller fever. Come on, Pete, an’ quit foolin’.”

Under the strong coercion of the law administered by a sheriff who wanted his supper, Rood could but go.

Despite his rapacious interest in all that concerned the tragedy, he had hitherto held aloof from the court-house; he had withdrawn himself even from the streets, fearing to meet the sheriff. Seeing the great yellow lights in the windows, each flaring in the rainy night like some many-faceted topaz, he had fancied that the trial must be well under way, for no gossip had come to him in his hiding-place of the difficulty of securing a jury. He could no longer resist his curiosity. He strode at his leisurely gait up the steps, meaning merely to glance within, when the sheriff issued upon him.

As he came with the officer into the room, Mink scanned him angrily, leaned forward, and whispered sharply to the lawyer. Rood was trembling in every fibre; the fixed gaze of all the crowd seemed to pierce him; his great eyes turned with a fluctuating, meaningless stare from one official to the other.

He was a freeholder, not a householder. He had expressed no opinion as to the guilt of the prisoner. Had he formed none? He had not thought about it. He was challenged by the defense on the score of personal enmity toward the prisoner, the peremptory challenges[153] being exhausted. As he was otherwise eligible he was put upon his voir dire.

Harshaw looked steadily at him for a moment, his red lips curling, sitting with his arms folded across his broad chest. Mink’s bright, keen face close behind him was expectant, already triumphant. His hand was on the back of his counsel’s chair.

Suddenly Harshaw, tossing his hair from his brow, leaned forward, with his folded arms on the table before him.

“Did you not, sir,” he said, smacking his confident red lips, and with an exasperatingly deliberate delivery,—“did you not on the twentieth day of August ascend a certain summit of the Great Smoky Mountains called Piomingo Bald, and there”—he derisively thrust out his red tongue and withdrew it swiftly—“shoot and kill a certain cow, believing it to belong to Mink Lo—to Reuben Lorey?”

The judge’s eyes were fixed upon Rood. He seemed strangely agitated, shocked; his face assumed a ghastly pallor.

The attorney-general protested that the juror was not obliged to answer a question which tended to fasten disgrace, nay crime, upon him; Harshaw the while still leaning on the table, laughing silently, and looking with the roseate dimples of corpulent triumph at their discomfiture.

“The juror need not answer,” said the judge.

“I’m mighty willin’ ter answer, jedge,” gasped Rood. “I never done no sech thing sence I war born.”

In the estimation of all the crowd it was natural that he should say this; to accept the privilege of silence would be admission.

“Let me put another question in altogether another field,” said Harshaw, smoothing his yellow beard. “If it please the court to permit us to cite the decision of an inferior court, perhaps, but altogether beyond the jurisdiction of this honorable court, I should like to refer to the dicta in the courts of Cupid. Were not you[154] and the prisoner suitors for the hand of the same young lady?”

It tickled him, to use a phrase most descriptive of the enjoyment he experienced, to describe in this inflated manner the humble “courtin’” of the mountaineers. There was a broad smile on many of the faces within the bar, the townspeople relishing particularly a joke of this character on the mountain folks. The judge’s discerning gray eye was fixed upon him as his pink laugh expanded, his peculiarly red lips showing his strong white teeth.

“Yes, sir, we war,” Rood admitted. He was calm now; his agitation had excited no comment; it was to be expected in a man surprised, confounded, and dismayed by so serious a charge.

“You were! How interesting! Go where you may, the world’s the same! The charmer spreads her snare even up in the cove! And you and Reuben Lorey fell together in it, two willing victims. And as he got the best of it, as the lady preferred him, it would be natural that you should have some little grudge against him, hey?”

“I dunno how he got the best of it,” said Rood sharply. “I ain’t got no grudge agin him fur that. ’Twar jes’ yestiddy she sent me word by her mother ter kem back; she war jes’ foolin’ Mink.”

He was evidently glad to tell it; he did not care even for the giggle in the crowd.

The lawyer was abashed for a moment, and Mink, so long accustomed to be rated a breaker of hearts, a lady-killer, was grievously cut down. In all the episodes of that day which had so bristled with animosity this was the first moment that his spirit flagged, despite that he had never heretofore cared for Elvira,—did not care for her now.

Rood hardly was aware how the examination was tending; in the interests of self-defense he had overlooked its purpose. He stood staring with blank amaze when the judge’s voice ended the discussion.

[155]

“The juror is competent,” he said.

The two remaining talesmen being unchallenged, the jury was duly impaneled and sworn.

The court was adjourned. The sleepy crowd filed out into the streets, the lights in the court-house windows disappeared, and a dark and vacant interval ensued.

The morning dawned with a radiant disdain of mists. The wind was buoyant, elated. The yellow sunshine, in its vivid perfection, might realize to the imagination the light that first shone upon the world when God saw that it was good. The air was no insipid fluid, breathed unconsciously. It asserted its fragrance and freshness in every respiration. It stirred the pulses like some rare wine; it seemed, indeed, the subtle distillation of all the fruitage of the year, enriched with the bouquet of the summer, and reminiscent of the delicate languors of the spring. The sky had lifted itself to empyreal heights, luminously blue, with occasional faint fleckings of fleecy vapors. The white summits of the mountains were imposed against it with a distinctness that nullified distance; even down their slopes, beyond the limits of the snowfall, the polychromatic vestiges of autumn were visible, with no crudity of color in these sharp contrasts, but with a soft blending of effect. Within the court-house great blocks of sunshine fell upon the floor through the dirty panes. Several of the sashes were thrown up to admit the air. The rusty stove stood cold and empty. Many a day had passed since the spider-webs that hung from the corners of the ceiling and draped the bare windows of the great room had been disturbed. They might suggest to the contemplative mind analogies to the labyrinthine snares of the law, where the intrusive flies perish miserably, and the spiders batten. On one of the window-panes a blue-bottle climbed the glass, intent on some unimagined achievement; always slipping when near the top, and falling buzzing drearily to the bottom, to recommence his laborious ascent in the sunshine. Sometimes he would fly away, droning in melancholy[157] disgust, presently returning and renewing his futile efforts. He was a fine moral example of perverted powers, and might well be commended to the notice of human malcontents,—by nature fitted to soar, but sighing for feats of pedestrianism. In contrast with the day in its alertness, its intense brilliancy, yesterday was blurred, dim, like some distorted dream hardly worth crediting as a portent. It might need as attestation of its reality the jury which it had brought forth. They were all early in their places, having been sequestered in charge of the sheriff, and having slept as it were under the wing of the law. The privilege accorded by law, in phrase of munificent bestowal,—to be tried by a jury of one’s peers,—seems at times a gigantic practical joke, perpetrated by justice on simple humanity. They were indeed Mink’s peers so far as ignorance, station,—for most of them were mountaineers,—poverty, and prejudice might suffice. Few were so intelligent, but none so lawless. Most of them were serving under protest, indifferent to the dignity of the great engine of justice which they represented. The two or three who showed willingness were suspected, either by the defense or the prosecution, of occult motives. All looked unkempt, stolid, dogged, even surlily stupid, as they sat in two rows, chewing as with one gesture. Gradually, however, they visibly brightened under the bland courtesy of Mr. Kenbigh, the attorney for the State, who took early occasion to say—and he paraphrased the remark more than once in the course of the day—that he had never had the pleasure of trying a case before so intelligent a jury, or one to whom the sacred interests of justice could be so safely entrusted. Harshaw, too, deported himself toward them with a mollifying suavity which, to judge from his ordinary manner, would have seemed impossible. He had a very pretty wit, of a rough and extravagant style, that greatly commended him to them and relieved the irksomeness of their duress. Mink had evidently been tutored in regard to his demeanor toward them. He forbore to scowl at Pete Rood with the fierce dismay his[158] face had worn when he saw his enemy sworn on the preceding night. But his dissembling was limited. He simply would not look at Rood at all. There was an unaffected confidence, almost indifference, upon his handsome face that occasioned much comment. It had already been rumored among the bar, thence percolating through the town at large, that the defense had discovered important testimony at the last moment, but that for some reason Harshaw had desired to apply for a continuance. The prisoner, it was said, had protested, and refused downright, declaring that by nightfall, by to-morrow at farthest, he would be on his way to his home in Hazel Valley. This rumor gave an added interest to the moment when the witnesses were brought in to be sworn and put under the rule. The crowd scanned each with a fruitless conjecture as to which possessed the potent and significant knowledge on which the defense relied. Several of them were women, demure as nuns in their straight skirts and short waists and long, tunnel-like sun-bonnets. The mountain men strode in, and stared about them freely, and were very bold, in contrast to these decorous associates, with their grave, downcast eyes and pale, passionless faces. The book was held toward the witnesses, two or three were instructed to put their hands upon it, and then the clerk, in a voice that might have proceeded from an automaton, so wooden was the tone and elocution, recited the oath with a swiftness that seemed profane. The group stood half in the slanting sunbeams, half in the brown shadow, close about the clerk’s desk. Among the tall, muscular figures of the mountain men and the pallid, attenuated elder women was Alethea, looking like some fine illusion of the dusky shadow and gilded sunshine, with her golden hair and her brown homespun dress. How shining golden her hair, how exquisitely fresh and pure her face, how deep and luminous and serious her brown eyes, showed as never before. Somehow she was embellished by the incongruity of the sordid surroundings of the court-room, the great, haggard, unkempt place, and the crude ugliness of its[159] frequenters. Her face was fully revealed, for she had pushed back her bonnet that she might kiss the book. As she took it from the clerk’s hand and pressed her lips to it, Mink’s heart stirred with a thrill it had never before known. He was entering as a discoverer upon a new realm of feeling. He experienced a subtle astonishment at the turbulence, the fierceness, of his own emotion.

The judge was looking at her!

Gwinnan’s hand still held his pen. His head was still bent over the paper on which he wrote. The casual side-glance of those discerning gray eyes was prolonged into a steady gaze of surprise. He did not finish the word he was writing. He laid the pen down presently. He watched her openly, unconsciously, as she gave back the book, and as she walked with the other witnesses into the adjoining room to await the calling of her name.

Mink could hardly analyze this strange emotional capacity, this new endowment, that had come to him, so amazed was he by its unwonted presence. He had not known that he could feel jealousy. He could not identify it when it fell upon him. He had been so supreme in Alethea’s heart, so arrogantly sure of its possession, that he had not cared for Ben Doaks’s hopeless worship from afar; it did not even add to her consequence in his eyes. But that this stranger of high degree—he would not have phrased it thus, for he had been reared in ignorance of the distinction of caste, yet he instinctively recognized it in the judge’s power, his isolated official prominence, his utter removal from all the conditions of the mountaineer’s world—that this man should look at her with that long, wondering gaze, should lay down his pen, forgetting the word he was to write!

Mink felt a terrible pang of isolation. For the first time Alethea was in his mind as an independent identity, subject to influences he could scarcely gauge, perhaps harboring thoughts in which he had no share. Her love for him had hitherto served for him as an expression of her whole nature. He had never recognized other possibilities. Even her continual pleas that he[160] should take heed of the error of his ways he had esteemed as evidence of her absorption in him, her eager, earnest aspiration for his best good; she would endure his displeasure rather than forego aught that might inure to his welfare. He had felt no gratitude that she had come to rescue him, as she had often done, never so sorely needed as now; it had seemed to him natural that she should bestir herself, since she loved him so. The first doubt of the permanence and pervasiveness of this paramount affection stirred within him. He wondered if she had noticed the man’s look, if she were flattered by it. He sought to reassure himself. “Lethe jes’ bogues along, though, seein’ nuthin’, studyin’ ’bout suthin’ else; mebbe she never noticed. But ef Mis’ Purvine hed been hyar, or Mis’ Sayles, I be bound, they’d hev seen it, an’ tole her, too, else they ain’t the wimmen I take ’em fur.” He marveled whether Gwinnan had thought she was pretty. He himself had always accounted her a fairly “good-lookin’ gal,” but no better favored than Elvira Crosby.

He had had no fear of the result of the case since he had known of Alethea’s strange glimpse of Tad; he was, too, in a moral sense, infinitely relieved by the circumstance. Otherwise he might not have been able to entertain a train of thought so irrelevant to the testimony which was being given by the witnesses for the State. He heard it only casually, although he now and then languidly joined the general smile that rewarded some happy hit of Harshaw’s. These pleasantries were chiefly elicited in cross-examining the witnesses for the State, and in wrangles with the attorney-general as to the admissibility of evidence. Kenbigh, with a determination of purple wrath to his bald head, would in his stentorian roar call aloud upon his authorities with a reverent faith as if they were calendared saints. More than once the court ruled against him, when it seemed appropriate in his next remark to drop his voice to a rumbling basso profundo. He maintained due respect for the judge and showed a positive affection for the jury, but the very[161] sight of Harshaw would excite him to an almost bovine expression of rage,—the florid counsel being like a red rag to a bull. At first the only point which Harshaw seemed desirous to make was that none of the witnesses had attached any importance to Mink’s threats, the afternoon of the shooting match, to “bust down the mill,” until they heard of the disaster. He tried, too, to induce them to admit that Mink was a good fellow in the main. The tragic results, however, of his late mischief had given a new and serious interpretation to all his previous pranks, and the witnesses were more likely to furnish supplemental instances of freakish malice and the mischievous ingenuity of his intentional reprisals than to palliate his jocose capers. One old man, a by-stander at the shooting match, was especially emphatic, even venomous. Harshaw involved him in a sketch of what he considered a young man should be. When asked where he had ever known such a man he naively confessed,—himself, “whenst I war young.”

Harshaw found it much safer to take the aggressive. He played upon the alternating fears which Mink’s comrades entertained of the revenuers and the moonshiners. He seemed to question rather pro forma than with the expectation of eliciting serious results, and to amuse himself with the involutions and contradictions in which he contrived to enmesh them, in replying to his questions as to their sobriety that night in the woods, what they had to drink, how much it required to make them drunk.

To the witness it was not a reassuring playfulness. Harshaw looked very formidable as he sat, his chair tilted back on its hind legs, both hands clasping the lapels of his coat. Whenever he made a point he smacked his confident red lips.

“You were perfectly sober that night?”

The witness virtuously assented.

“And why shouldn’t you be,” said the crafty Harshaw, “when we all know there is no still but the God-fearing bonded still in the whole country! Look at the[162] jury, and tell them that you were not drinking that night.”

The unfortunate witness faltered that he had been drinking some.

“You had!” exclaimed Harshaw, with the accents of surprise. “And yet you say, on oath, that you were sober. Now what do you call sober? We must inquire into this. What do you take? I wish I could put that question as it should be between gentlemen, but”—he waved his fat hand—“some other day.”

The witness stared dumbly at him, and the crowd grinned.

“Let me put the question in another form. How much of the reverend stuff is enough to settle you? A pint?”

The witness gallantly declared that he could stand a pint.

“A jugful?”

“Oh, naw, sir,”—meaning a jugful would not be necessary.

In the staccato of affected amaze, “Barrelful!”

The badgered witness protested and explained, and Harshaw asked, lowering his voice, as if it were exceedingly important, “Now, did that whiskey taste like brush whiskey?”

As the quaking, shock-headed country lout replied, the facetious counsel recoiled.

“What! you tell this honorable court, and this intelligent jury, and this upright and learned and teetotaling attorney for the State, that you don’t know the difference in the taste between the illicit corn juice of the mountains and the highly honorable, pure, rectified liquor, taxed and stamped, made and drunk, under the auspices of this great, good, and glorious government!”

The judge, who had watched Harshaw with a dilated, gleaming gray eye and a quivering nostril, spoke abruptly.

“The court will not longer tolerate this buffoonery,” he drawled. “Counsel may cross-examine witness, and if he has nothing to say he may be silent.”

[163]

Harshaw flushed deeply. He had always enjoyed certain privileges as a wit. Judge Averill, who loved a joke for its own gladsome sake, had often permitted him to transcend decorum. He had no idea, however, of figuring as the butt of his own ridicule. He was a quick fellow, and took what advantage was possible of the situation. “If it please your Honor,” he said, rising to address the judge, and with an air of great courtesy, “I will waive the right of cross-examination, since my methods fail in satisfying the court.”

Gwinnan looked at him with thinly veiled antagonism. Harshaw relapsed into his tilted chair, still lightly holding his lapels, that favorite posture of rural gentlemen, listening with an air of polite but incidental attention to the attorney-general’s examination of the next witness, and declining with a wave of his fat hand to cross-examine.

A stir of excitement pervaded the bar; great interest was aroused in the audience. An old farmer, sitting on one of the benches, holding one treasured knee in both hands, put his foot on the floor to take care of itself, and leaned forward in breathless eagerness to lose no word. Others, who had been less attentive, were nudging one another, and asking what had been said. Again and again, as the successive witnesses were turned over to the defense for cross-examination, and the lawyer waved his pudgy hand, there was a suppressed sensation. His freak of silence had the effect of greatly expediting matters, and the attorney-general announced before the adjournment for dinner that he had no more witnesses to call.

In conducting the examination of the defendant’s witnesses Harshaw was extremely grave. He had an excited gleam in his eye, a flurried, precipitate manner, as he went on. Now and then he nodded his head, and tossed back his mane of yellow hair as if it were heavy and harassed him. He still sat in the big, important posture he liked to assume, but every glance was full of an acute anxiety.

[164]

Mink strove again to fix his mind on the testimony. Over and over it wandered. He only knew vaguely that his best friends were assuring the jury that his escapades were all in mirth and naught in malice, and instancing as indications of his deeper nature all the good turns he had ever done. He was a loose-handed fellow. He had no thrifty instincts, and perhaps because he valued lightly he gave freely. But the habit, such as it might be, was displayed to the jury under the guise of generosity.

The sunlight now slanting upon the walls had turned to a deep golden-red hue, for the early sunset was close at hand. Through a western window one might see the great vermilion sphere, begirt with a horizontal band of gray cloud, and sinking down into the dun-colored uncertainties about the horizon. The yellow hickory-tree beside the window showed through its thinning leaves the graceful symmetry of its black boughs. The room was dropping into a mellow duskiness, hardly obscurity, for as yet the soft light was sufficient to make all objects distinct in the midst of the gathering shadow,—the lawyers, the prisoner, the tousled heads of the audience, the attentive jury, the unwearied judge. Harshaw could even read his own handwriting as he looked at the list he held, and said, “Mr. Sheriff, call Alethea Sayles.”

“Alethea Sayles,” roared Mr. Sheriff at the door, as if Alethea Sayles were “beyond the seas” and hard of hearing besides, instead of waiting expectantly in the adjoining room, ten steps away.

As she came in, Mink was quick to notice the interest on Gwinnan’s face,—a sort of grave curiosity without any element of disrespect. She had a look in her eyes which Mink had often seen before, and which at once rebuked and angered him,—an expression of spiritual earnestness, of luminous purity; he had sneered at it as “trying to look pious.” She sat down in the witness-chair, and pushed back from her forehead her long bonnet; under its brown rim her golden hair showed in[165] lustrous waves. Her saffron kerchief was knotted beneath her round chin. Her face was slightly flushed with the excitement of the moment, but she was not flurried, nor embarrassed, nor restless, nor uncouth, as many of her predecessors had been. Her deliberate, serious manner gave her an air of great value, and as she began to reply to the questions, her clear-voiced, soft drawl pervaded the court-room, singularly silent now, and there was a growing impression that hers was the important testimony for which all had been waiting. Harshaw’s manner served to confirm this. He was repressed, grave; only the quick, nervous glance of his opaque blue eye indicated his excitement; his questions were framed with the greatest care, and some of these were strange enough to excite comment. He asked her first to tell all that she knew about the party in the woods that night,—whether they were drinking and had access to any ample supply of liquor. She recited her adventure at Boke’s barn, and detailed the subsequent interview with the moonshiner and her refusal to keep his secret, throughout scarcely suppressed excitement in the court-room, for every man knew that with the words she courted martyrdom and took her life in her hands. Harshaw seemed to prize this attestation of her courage and her high sense of the sacred obligations of her oath, and dexterously contrived it so that the judge and the jury should be fully impressed with the crystalline purity of her moral sense, with her immovable determination to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He persevered in the examination of this point with great pertinacity, despite many stormy wrangles with the attorney for the State as to the pertinence and admissibility of the evidence, and the occasional ruling of the judge against him. Enough was secured, however, to prove that despite the limitations of the bonded still, Mink had had the opportunity to get drunk if he chose, and his habits were not those of a teetotaler.

The lawyer’s questions then became more inexplicable.

“When you discovered that you could give some testimony in this case, what did you do?”

[166]

Alethea pushed back her bonnet still further, and stared at him.

“Why, you-uns know,” she said.

“Tell the jury.”

Like many rural witnesses, she persisted in addressing the judge. She would fix her serious brown eyes on the stolid wooden faces in the jury-box, then lift them to the judge and answer.

“I kem down ter the jail ter see Reuben, an’ tell him.”

“And did you see him?”

She looked at Harshaw, with a deep humiliation and resentment intensifying the flush on her delicate cheek to a burning crimson. His gravity, the respect of his manner, reassured her. She replied with her deliberate dignity,——

“You-uns know mighty well he wouldn’t see me.”

“Then what did you do?”

She seemed for a moment doubtful if she would answer.

“I dunno how ye hev forgot,” she said slowly. “I hain’t.”

“I want you to tell the jury,” he explained.

“I tried to make you listen.”

“And what did I do?”

Once more she pushed her brown bonnet further from her golden head, and looked at him silently.

The pause was so long that the attorney-general remarked that really he could not see the pertinence of the examination.

The judge spoke presently: “Counsel would do well not to harass the witness with unnecessary questions.”

What new life was in the man’s tones! He had forgotten to drawl. There had been many a badgered witness on the stand to-day whom he had not interfered to protect. Mink eyed him narrowly through the closing dusk. He was leaning forward upon the desk. He was listening with no impartial judicial interest. A personal concern was expressed in his face.

[167]

The sympathetic cadence in his voice struck on other ears than Mink’s. It was like an open sesame to Alethea’s heart. The pent-up indignation burst forth. She was all at once eager to tell the affronts she could not resent. “He wouldn’t listen ter me, jedge!” she cried. “He ran from me,—actially ran down the street. An’ I didn’t know what ter do. An’ nobody knowed ’bout ’n it but me. An’ I dassent tell nobody ’ceptin’ the lawyer. An’ Jerry Price,—him ez air on the jury,—he ’lowed ef I knowed suthin’ I wanted ter tell in court, he’d make the lawyer listen, an’ so he did. An’ I tole him.”

“When was that?” asked Harshaw.

“Yestiddy mornin’.”

“So that was the reason you didn’t tell it before?”

“I war feared ter tell ennybody but the lawyer, ’kase Reuben’s enemies mought fix it somehows so ’twouldn’t be no ’count.”

“Well, what was this you wanted to tell?”

Her face was growing dim among the glooms. The dusky figures within the bar, the shadowy judge, the indistinct mass of the crowd, the great windows,—indefinite gray squares,—seemed for a moment the darker because of a dull suffusion of yellow light in the halls, falling through the doorways, and heralding the coming of the lamps.

“I wanted to tell that I seen Tad Simpkins arter they ’lowed he war drownded.”

There was absolute silence for a moment; then, wild commotion. Men were talking loudly to each other in the crowd. The lights came in with a flare. Several of the jury requested to have the answer repeated. The attorney-general began to ask a question, left off, and bent his head to his notes. A sudden shrill, quaking voice pierced the tumult.

“I know it air a true word!” cried the old miller, clasping his hands. “God would not deliver my soul ter hell. I fund him in my youth, but my age air the age o’ the backslider. He would not desert me, though! An’ I hev been gin ter do my good works o’ faith anew. I’ll find my boy. I’ll make amends. I’ll”——

[168]

The sheriff’s insistence, “Silence in court!” had no coercion for him. He began to sob and cry aloud, and to call the idiot’s name, and was finally taken by the deputy and led out of the court-room, the officer promising to come and let him know as soon as Alethea had disclosed the boy’s whereabouts.

Mink glanced around him in triumph. His lip curved. A brilliant elation shone in his eyes. He tossed back, with an arrogant gesture, his long, red, curling hair, gilded by the lamplight to a brighter hue. He joyed to see the discomfiture of his detractors, who had given their testimony with all the gusto that appertains to stamping on a man, literally and metaphorically, who is already down. He noted, too, the surprise and pleasure in Ben Doaks’s eye, in Jerry Price’s freckled, ugly face, and, strangely enough, Peter Rood looked transfigured. His surly scowl was gone, as if it had never existed. His swarthy face was irradiated by his great excited eyes. A flush dyed his cheek. His breath came in quick gasps. He seemed inordinately relieved, delighted. What! because the forlorn little idiot was not dead? Mink could not understand it. With not even a surmise to explain the demonstration, he stared in suddenly renewed gravity at his old enemy on the jury.

As soon as order was restored, Harshaw resumed his questions.

“Tell the jury when and where you saw him, and how you are sure it was after he was reputed to be drowned.”

“’Kase ’twar on the Monday o’ the camp-meetin’ in Eskaqua Cove, an’ that warn’t begun till arter the mill war busted down,” said Alethea.

She detailed the scene at the little school-house in her uncouth phrasings, every syllable carrying conviction to her hearers. Her bonnet had fallen quite back on her shoulders. Her face was delicately ethereal in the lamplight,—so much of the sincerities of her nature it expressed, so fine and true an intelligence, that, beautiful as it was, it was still more spiritual. The strange story[169] she had told was improbable. Looking upon her face it was impossible to doubt it.

“That night, what did you do?”

“I let Buck an’ the rest o’ the fambly go by ter aunt Dely’s house, an’ whenst they war out o’ sight I called Tad, but he wouldn’t answer. An’ then I climbed over the fence, an’ sarched an’ sarched fur him. But I couldn’t find him,—not in the house, nor under it, nare one. Then I went on ter aunt Dely’s,—Mis’ Purvine’s,” she added, decorously, remembering that her relative was a stickler for etiquette, and might not relish the familiar appellation of kinship in a public assembly. “I never tole nobody, ’kase I war feared ez whoever hed Tad a-hidin’ of him fur spite agin Reuben would hear ’bout’n it, an’ take him so fur away ez we-uns couldn’t never ketch him agin. I went back ter the school-house over an’ over, a-sarchin’ fur him, hopin’ he’d take a notion ter kem thar agin. An’ at last I ’lowed I’d tell the lawyer.”

It had become very plain to the listeners that it was in the interests of his client that Harshaw had permitted his own rude conduct to be made public. The prosecution could not now reasonably demand why a hue and cry had not been raised, and why the boy was not brought into court, as it was very evident that because of the witness’s mistaken secrecy and the lawyer’s purblind folly the facts had not become known to the defense until the preceding day, when it was futile to search a place where the fugitive had been glimpsed three months before.

The attorney-general, about to cross-examine the witness, cleared his throat several times on a low key. He began with a deliberation and caution which indicated that he considered her formidable to the interests of the State. He sat with his side to the table,—the rural lawyer seldom rises save to address the court,—with one elbow upon it, and the other hand twirling his heavy gold watch-chain that festooned his ample stomach. More than once he desisted in this operation, and passed[170] his hand soothingly over his bald head, as if he were encouraging his ideas. He at once sought to show an interested motive in the testimony.

Was she a relation of the prisoner? Was she not interested in him? Was he not her lover? Ah, he had been! And he was not now? And why?

Alethea’s simple and modest decorum in answering these questions abashed the ridicule that the mere mention of the tender passion always excites in a rural crowd. She only threw added light upon her character when she replied:

“Reuben didn’t like folks ter argufy with him. I useter beg him not ter play kyerds, an’ be so powerful gamesome, an’ drink whiskey, an’ git in sech a many scrapes. An’ he ’lowed ’twarn’t my business. An’ I reckon ’twarn’t But it never ’peared-like ter me ez sech goin’s-on war right, an’ I couldn’t holp sayin’ so. An’ so he ’lowed ez me an’ him couldn’t agree, an’ thar war no use a-tryin’.”

Mink glanced up at Gwinnan to note the impression of this plain statement. The judge was looking at him.

The attorney-general went on, hoping to find a discrepancy in her testimony, yet hardly knowing how he had best approach it. The court-room had relapsed into absolute silence. One could hear in the pauses the slight movement of the branches of the trees without as the light wind stirred. They were distinctly visible beside the windows, for the night was fair. All the long upper sashes gave upon a sky of a fine, pure azure, seeming more delicate for the dull yellow lamplight flooding the room. The moon with an escort of clouds was riding splendidly up toward the meridian; now and then they closed jealously about her, and again through their parting ranks she looked out radiantly and royally on her realms below. The frost touched the panes here and there with a crystalline sparkle. The attorney-general fixed his eyes upon the moon as he pondered; then, his fingers drumming lightly upon the table, he asked, “It was at the little school-house on the road to Bethel camp-ground?”

[171]

“Yes, sir,” said Alethea.

“Were you ever there before?”

“A many a time,” said Alethea. “The folkses in Eskaqua Cove goes thar ter preachin’.”

He glanced again absently at the moon, his fingers still drumming on the table.

“It’s a church-house, then,” he said, adopting the vernacular, “as well as a school-house?”

“Yes, sir,” assented the witness.

“Well, is this fence by which you were standing the fence around the play-yard?”

“Naw, sir,” said Alethea, amazed at the idea of this civilized provision for youthful sports. “The palin’s air round three sides o’ the house, leavin’ out the side whar the door be, ter pertect the graves.”

The drumming fingers of the attorney-general were suddenly still. “It is a graveyard, then?” he said, in a sepulchral undertone, overmastered himself by the surprise.

“Yes, sir. Folks air buried thar. It’s a graveyard.”

There was a pause.

“There’s no place more appropriate for a boy in poor Tad’s predicament to be!” cried the lawyer. “Look here,” squaring himself before the table and placing his elbows upon it, “do you believe in ghosts?”

Harshaw had changed color; he had been fiercely biting his red lips and stroking his yellow beard throughout these interrogatories, seeing their drift more clearly, perhaps, than the prosecuting officer did. Now he sprang to his feet, and insisted that the attorney for the State should not be permitted to play upon the superstition of the witness. She had seen no ghost. The court would not, he hoped, permit the questions to take the form of an attempt to persuade a witness—of great native intelligence, indeed, and of the highest moral worth, but densely ignorant, and doubtless saturated with the ridiculous superstitions of the uneducated—that in seeing this fugitive lad she had beheld a supernatural manifestation.[172] “In one moment, sir,” he interpolated, addressing Peter Rood, who sat in the back row of the jury, and who had suddenly bent forward, pointing a long finger at the witness, as if he were about to ask a question. “The boy doubtless swam out of the river, and being a maltreated little drudge ran away, and is now somewhere held in hiding by persons inimical to the prisoner. The witness had a glimpse of him. There is no man here ignorant enough to believe that she saw a ghost,—least of all the learned and astute counsel for the State.”

“I don’t believe she saw a ghost,” said the attorney-general, still seated, cocking up his eyes at his vehement opponent. “I do believe, however, most firmly, that the witness had an illusion, hallucination.”

There was a stir in the audience and the jury as he uttered these big words. They seemed to represent something more vaguely formidable than a ghost.

“Counsel must conduct the examination on a reasonable basis,” remarked the judge.

“I will do so, your Honor,” in the basso profundo of deep respect.

Mink, agitated, trembling with the sudden shock, leaned forward and looked with burning eyes at Alethea. How was she discrediting the testimony she had given for him? How was she jeopardizing his fate?

She was almost overcome for a moment. Her nerves were shaken; she was appalled by the sudden revolution her simple disclosure had wrought. Her lips trembled, her eyes filled, but she made a gallant struggle for self-control, and answered in a steady voice the attorney-general’s next question.

“Did the boy wear a hat, or was he bare-headed?”

There was suppressed excitement in the audience, for Tad’s hat and coat, recovered from the river, had been shown to the jury while she was in the ante-room with the other witnesses.

“I didn’t notice,—’twar so suddint”

“How was he dressed?”

[173]

“I didn’t see,” faltered Alethea.

“What did you see?”

“I seen his face, ez clear ez I see yourn this minit.”

“How did he look,—hearty?”

“Naw, sir; he looked mighty peaked. His face war bleached,”—a thrill ran through the crowd,—“an’ I reckon he war skeered ez he seen me, fur he ’peared plumb tarrified.”

“How long did you see his face?”

“A minit, mebbe; the fog passed ’twixt us.”

“Ah, there was fog!”

The attorney-general cast a triumphant sidelong glance at the jury.

He paused abruptly, and turned toward them.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, addressing Peter Rood. “I had quite forgotten you wanted to ask a question.”

It did not immediately strike him as odd that the man was still in the same position,—in the shadow, leaning forward, supported on the back of the chair of the juryman in front of him, and still pointing at the witness with a long finger.

The judge took note of the lapse of time. “Mr. Sheriff,” he said, irritably, “wake that juror up. The man’s asleep.”

There was a stir in the jury-box among the attentive eleven men. The juror on whose chair the immovable figure leaned turned his head, and met the fixed gaze of the eyes so close to his own.

He sprang up with a loud cry.

“The man is dead!” he shrieked.

The finger of the dead man still pointed at Alethea. His ghastly eyes were fixed upon her. The chair of the juryman in front of him had sustained his weight in the same position in which he had fallen when the first shock of the idea that the witness had seen a spectre instead of the boy, alive and well, had thrilled through the room.

For a few moments it was a scene of strange confusion. The crowd rose from their seats, and surged up to the bar. New-comers were rushing in from the halls. Some one was calling aloud the name of the principal physician of the place. Many were clamoring to know what had happened. The judge’s voice sounded suddenly. “Look out for your prisoner, Mr. Sheriff!” he exclaimed sharply; for the officer still stood as if transfixed beside the dead man, on whose shoulder he had laid hold. No hand, however heavy, could rouse him from the slumber into which he had fallen.

The sheriff turned toward the prisoner. The proud mountaineer, keenly sensitive to an indignity, burst out angry and aggrieved. “I hain’t budged a paig!” he cried. And indeed he had not moved. “It’s jes’ ’kase you-uns set thar in jedgmint, an’ I hev ter set hyar an’ be tried, ez ye kin say sech ez that ter me!”

Harshaw had vehemently clutched his client’s arm as a warning to be silent. To his relief, he perceived that Gwinnan had not heard. He was absorbed in directing a physician to be called, and formally adjourned court until nine o’clock the following morning. The reluctant jurymen, quivering with excitement and consumed with curiosity as to the subsequent proceedings, were led off[175] from the scene in charge of an officer,—himself a martyr to duty,—with many an eager backward glance and thought. The crowd hung around outside with unabated excitement. Often it effected an entrance and surged through the doors, to be turned out again by the orders of the physicians. Many climbed on the window-ledges to look through. The lower branches of the hickory-trees swarmed with the figures of nimble boys. The wind now was high. The boughs swayed back and forth with a monotonous clashing. Leaves continually fell from them like the noiseless flight of birds. The moon showed the pale, passionless sky; a planet swung above the distant mountains, burning with the steadfast purity of vestal fires; the inequalities of the hills and dales on which the rugged little town was built—very dark beneath the delicately illumined heavens—showed in the undulating lines of lighted windows, glimmering points stretching out into the gloom. Constantly the weighted gate clanged as men trooped into the court-house yard. The shadows seemed to multiply the number of the crowd.

Suddenly there was a cry: “He’s comin’! They’re bringin’ him! He’s comin’!”

The expectation had been so strong that the physician would pronounce it some transient paroxysm of the heart, which he was known to often suffer, that the crowd was stricken into a shocked silence to recognize the undertaker among the men coming out and bearing a litter on which the motionless figure was stretched. One glance at it, and there seemed nothing so inanimate in all nature. The moon, the trees, even the invisible wind, were endowed with redundant life, with identity, with all the affirmations of speculation, of imagination, in comparison with the terrible nullity of this thing that once was Peter Rood. It expressed only a spare finality.

It was strange to think he could not hear the wind blow, straight from the mountains, the dull thud of the many feet that followed him through the gate and down[176] the street; could not see the moon which shone with a ghastly gleam upon his stark, upturned face. He was dead!

He was so dead that already his world was going on with a full acceptation of the idea. He had no longer an individuality as Peter Rood; he was only considered as a dead man. Considered as a dead man, he furnished the judge with a puzzle which irritated him. Gwinnan could not remember any case in which a man had died upon a jury, and he debated within himself whether this instance came under the statute leaving it to the discretion of the court, in the case of a sick juror, to discharge the jury and order a new one to be impaneled, or to excuse the juror and summon another in his place from the by-standers. He went into one of the lawyers’ offices, and turned over a few books in search of precedent.

The attorney-general utilized the respite. He had lingered at the scene for a time, animated by curiosity. But when one of the physicians who had been summoned to the court-house, returned to his office, after the vain efforts to resuscitate the man, he found the attorney for the State seated before the wood fire, his hands clasped behind his head, his feet stretched out upon the hearth, his chair tilted back upon its hind legs, waiting for him in comfortable patience.

There was no carpet on the floor. The small windows were lighted by tiny panes of glass. The hearth was broken in many places, but painted a bright red with a neat home-made varnish of powdered bricks mixed with milk, commonly used in the country. There were several splint-bottomed chairs, an easy-chair, and one or two tables; book-cases covered the walls from the floor to the ceiling. It was the doctor’s professional opinion that tobacco was the ruin of the country; on the high mantelpiece were ranged several varieties of pipe, from the plebeian cob and brier-root to the meerschaum presented by a grateful patient, all bearing evidences of much use.

[177]

Kenbigh looked up quietly as the owner of the appropriated quarters walked in. Dr. Lloyd was a tall, spare man of sixty odd, with a back that never bent, dressed punctiliously in black broadcloth and the most immaculate linen of an old-fashioned style. His thick hair was white. He wore a stiff mustache; his shaven chin was square and resolute; his features were singularly straight. His gray eye expressed great cleverness and goodness, but there was a refined sarcasm in the curl of his lips, and he affected a blunt indifference of manner, not to say brusqueness.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing, doctor,—nothing with my vitals, or I wouldn’t have trusted myself near you. The instinct of self-preservation is strong. I have come for some information.”

“An aching void in the regions of your brain, eh? Well, at your time of life that’s incurable.”

“I want you,” said the lawyer, his eyes roaming around the medical library, ranged upon the wall, with a gloating, gluttonous gleam at the idea of the feast of information within the covers of the volumes, “to lecture me, doctor.”

“Where’s your Medical Jurisprudence?”

“It doesn’t teach me all I want to know about ghosts.”

Surprise was something Dr. Lloyd was never known to express or imply. He sat looking at the visitor with his calm professional eye, as if it were the most habitual thing in the world for sane lawyers to come into his office at night, wanting to know about ghosts.

“I want to know all about absurd illusions,—in people of undoubted sanity.”

“Subject of some scope,” dryly remarked the doctor.

“I want to know all that you know about hallucinations, visions. I want an elaborate exposition of the visual apparatus as connected with the brain, and of the derangement of its nervous functions.”

“Upon my word, you’re a pretty fellow!”

[178]

“And then I want you to lend me all your books.” And once more he gazed around on the coveted treasures of the shelves.

One of the great logs had burned in two, the chunks falling forward upon the other blazing sticks. The doctor had made a move toward the tongs, but the lawyer arose, and with a sort of cumbrous agility kicked first one and then the other into the space between the dogs. Dr. Lloyd watched this proceeding with silent disapproval. Far be it from him to put his dapper old-fashioned foot-gear to any such purpose.

The warmth of the fire was grateful, for it had grown much colder without. The wind surged down the street like the passing of many feet, some tumultuous human rush. The fir-tree beside the door was filled with voices, sibilant whisperings, sighs. Clouds were scudding through the sky; Kenbigh could see them from where he sat listening to the doctor’s monologue. The moonlight lay on the old-fashioned garden without, all pillaged by the autumn winds,—the rose-bushes but leafless wands; the arbors, naked trellises; the walks, laid off with rectangular precision, showing what the symmetry of its summer guise had been, as a skeleton might suggest the perfection of the human form. The lights in the two-story frame house beyond—for the doctor’s office was in the yard of his dwelling and the garden lay a little to the rear—were extinguished one by one. A dog close by barked for a time, with echoes from the hills and depressions, and then fell to howling mournfully. The doctor talked on, now and then taking down the books to illustrate; marking the passages with a neat strip of paper in lieu of turning down a leaf, as Kenbigh seemed disposed to do. He piled the volumes beside his apt pupil on the candle-stand, and as the lawyer fell to at them he himself read for a time, as a light recreation, from a history in some twelve volumes. To a country gentleman of ample leisure and bookish habit, this lengthy work was but as a mouthful.

Dr. Lloyd rose at last, knocked the ashes out of his[179] pipe upon the head of one of the fire-dogs, glanced at the absorbed lawyer, and remarked, “You’ll come over to my house to go to bed after a little more, won’t you?”

“Reckon so,” responded Kenbigh, without lifting his head.

The fire flared up the chimney in great white flames; they emanated from a lustrous, restless, pulsing red heart. The sparks flew. The faint and joyous sounds from the logs were like some fine fairy minstrelsy which one is hardly sure one hears. A sylvan fragrance came from the pile of wood in the corner, the baskets of chips, the pine knots.

The doctor left the room, opened the door and looked back.

“Don’t you set the house afire and burn up these books,” he said, with the first touch of feeling in his tones that night.

The results of the attorney-general’s vigil were abundantly manifest in his speech to the jury the following day. For that body was recruited by summoning another talesman in Rood’s place, and the trial perforce began anew; Gwinnan apparently thinking this alternative served better the ends of justice than to risk the delays and vicissitudes of again securing a competent jury. This decision encouraged Mink, who had been tortured by the fear that by some disaster the case would be continued to the next term. He was not now greatly perturbed by the strange turn which the attorney-general had contrived to give to Alethea’s testimony. Since Harshaw had found that any one claimed to have seen Tad after the report of the boy’s death he had felt confident of an acquittal, laying much stress on the necessity of proving the corpus delicti, as he phrased it; and Mink accepted his lawyer’s opinion and relied upon it. He had not been greatly affected by Rood’s fate, so absorbed was he by his own interests; but it was a moment of tense excitement when the testimony again reached the juncture at which, on the preceding day, the unfortunate juror had leaned forward and pointed at[180] the witness, his question failing on his lips in the dumbness of death. Nothing further was elicited from Alethea except that she did believe in ghosts, but that she was sure she had seen Tad alive, albeit he had stood among the graves with a blanched face, disappearing in a moment, lost in the mist.

The whole testimony occupied much less time than on the previous day, and as the afternoon progressed it began to be apparent that the case would go to the jury before the court adjourned.

The surprise of the day was the speech of the attorney-general. It opened simply enough. He sought to show that it was impossible for Tad to be alive. The poor boy was doubtless at the bottom of the river. How could it be otherwise? Assume, as his learned opponent would have them believe, that he had swum ashore. Where was he now? The suggestion that he was in the custody of some enemy of the prisoner, who sought by concealing him to effect the incarceration of Reuben Lorey in the penitentiary for a long term, was so absurd that he hesitated to argue such a foolish position before so intelligent a body of men as the jury whom he had the pleasure of addressing. Who would, for revenge, encounter the hazards of such a scheme? The boy was as well known throughout the section as Piomingo Bald. Any chance glimpse of him by a casual visitor would fling the conspirators themselves into the clutches of the law, that would be loath to lightly loose its hold on such rascals. Who would voluntarily burden themselves with the support of an idiot? If anybody had found Tad, he would have been mighty quick to carry the boy back to old man Griff. Say that no one had detained him,—what then? He was an idiot, incapable of taking care of himself. If he were wandering at large, starving, half clad, would not some one have seen him besides Alethea Sayles, in all these weeks, gentlemen, in all these months? It was a remarkable story that the witness had told,—a remarkable story. (The counsel seemed to find fit expression of his sense of its solemnity[181] by sinking his basso profundo to a thunderous mutter.) No one for a moment could doubt the sanity of that witness. She was evidently a girl of fine common sense; an excellent girl, too,—no one could for a moment doubt the truth of any word she uttered. The fact was, Alethea Sayles saw a strange thing that night. She thought she saw Tad. It was only his image, not himself. “The forlorn boy is dead, gentlemen,” he continued. “She saw the fantasy of her own anxious, overwrought brain. He was in her mind. She had pondered long upon him, and upon the plight of her lover, who had killed him. What wonder, then, that in the mist, and the flickering moonlight, and the lonely midnight, she should fancy that she saw him!”

He told the gaping and amazed jury that this was not an isolated instance. He mentioned other victims of hallucination; he detailed the strange experiences of Nicolai, of Spinoza, of Dr. Bostock, of Lord Londonderry, of Baron de Géramb, of Leuret, of Lord Brougham.

Harshaw, who had sat listening, with his hands in his pockets and his legs crossed, a smile of ostentatious derision upon his face, grew grave upon the mention of the last name. He had never heard of the others, but to attempt to bolster a theory of spectral apparition by this name, revered in the profession, was, he felt, a juridical sacrilege that should cause the attorney-general to be at the very least stricken from the rolls.

As Kenbigh went on, expounding the relative and interdependent functions of the brain and eye, the fine and subtle theories of spiritual and physical life, its vague boundaries, its unmeasured capabilities,—the deductions, the keen analysis of science, all reduced to the vernacular in the mouth of a man trained by years of practice to speak to the people,—Harshaw sat in blank dismay. He had never heard of any spiritual manifestation but the vulgar graveyard ghost, usually headless, stalking in its shroud to accomplish missions of vengeance upon the very ignorant in the deep midnight. But Kenbigh’s account of sundry ethereal-minded and[182] mild-mannered spectres, with a preference for high company, singing, appearing at dinner-tables, conversing agreeably, arrayed in conventional garb, as decorous and reasonable and as mindful of etiquette as if still bound by all the restraints of the world, the flesh, and the devil, disappearing as noiselessly as they had come, with no appreciable result of the visit,—it shocked every sense of precedent within him. He was country-bred and did not know that when ghosts are fashionable they conduct themselves as fashionable people do. He noted keenly the discrepancies in the scientific explanations. Always, despite its show of learning, its systems, its terminology, its physiology, its psychology, and its persistent reference of supernatural appearances to natural causes, Reason retires from the spectral exhibition with some admission of occult influences, not fully understood,—in effect making a bow to the ghost in question, “Saving your presence.” He noticed, too, that the jury were listening with that intentness and eager interest which characterize every mind, even the most ignorant, in considering things of the other world, manifestations of hidden agencies. When he rose to reply he felt at a loss. The sound, however, of his own hearty voice ringing against the walls, instead of the sepulchral basso profundo of the attorney for the State, the motion of his own stalwart arm sawing the air,—for he was in the habit of impressing his views with a good deal of muscular exertion,—had an invigorating effect upon him, and brought him back to his normal state of confidence and bluster. He found words for his ready scorn. He sought to discredit the attorney-general’s phantoms. He did not know where the counsel got these old women’s tales; they were an insult to the intelligence of the jury. The learned counsel knew mighty well he wasn’t going to be called upon for his authorities,—medical books can’t be produced as evidence in a court of justice, much less ghost stories, “Raw-head and bloody-bones”! For his own part, he didn’t believe a word of them. A fact is a thing that can be proved. The law requires authentication. “Henry Brougham, Lord Chancellor, saw[183] visions, did he? And may be Lord Coke dreamed dreams,” he sneered indignantly. “And Lord Mansfield perchance walked in his sleep. And who knows they did? And what drivel is this! Gentlemen, we live in the nineteenth century!”

The aspersion of Lord Brougham—for thus he considered the anecdote—was very bitter to him. He was a man of few enthusiasms, and such hero-worship as was possible to him had been expended upon the great lights of his profession whose acquaintance he had formed in his early reading of law, some twenty years ago. He so dwelt upon this point that the jury received the valuable impression that Henry Brougham was a chancellor and a “valley man,” hailing from Knoxville, perhaps, and was held in high esteem by the lawyers in Shaftesville, and that Harshaw seemed to think the attorney-general had slandered him. He wrenched himself from this phase of the subject with some difficulty. “Gentlemen,” he said sarcastically, “the attorney-general is a mighty smart man. He’s got a heap of learning lately about visions.” He glanced down obliquely at his opponent; he would have given a good deal to know how the counsel for the State came by his information. He could have sworn that it was not indigenous. “But there are plenty of folks in this town could have told him just as much and more. He’s mighty particular to show the difference between il-lusion and de-lusion, and hallucination and mania. Visions! That ain’t what we call ’em, gentlemen. Down here in the flat woods we call ’em—‘snakes’!” The hit told, and he went on, encouraged. “Right over yonder in Tim Becker’s saloon they keep every assortment of vision. Men have seen green rabbits there, and black dogs, and snakes, and whole menageries of hallucinations. Is anybody going to believe Alethea Sayles had the jim-jams that night, coming from camp-meeting? She had no call to see visions! This girl had her head in her hands; she was leaning on the fence; she felt some one touch her; she looked up, and saw the boy before her. Mighty few of the ghosts that we have heard of had such consistency of entity as to[184] make their presence perceived by the sense of touch; on the contrary, it is thus that their unreality is often demonstrated in these same fables. A lady passes her fan through one immaterial image. A man thrusts his knife vainly into the misty heart of another. And why does this instance differ? Because, gentlemen, there was no phantom. It was Tad Simpkins in flesh and blood. The fugitive boy sees Alethea Sayles, whom he knows well; he is about to appeal to her; he lays his hand on her hand. She lifts her head, and at the unexpected appari—sight, she screams, and the foolish boy is frightened, and flees!”

He went on to say that he would impose upon the patience of this court and jury only for a few moments longer. He wanted to contradict the statements of the attorney-general that no one would voluntarily burden himself with the support of a useless member of society. “How many yaller dogs at your houses, gentlemen? I’d be afraid to count how many at mine. How many of your wife’s relations? No, gentlemen, none of us are so rich in this world’s goods as we deserve to be, but we ain’t got down to dividing bread and meat that close yet. As to the reckless crime of keeping the boy in hiding in order to put Mink Lorey in the penitentiary for involuntary manslaughter,—why, gentlemen, if there were not just such reckless people continually committing crimes, the consequences of which they cannot escape, the attorney-general and I would have nothing to do. We’d have to suck our paws for a living, like a bear in the winter, and look at one another,—a profitless entertainment, gentlemen.”

He sat down, his pink smile enlivening his countenance, well satisfied with his efforts and with the prospects of the case.

The attorney-general, who had the last word, was very brief in saying it. The judge charged the jury, and he, too, was brief. The long slant of sunshine falling athwart the room was reddening when the jury were led out by the officer to their deliberations, noisily ascending the stairs to the jury-room above, assigned to their use.

They slouched into their lair, looking more like offenders detained against their will than the free and enlightened citizens of a great country in the exercise of the precious privilege of serving on the jury. They were all tired. They had undergone much excitement. They felt the mental strain of the arguments and counter-arguments to which they had listened.

“It hev fairly gin me a mis’ry in my head ter hev ter hear ter them red-mouthed lawyers jaw an’ jaw, like they done!” exclaimed one, flinging himself in a chair, and putting his feet up against the round sides of the stove, which was cold and fireless, the day being warm and genial. The windows were open, the sunlight streaming over the dusty floor and chairs and benches. Two or three of the jurymen, looking out, laughing, and making signs to the people in the streets, were smartly remonstrated with by the officer in charge.

His objections had the effect of congregating them in the middle of the room, where the discussion began, most of them lighting their pipes, and tilting their chairs on the hind legs. Two or three lifted their feet to the giddy eminence of the backs of other chairs; several stretched themselves at lank, ungainly length upon the benches. They were mostly young or middle-aged men; the senior of the party being a farmer of fifty, with a pointed, shaven chin, newly sprouting with a bristly beard, over which he often passed his hand with a meditative gesture. His eyes were downcast; he leaned his elbows on his knees; his mien was depressed, not to say afflicted. “I ain’t hearn ten words together,” he remarked. “I never knowed when they lef’ off, sca’cely, bein’ so all-fired[186] oneasy an’ beset ’bout them cattle o’ mine.” He turned to explain to the new juror whom they had taken on that morning. “Ben Doaks hed my cattle a-summerin’ of ’em up on Piomingo Bald, an’ when the cattle war rounded up I went thar ter pick out mine, an’ I druv ’em down an’ got ez far ez Shaftesville, an’ I let ’em go on with Bob, my son, ’bout fifteen year old. An’ I stopped hyar ter git a drink an’ hear a leetle news. An’ durned ef they didn’t ketch me on the jury! An’ Bob dunno what’s kem o’ me, an’ I dunno what’s kem o’ Bob an’ the cattle, nor how fur they hed traveled along the road ’fore they fund out I warn’t comin’ arter.”

“Waal, I reckon they be all right,” said the new man, a hunter from the mountains, just come into town with game to sell.

“Lord knows! I don’t!” said the old fellow, sighing over the futility of speculation. “Ef Bob war ter draw the idee ez I got hurt, or robbed, or scrimmagin’ in them town grog-shops,—I hev always been tellin’ him a all-fired pack o’ lies ’bout the dangers in sech places, bein’ ez I warn’t willin’ ter let him go whar I’d go myself,—he’d leave them cattle a-standin’ thar in the road, an’ kem back ter town ter s’arch fur me. He hain’t got much ’speriunce, an’ he ain’t ekal ter keerin’ fur them cattle. They’ll stray, an’ I’ll never see ’em agin.”

“I reckon they hev strayed back ter the mountings by this time; must be wilder ’n bucks, ef they hev been out all summer,” suggested a broad-faced twinkling-eyed young fellow, with a jocose wink at the others.

“Bob dozes, too; sorter sleepy-headed, ye know,” said the old man, taking note of all the contingencies. “I hev seen him snooze in the saddle, ef the cattle war slow. He’s growin’, an’ runs mighty hard, an’ ef he sets still, he falls off. Ef he got tired, he’s apt ter lie down in a fence-corner ter rest; an’ he mought go ter sleep thar, an’ somebody mought toll the cattle off. Or else he mought ax somebody ter keer fur the cattle till he could kem back an’ find me. Lord A’mighty, thar’s no yearthly tellin’ what Bob mought do!”

[187]

“Then, again, he moughtn’t” said Jerry Price. “Ye hev jes’ got ter gin up yer hold on worldly things when ye air on a jury, like ye war dead.”

“Yes; but when ye air dead ye ain’t able ter be pestered by studyin’ ’bout what yer administrator air a-doin’ with yer yearthly chattels an’ cattle.”

“How d’ye know?” demanded Price. “Arter all we hearn ter-day, a body mought b’lieve a real likely harnt air ekal ter ennything in motion an’ looks, an’ ye dunno what they air studyin’ ’bout. But time’s a-wastin’. ’Less we air wantin’ ter bide hyar all night agin, we hed better be talkin’ ’bout our verdict on Mink Lorey. The jedge’s waitin’, an’ from all I hev seen o’ him he ain’t handy at patience.”

“Waal, sir,” said the man with his feet on the stove, who was the foreman of the jury, taking his pipe from his mouth, “I ain’t settin’ much store on Gwinnan. I don’t b’lieve he acted right an’ ’cordin’ ter law about this jury. Thar’s thirteen men on this jury!”

They all sat motionless, staring at him.

“Yes, sir,” he declared, reinserting his pipe between his teeth, and speaking with them closed upon it. “I know the law! My uncle war a jestice o’ the peace fur six year, ’bout ten year ago. An’ he hed a Code o’ Tennessee! An’ I read in it! Some mighty interestin’ readin’ in the Code o’ Tennessee. Sure’s ye born, thar is! The law say the juror, ef he be ailin’, kin be excused, an’ another summonsed. But Peter Rood warn’t excused, nor discharged nuthar. He’s on this jury yit.”

“Waal, fur Gawd’s sake, don’t git ter jawin’ ’bout Peter Rood!” cried Bylor, the man on whose chair the dead juror had fallen, and who had turned his face to the close encounter of the stare of death in those glassy eyes. Bylor’s nerves were still unstrung. He looked as ill as a broad-shouldered, sun-burned, brawny fellow could look. “I never slep’ a wink las’ night; an’ that thar cussed ’torney-gineral a-tellin’ them awful tales ’bout harnts all day, an’ that thar solemn Lethe Sayles purtendin’[188] she hed seen that drownded idjit,—I felt ez ef I’d fall down in a fit ef they didn’t quit it.”

“I don’t b’lieve she seen Tad’s harnt,” said Ben Doaks, instinctively adopting her view.

“Then what war it in the graveyard fur?” demanded the foreman conclusively.

There was momentary silence. The sunshine was dying out on the floor; the dim tracery of the boughs of the hickory-tree was the only manifestation of its presence. The rural sound of the lowing of cattle came in on the soft air,—the village kine were returning from their pastures. The voices of men in the rooms below rose and fell fitfully; they were trying another case, in the interim of waiting for the verdict.

“An’ how kem nobody hev seen him sence, ’ceptin’ Lethe Sayles?” he supplemented his question.

“The jedge hinted ez much ez we-uns oughter be powerful keerful o’ not convictin’ a man fur killin’, when a witness claimed ter hev seen the dead one sence,” argued Jerry Price, ambiguously.

“She never seen nuthin’ but his ghost,” said the foreman.

“Ben, how’d that leetle red cow o’ mine git her hawn bruk?” interpolated the bereaved cattle-owner, meditating on the vicissitudes experienced by his herds in their summer vacation.

“Gawd A’mighty, man, quit talkin’ ’bout yer cattle, interruptin’ we-uns jes’ ez we war a-gittin’ ter the p’int!” exclaimed the foreman.

“I’d heap ruther hear Mr. Beames talk ’bout his cattle ’n hear ’bout harnts, an’ sech,” said Bylor, as he lay on the bench. He was still feeling far from well. He got up presently, and went to the officer, who was at the door, and petitioned for something to drink. But that worthy, determined upon the literal performance of duty, withstood his every persuasion, even when he declared he was “plumb sick;” and the rest of the jury, alarmed lest he should be excused, another juror summoned, and the whole performance of the trial begin anew, the agony[189] of their detention thus lengthening indefinitely, pleaded for him. The officer’s devotion to what he considered his duty did not save him from some abuse.

“’Twould sarve ye right ef we war ter lay a-holt o’ ye an’ fling ye outer this winder,” said Ben Doaks.

“Ye mis’able leetle green gourd, ye dunno nuthin’ ’bout nuthin’,” declared the foreman, the much informed because of the Code.

“Waal, ye kin say what ye wanter,” retorted the official. He was a young man; he had a resolute eye and a shock head. “But ye ain’t goin’ ter git out’n here till ye find yer verdict.” He withdrew his tousled head suddenly, and shut the door on them.

Rebellion availing nothing, they resorted to faction.

“Ye needn’t be so powerful techy ’bout harnts; ye ain’t seen none ez I knows on,” said the foreman, turning upon the sick juror.

“Naw, an’ I don’t wanter hear ’bout none o’ ’em till my stommick feels stronger.”

“Shucks! that air nuthin’ oncommon, seein’ harnts an’ sech. Plenty o’ folks hev seen the same one. Thar’s ever so many o’ them herders on Thunderhead hev seen the harnt ez herds up thar. Rob Carrick seen him. I have hearn him tell ’bout’n it arter he got his mind back. Hain’t you, Ben?”

The moon was at the eastern windows. The white lustre poured in. The great room seemed lonely and deserted, despite the group of deliberating jurymen, and the colorless double with which each had been furnished, to ape his gesture, and caricature his size, and dog his every step. An owl was hooting in some distant tree. The voices from the street were faint.

“Ain’t that thar weasel of a constable goin’ ter hev no lamps brung hyar ter-night?” exclaimed Bylor.

But the lamps which came in almost immediately were inadequate to contend with the solemn, ethereal, white pervasion of the night that still hung in the window, and lay upon the floor, and showed the gaunt bare tree outside. They only gave a yellow cast to the circle in[190] which the party sat, and made their faces seem less pallid and unnatural.

“Yes, I hev hearn Carrick tell it a many a time. He used ter herd with Josh Nixon in life.” Ben Doaks paused a moment. “I seen the Herder wunst myse’f, though I never felt right sure about it till ter-night. I ’lowed I mought jes’ hev fancied it.”

“What made ye sure ’bout it ter-night?” demanded Bylor, starting up from the bench.

“’Count o’ what the ’torney-gineral said ’bout hellucination. I know now ez ’twar a vision sent from hell, an’ I reckon that air one reason I hev fund it air so hard ter git religion. My mind hev got too much in league with Satan.”

“Waal, Carrick ’lowed ez Josh Nixon kem back from hell ter herd on Thunderhead ’kase all his bones warn’t buried tergether,” said the foreman.

“Law, Ben,” broke out the owner of cattle, “I wonder ef them beef bones we seen on the top o’ Piomingo Bald warn’t the bones o’ that thar leetle black heifer o’ mine ez couldn’t be fund, an’ ye ’lowed mus’ hev been eat by a wolf.”

“I knocked off the vally o’ that thar heifer in our settlin’ up, an’ I hed hoped ter hear no mo’ o’ her in this mortal life!” cried Ben Doaks, lifting his voice from the bated undertone in which he had discussed the spectral phenomena to an indignant worldly resonance. “I didn’t know ez ye branded yer beastis on her bones,” sarcastically; “the las’ time I seen her she war too fat ter show ’em. I never looked fur yer mark on them bones on the bald.”

“Waal,” said a slow, measured voice, with that unnatural tone one has in speaking to one’s self, “Tad hev got no call ter kem back.”

“Who air ye a-talkin’ ter?” cried Bylor, starting up, his nerves quivering at the slightest provocation.

“Somebody told me just then ’twar Tad’s harnt,” said Price, rousing himself with an effort.

“They never!” cried Bylor. “Old man Beames[191] hain’t got done moanin’ ’bout his cattle, like they war the ornymints o’ the nation. Nobody never opened thar mouths ter ye. Ye jes’ answered ter nuthin’.”

“Harshaw never b’lieved Lethe Sayles seen no harnt,” declared one.

“He hed ter say that,” observed the foreman, evidently of spectral tendencies, “no matter what he believed. The ’torney-gin’al war powerful sure she seen a harnt.”

“He ’lowed it war a hellucination,” protested Bylor, being extremely averse to any theory involving supernatural presence.

“Waal,” argued the logical Price, “he ’lowed ez a hellucination war suthin’ ez looks like a person, but ’tain’t him. Now ain’t that a harnt? Ain’t Tad’s harnt suthin’ that looks like Tad, an’ ain’t Tad?”

“Oh,” cried Bylor, springing from the bench, “I feel obligated ter git away from sech talk! I jes’ look ter see Peter Rood a-stalkin’ round hyar direc’ly, with that awful stare he hed in his eyes when he war stone dead fur ever so long, with his face so close ter mine. I can’t abide it no longer! Let’s toss up. Heads, acquit! Tails, convict!” He produced a coin from his pocket.

“Naw, ye won’t,” said the foreman quickly. “Naw! We’ll delib’rate on this hyar question, an’ decide it like a jury oughter.”

Bylor cast a glance at the windows, each with its great white image upon the floor below; at the dim faces about him; at the lamps, dull and yellow, making the moonlight seem more pallid and vaguely blue. He threw himself upon the bench, and for a long time was silent.

“Look hyar,” said Jerry Price, “it hev jes’ got down ter this,—harnt or no harnt. Ef Lethe Sayles seen Tad, Mink never killed him, an’ hev ter be acquitted. Ef Lethe Sayles seen Tad’s harnt, Mink killed him whilst doin’ a unlawful act, an’ he hev ter go ter the pen’tiary fur involuntary manslaughter, ez the jedge ’lows sech be a felony.”

The wrangle over the question, which bristled with[192] difficulties enough, began anew. They were even more illogical and irritable than before. They were utterly unused to debate, to reason. The mental strain of laboriously applying their attention to each detail, striving to master circumstance and argument, throughout the two days during which the case had been tried twice before them, had resulted in a certain degree of prostration of their faculties. The singular surprise in the evidence and the sudden death of one of their number had unnerved them all, more or less. Being ignorant men, untrained to discriminate and differentiate, while they could accept the strange occurrences which the attorney-general had brought to their knowledge, they were not able to perceive and apply the scientific explanations. And in fact many of these were lame and inadequate. They had heard these seemingly supernatural instances from a man of education and acumen, and it had fallen to their lot to probe the probabilities, and possibilities, and decide an important question based upon them. They were no nearer a conclusion when Ben Doaks, who had been sitting with his arms folded, silently meditating for a time, broke out abruptly, “That’s it! Tad’s harnt kem back ’kase his bones ain’t buried.”

Bylor once more started up. “Who tole ye that? Who said it fust?”

“I dunno,” replied Ben Doaks quietly. “Some o’ them boys.”

“They never!” cried Bylor. “I hev been listening ter every one. Some o’ ye answers the words o’ a man who never speaks aloud! Thar’s a harnt on this jury! I know it! I feel it!” He stood up at his full height, trembling like a leaf. He was in a nervous panic. “Gentlemen, we hev got”—he faltered at the name—“him with us yet. Thar’s thirteen men on this jury. For Gawd’s sake, let’s go down an’ tell the jedge we can’t agree. I’ll see Rood d’rec’ly, an’ ye will too.”

“Laws-a-massy!” cried old Beames, interested for the first time in aught save his cattle. “I’ll make a break an’ run”—he did not say where, the obdurate[193] officer being on the other side of the door. He too rose, agitated, his toothless jaw shaking. “I couldn’t abide ter see him, like he looked las’ night!”

“Thar’s thirteen men on the jury. Thar’s no use denyin’ it,” said the foreman, “whether Pete Rood’s sperit’s in the panel or no.”

A great shadow suddenly flapped awkwardly across the floor. Every man of them started. But it was only the owl they had heard in the distance, now flying past the window. The situation was not more cheerful when the ill-omened bird settled itself on the branch of the hickory-tree, and shrilled its nerve-thrilling cry and convulsively chuckled aloud.

The foreman rose, too. “Thar’s no use a-tryin’,” he said: “we can’t agree, an’ we hev got a right ter disagree. Le’s go down an’ tell the jedge, an’ git discharged. I ain’t easy shook, but this hyar whole case hev been powerful cur’ous, an’ I hev mighty nigh petered out.”

“Look hyar, oughtn’t we ter hold on a while longer? Fur Mink Lorey will hev ter stay in jail fur four months more, till he kin git tried at the next term,” suggested Jerry Price.

“I’m willin’,” said Ben Doaks reluctantly. He looked doubtfully over his shoulder as he spoke. “Eh?” he said, as he turned his head back again.

“Nobody never said nuthin’,” declared the foreman.

“I ’lowed I hearn somebody call my name.”

“I’ll be bound ye did!” cried Bylor. “But nobody called it ez we kin see—yit.”

He rushed to the door and summoned the officer. The court was notified, and the twelve men were conducted down the stairs, each conscious of the presence of the unseen thirteenth.

It was like a transition from the conditions of delirium to the serene atmosphere of right reason. The windows were all flaring with lights, as if the court-room were some factory that ran all night. The lawyers looked fagged and worn out; they had the air of working by momentum aggregated during the day rather[194] than by immediate exertion. It was a contrast to Averill’s leisurely procedure, and they regarded the innovation with exasperation and the judge with some personal animosity. He had his pen still in his hand; there was a moment’s silent waiting while he finished the line he was writing. Mink had been brought out from jail. He sat feverishly impatient and bright-eyed.

Harshaw and the attorney-general turned expectant and interested faces toward the jury.

The judge laid down his pen and looked kindly at them. He viewed them as a bit of completed work. He had a great respect for completed work.

When they were asked if they had agreed upon their verdict, the foreman answered that they could not agree.

The prisoner’s countenance changed instantly. It had upon it an expression of blank amaze, then of sharp distress. Harshaw’s face fell. The attorney-general pricked up his ears. The judge looked grave, concerned.

“Do you desire any further instructions,—any point of difficulty explained?”

The foreman interpreted this formula as a general inquiry into the nature of the trouble. He began precipitately, the quaking men behind him feeling all the despair of being the members of a responsible corporate body of which he was the mouthpiece.

“Ye see, jedge, we-uns can’t but feel thar’s thirteen men on this jury.”

They felt the judge’s quick gray eye counting them. Perhaps at that moment they were all indifferent to the terrors of their spectral associate, so much more substantial a source of terror being presented to them.

The man who had read the Code went on: “Pete Rood—him ez died las’ night—war neither excused nor discharged, so thar’s thirteen men on this jury; an’ we hearn him talkin’ up-stairs along o’ the rest o’ the jurors, sometimes interruptin’ us, an’ we-uns can’t agree ’count o’ thar bein’ a harnt on the jury.”

Even he faltered before the look in the face of the[195] judge, whose decisions were thus frankly criticised. There was something terrible in the fury that his eyes expressed. He sat motionless, with an air of great calmness and dignity. His face, however, crimsoned to the roots of his hair. The veins in his forehead stood out swollen and blue. There was an intense silence for a moment. Then his voice, as always, singularly low and inexpressive, broke the pause.

“Mr. Sheriff,” he said, “conduct those thirteen—those twelve men to the county jail, and keep them there for contempt of court until ten o’clock to-morrow morning, permitting no communication with others.”

He directed that a fine of ten dollars should be entered against each, and forthwith adjourned the court.

This high-handed proceeding had no parallel in the annals of the circuit. Harshaw, swelling with rage, found knots of men eagerly discussing it, as he pushed his way out into the hall. Some one was advancing the opinion that a jury in jail was no longer a jury, but merely twelve culprits. Another found a hearty laugh in the reflection that they would not probably discover so many harnts in jail as in the jury-room. A third demanded of Harshaw, “Why didn’t he discharge the jury, and imprison them as men?”

“Too afraid of the S’preme Court,” Harshaw hissed between his teeth. “Wish he had! On appeal a premature discharge would operate as an acquittal of the prisoner.”

He regarded the action of the judge as an outrage, and he did not hesitate to express this opinion. He had expended much time and force upon his case, and looked for no compensation but the satisfaction of success. He had that excellent quality in a lawyer, the faculty of making his client’s cause his own. He felt the hardship of this extension of the prisoner’s jeopardy scarcely less deeply than Mink himself. A little remonstrance with the ignorant men, a little pocketing of personal and judicial pride, a few coaxing, explanatory words, might have sent them back refreshed and invigorated to their deliberations,[196] with a good hope of agreement. Now, there was no prophesying what effect these strong measures would have upon them. He believed that Gwinnan had transcended all the authority of his office. “By God,” he cried, “if he keeps on like he’s started he’ll get impeached some day! And if I could see my way to it, I swear I’d introduce the resolution in the House myself!”

He walked off, his head swimming a little. He had said this rash thing before a motley crowd, and at any time it might be repeated to Gwinnan, who was himself a politician in some sort, and a man of great force.

Imprisonment proved an efficacious method of exorcising the “harnt” upon the jury. Much of the sojourn in the county jail was expended in criminations and recriminations. Not one of the jurymen would admit any responsibility for their plight. Not one had entertained the slightest belief in their ghostly associate. The mere contact with that practical, prosaic mundane force, the law of the land, had so restored them that they were emboldened to roundly denounce the harnt. And the name of poor Peter Rood, which had been whispered with bated breath in the jury-room, came smartly enough from the tongue even of Bylor. In fact, he was the most persistent in disavowing susceptibility to spectral influence.

“I begged an’ begged ye ter shet up talkin’ ’bout sech,” he cried, which was indeed the truth. “An’ ye jes’ kep’ it up an’ kep’ it up, till ye skeered yerse’fs out’n yer boots, an’ then I couldn’t do nuthin’ with ye.”

They had all been locked temporarily into one room of the jail, while the sheriff and jailer consulted in regard to the accommodations for so unusual a number of prisoners. In their close quarters the jurymen leaned against the wall or walked the floor, jostling each other in the shadow, for the room was dark save for the moonbeams slanting through the bars of the window. The foreman hung about in the obscure places, freely addressed,—for they knew, without seeing, that he was there,—and required to bear the brunt of all the reproaches for the calamity. Once he plucked up spirit to retort.

“Ye war the very man ez yapped fur the dep’ty,” he[198] said to Bylor, who allowed himself to be drawn into argument.

“How’d I know ez you-uns war a-goin’ ter traipse down them steers an’ ’low ter the jedge ez you-uns knowed mo’ law ’n he do? Ye dad-burned aged idjit, ef ye warn’t older ’n me I’d lay ye out on this floor.”

“I felt jes’ like the tail of a dog in a fight,—could neither holp nor hender the critter ez toted me ahint him, but war jes’ ez apt ter git gnawed ez him,” said Jerry Price disconsolately.

“I looked ter see the jedge fetch him a pop ’side the head, myself,” said the new juryman, evidently unacquainted with judicial methods. He had regarded his capture to serve on the jury as a woful disaster, and could hardly bear up under this aggregation of misfortunes. “Ef I hed knowed what war comin’, I wouldn’t hev followed him down them steers.”

“Six spry young steers ’mongst my cattle,—I’ll never see ’em agin!” cried old man Beames from out the darkness, reminded anew of his journeying herds under the insufficient guidance of Bob. “I hev never done no wrong in my life. I hev tuk heed ter my feet ter walk in the right way. An’ hyar in my old age, through another man’s fault, the door of a jail hev been shet on me.”

His voice dropped. They were all feeling the poignant humiliation of the imprisonment. They were honest men, to whom it could scarcely have come but for this mischance. At every contortion of wounded pride they turned upon the unlucky foreman.

“I ’lowed I’d drap in my tracks,” cried Ben Doaks, “whenst he jes’ tuk the Code o’ Tennessee by the hawns an’ tail, an’ dragged it up afore the jedge.”

And Jerry Price was fain to sneer, too.

“Did the Code hev nuthin’ in it ’bout cuttin’ out the tongue of a foreman of a jury?” he demanded.

But the Code was an unabated fact still, and the nephew of the ex-justice alone could say what was in it. “Naw, sir!” he retorted, emboldened by the allusion to[199] his superior knowledge, “nor about jailin’ a jury, nuther. I don’t b’lieve the jedge hed the right ter jail the jury.”

“Waal,” drawled Jerry, satirically, “we-uns hed better make up our minds powerful quick how we air a-goin’ ter pay him back fur it.”

The foreman was saved the mortification of acknowledging the hopelessness of reprisal. A voice without sounded suddenly.

“I wanter see how many thar air,” said the jailer.

“On a jury? Shucks! ye’re funnin’. Twelve,” in the familiar tones of the sheriff.

“I jes’ wanter look at ’em agin.”

“Ye sha’n’t,” retorted the sheriff.

He did not reckon on the fact that although he, as sheriff, had the legal authority and control of the jail, the jailer was possessed of the material keys, and locked and unlocked the doors at will. He opened this one now, gingerly, and the men within felt the grin they could not see.

“Brung ’em hyar ’kase they couldn’t count,” he said, jocosely. “They air the fust boarders we hev hed fur sech ez that.”

The sheriff, who was holding a lamp in the hall, pulled the door to, still animated by his sense of duty, and the jury heard the lock click as the facile jailer turned the key.

“They ’lowed thar war a harnt in the jury-room,” said the officer.

Within all were silent, that they might hear.

“I ain’t s’prised none,” said the jailer; “plenty o’ harnts hyar. Men ez war hung, ye know,—liked our accommodations better’n them they got arterwards; that brings ’em back. Tim Jenkins war dragged right out’n that thar room whar the jury be now, when the lynchers kem an’ tuk him. Hed me tied down-steers, ye ’member.”

He went off gayly down the hall, jingling his keys. Presently his voice was heard in another mood, swearing at the judge and demanding, “What sorter man is this[200] hyar Gwinnan, ennyhow, ez you-uns hev got out thar on the bench? Send me twelve men ter eat an’ sleep, an’ the jail ez full ez it air! Does he think I keep a tavern? Thar ain’t room enough hyar fur twelve fleas!”

He compassed the problem somehow, for the jurymen, smarting with the indignity and hardship, were led forth the next morning, having slept as well as was possible considering the united grievances of the accommodations and the mortification, and eaten as their reduced appetites and the prison fare permitted.

They resumed their deliberations in the jury-room, and it argues much for their earnest desire to do right and their respect for their oath that they did not find a verdict at hap-hazard. They reported again and again that they could reach no decision. They were held over Sunday, and after nightfall on Monday they came into the court-room, and in guarded phrase and with some perturbation of manner announced once more that they could not agree as to the guilt or innocence of the prisoner.

In answer to the usual question, the foreman was eager to explain that they had experienced no difficulty other than a difference of opinion, and felt no want of further instructions. He forbore to offer criticisms upon judicial methods, and the men behind him, all acutely realizing the position of the dog’s tail, breathed more freely. The judge looked at them with a certain resentment in his eyes. He leaned back in his chair, gnawing the end of his mustache. Mink sat beside his lawyer, eager, intent, hardly appreciating at the moment the significance of the disagreement. Harshaw had turned aside with a pettish mutter to his yellow beard, for the final adjournment for the term impended, Gwinnan being compelled to leave on the train that night to hold court in a remote county in his own circuit.

How Gwinnan could infuse into his impassive mien and his soft, expressionless drawl so caustic a suggestion of displeasure is one of those mysteries of manner addressed to a subtle and receptive sense which can take[201] account of so fine and elusive a medium of communication. The jury, in receiving their discharge, felt like culprits until they were once more at large and in the outer air, when they swore at the judge with the heartiest unanimity,—on this point they could agree,—and promised themselves, taking note of his character as politician, that if ever they were vouchsafed the opportunity they would retaliate. Then among the loungers about the tavern they fell to asking the news with the hungry interest of travelers who have been long absent.

They experienced a certain surprise to find that their accountability as jurors had not ceased with their discharge. There was a manifest inclination on the part of public opinion, as embodied in the idlers about the hotel, to hold them individually responsible for the mischances of the trial. Perhaps the impression that they had been long absent was strengthened by the revolution which popular prejudice had accomplished in the interval. Its flexibility could hardly be better illustrated than by the fact that the prankish Mink had suddenly risen in its estimation to the dignity of a public martyr.

“He’s a tremenjious wild scamp, the Lord knows,” said one, “but folks ain’t jailed fur bein’ gamesome, an’ by rights ye oughter hev turned Mink out’n that jail this evenin’.”

“Yessir,” assented another. “Mink oughter be mighty nigh Hazel Valley by now, ef he had been gin a fair trial.”

That conclusive formula, “This is a free country, by the Lord!” was often insistently reiterated in the discussion, for the bewildered jury discovered that the persuasion of the prisoner’s innocence had never wavered after Alethea Sayles had sworn that she had seen Tad Simpkins since the disaster. The community at large had not been subjected to the morbid influences of seclusion, and mental stress, and the nervous shock which the jury had sustained upon the death of Peter Rood, and the necessity of persistent consideration of spiritual and spectral phenomena forced upon them by the attorney-general.

[202]

“You see, gentlemen,” said a young sprig of a lawyer, glad to air his information, “you went off on the wrong road. ’Twarn’t the business o’ the defense to account for Tad. ’Twas the prosecution’s business to prove that he was dead and that Mink killed him. And they didn’t do it; they just proved he was missing, for that girl swore she saw him afterward. They’ve got to prove the corpus delicti, gentlemen, in a case like this.”

The jurymen were laughed to scorn when they suggested their doubts of the genuineness of Tad’s appearance.

“Now didn’t the attorney-general stuff you as full of lies as an egg of meat!” cried the young lawyer, divided between admiration of the attorney-general’s resources and contempt for their credulity.

“Ye air the only folks in Cherokee County ez b’lieves sech,” said another by-stander. “Old man Griff an’ all his gran’chil’n lef town yestiddy evenin’ plumb sati’fied Tad’s alive, an’ goin’ ter hunt him up. An’ then I reckon the old man’ll furgit all about his repentance, an’ club an’ beat him same ez he always done.”

“Waal,” demanded the ex-foreman, who was disposed to maintain the difficulty of the question, “how could a idjit keer fur hisself all this time?”

“Tad never war sech a idjit; could run a mill, an’ plough, an’ pull fodder, an’ feed stock! I’ll be bound thar’s a mighty differ round old man Griff’s diggins now, sure. He ’peared a idjit mos’ly when he war beat over the head. Mos’ folks would look miser’ble then. He air lackin’, I know, but I reckon he kin work fur hisself ez well ez he done fur old man Griff. It’s a plumb shame ter jail Mink Lorey fur fower month more till he kin git another fool jury ter try him, an’ mebbe send him ter the Pen’tiary fur five year. I dunno what oughter be done ter sech a jury ez you-uns.”

It was probably well for the public peace that events of general interest had taken place during the seclusion of the jury which the by-standers found a certain gloomy satisfaction in detailing; their attention was thus readily[203] enough diverted from the disagreements of the jury-room to the circumstances of Peter Rood’s funeral,—who preached the sermon, and who were in attendance. They all sat, solemnly chewing, tilted back in their splint-bottomed chairs on the front gallery of the little hotel. The lights which came from the doors and windows of the building, slanting out in wide shafts, seemed to sever the gloom in equal sections. The figures of the men were dimly seen in the dusky intervals. The stars, in infinite hosts, were marshaled in the black sky, for the moon was late to-night. Only about the horizon were melancholy desert spaces. The summit line of the distant mountains was indistinguishable in the gloom. The landscape was all benighted. The presence of invisible trees close at hand was perceptible only to some fine sense of the differing degrees of density in the blackness. A horse trotted through the slant of light, falling into the road and showing the sleek roan of the steed and the impassive face under the drooping hatbrim of the rider,—then loomed an indeterminate centaur in the alternate glooms. The sounds of the town were shrill, then faint, with lapses of silence. One forlorn cricket was piping somewhere between the bricks of the pavement.

“’Pears ter me,” said Bylor, “toler’ble cur’ous ez they wagoned deceased”—he had adopted the word from the reports of the sermon—“way up yander ter Eskaqua Cove, ter be buried in the graveyard thar.”

“Waal,” explained a by-stander, “his mother ’lowed he’d feel mo’ lonesome down hyar ’n he would ’mongst the mountings,—an’ I reckon he would.”

“Ennybody ez air dead always looked lonesome ter me,” suggested Ben Doaks.

“I don’t b’lieve thar’s a man in the Newnited States, alive or dead, ez lonesome ez me!” cried the cattle-owner. “I wisht that thar durned moon would heft over the mountings. Ez soon ez she shows her aidge I’m a-goin’ ter light out arter my cattle an’ Bob.”

“’Pears ter me,” said Doaks, reflectively, “ez things[204] hev turned out mighty cur’ous, ez he war buried in the same graveyard whar Lethe Sayles seen Tad’s harnt.”

“I wouldn’t go by thar of a dark night fur nuthin’,” declared Bylor. “Mought see both of ’em.”

“I reckon,” said Ben Doaks, “ez Peter Rood knows all ’bout’n it now,—whether it war Tad’s harnt or no.”

Something at a distance sounded sharply and fell into silence.

“I reckon folks ez air dead hev got suthin’ mo’ ter tend ter’n studyin’ ’bout folks they knowed in this life,” said Bylor, nodding his head with grim conviction.

“Yes, sir-ee!” exclaimed the ex-foreman, as he chewed vigorously, and spat at the post which upheld the floor of the gallery above; he was an effective marksman. “They hev got a verdict in the courts of the t’other world on Peter Rood by now. They ain’t got no failin’ human jury thar,” he continued sanctimoniously. “I reckon he’s burnin’ in Torment before now.” He offered this suggestion with that singular satisfaction in the symmetry of the theory of fiery retribution characteristic of the rural religionist.

Ben Doaks stirred uneasily. “I dunno ’bout that,” he said, dubiously. “Rood war a perfessin’ member.” He himself laid great stress upon this unattained grace.

“I know that,” said the ex-foreman, “but ’tain’t done him no good. I hearn him ’low at camp ez he war a backslider, an’ ef the truth war knowed I reckon he war a black-hearted sinner.”

Once more that strange sound, half smothered by the distance, smote upon the air. Then the regular hoof-beat of a horseman riding by on the red clay road interposed and rattled against the stones, and echoed from the bridge below with hollow reverberations.

“What war that cur’ous noise?” demanded Ben Doaks.

“Sounded ter me like cattle a-bellerin’,” said old man Beames.

The attentive pause was illustrated by the red spark of each man’s pipe, dulling as it was held motionless for[205] a moment in the hand; then restored to the smoker’s lips, it glowed into subdued brilliancy, sometimes giving an elusive glimpse of the delicate and shadowy blue vapor curling from the bowl. They heard nothing but a vague murmur, dropping presently into silence.

“I b’lieve,” said Bylor, “ez Peter Rood hed suthin’ on his mind.”

“Me, too,” spoke up another man. “He sot next ter me, an’ he looked troubled an’ tried, somehows, an’ wunst in a while he sighed mightily. I dunno what ailed him.”

“I reckon he war sick,” suggested a by-stander.

“He didn’t ’pear ter be sick. He turned an’ looked at me plumb pleased ter death when that Lethe Sayles ’lowed Tad war alive. An’ then when the ’torney-gineral made it out ez ’twar jes’ Tad’s harnt he jumped for’ards, an’ pinted with his finger, an’ next thing I knowed the man war a harnt hisself.”

The sound in the distance had become continuous, louder. Once more it broke upon the conversation. “Boys,” said Jerry Price, in a tone of conviction, “suthin’ is a-goin’ on somewhar.”

The vocation for the rôle of spectator is strong in humanity. Each of the long, lank mountaineers started up with unusual willingness, under the impression that he was balked of some entertainment at which nature intended that he should be dead-headed. The distant murmur was once more lost in the sounds nearer at hand. A sudden resonant, brazen clangor challenged the dark stillness. It had a vibratory, swaying iteration, for it was the court-house bell, rung as an alarum to the law-abiding population. As the group started swiftly in the direction of the sound, a man came running at great speed down the pavement, almost overturning old Beames, and called loudly to the proprietor of the hotel, asking if Judge Gwinnan were within. They recognized the deputy sheriff as he rushed into the bar-room.

“The old man’s been hevin’ hell with Mink Lorey, down yander at the jail,” he explained in breathless[206] gasps. “He kerried on like a crazy idjit when we tuk him back,—fout like a wild-cat every foot o’ the way. An’ now thar’s a crowd at the jail a-batterin’ the doors, an’ breakin’ the winders, an’ swearin’ they’ll take Mink Lorey out.”

In pursuit of the promise of excitement their feet did not lag. They heard, as they set out, the deputy’s rasping voice behind them renewing his anxious demand for Judge Gwinnan; then it was lost in the ceaseless thud of their own feet, and the insistence of the bell filling the darkness with its deliberate alternations of tone, till the night rocked and swayed with the oscillating, remonstrant sound. Approaching the court-house, they could hear those fainter and continuous vibrations of the bell-metal, the turbulent but bated undertones, that set the air a-trembling and seemed some muttered affirmation, some reserve of clamors, that should presently break out, too, and utter wrath and measured menace. The darkness seemed unparalleled, since there was something to be done and at hazard. Only at long intervals in the blackness, windows of dwellings were opened, and here and there a venturesome female head was thrust out in baffled and hopeless curiosity. But most of the houses had closed blinds and barred doors, for the alarum of the court-house bell had told the inmates all that the prudent might care to learn. The streets of Shaftesville, grass-grown as they were, had known the tread of lynchers, and distrusted any lawless mission. It was so dark that men, meeting at intersections of the streets, ran blindly against each other, recoiling with oaths,—sometimes against trees and posts. A few provident souls carrying lanterns, and looking in the blackness like fleet fire-flies, were made aware when they encountered the rescuers, in pressing in among the crowd in the jail-yard,—the posse and the mob otherwise indistinguishable,—by having the lanterns struck out of their hands. The jail was silent; its very vicinity had a suggestion of glum resistance. Some consciousness of a darker and solid[207] mass in the air was the only cognizance that the senses could take of its propinquity, except, indeed, the sound of breaking glass. A rail had been dragged from a fence, and, in the hands of unseen parties, after the manner of a battering-ram, the glass in the lower panes was shattered. This was wanton destruction, for the bars withstood the assault. The working of some instrument at them, ever and anon, was an evasive bit of craft, for follow the sound as they might, the sheriff and his posse could never locate it. A light showing in an upper window was saluted by a volley of stones, and quickly disappeared. The missiles fell back in the dense, panting, nameless, viewless crowd, eliciting here and there a howl, succeeded by jeering laughter.

Once, as the glass crashed in a lower window, a child’s voice within whimpered suddenly; a soothing murmur, and the child was silent.

“Mis’ Perkins,” called out a voice from among the mob to the jailer’s wife, “make Jacob open the do’! Tell him we’ll string him up ef he don’t, when we git holt o’ him.”

There was intense silence in the closely jammed, indistinguishable crowd without, for who could say who was the posse or who the mob, helpless against each other?

A murmur of remonstrance within. An interval. A sharp insistence from the crowd, and a quavering response.

“I can’t, gentlemen!” cried a shrill feminine voice. “Jake’s sech a bull-headed fool, he won’t!”

The summit line of the distant mountains was becoming vaguely visible; the stars were not less bright, the black earth was as dark as ever, but the moon-rise was imminent.

There was suddenly a surging commotion in the crowd; it swayed hither and thither, and rushed violently upon the door. The point of attack being plain enough, there was some feeble resistance, offered presumably by the posse. A pistol was fired in the air—another—a[208] wild turmoil; all at once the door crashed and gave way; half the assailants were carried over its splintered ruins by the force of their own momentum. There were lights enough now springing up in every direction. Men with torches dashed through the halls, holding them aloft with streaming clouds of flame and smoke, as erratic as comets. It required only a moment, with the united exertions of half a dozen stalwart young fellows, to break the door of Mink’s cell; it offered no such opposition as the main entrance.

There was no cry of joy as they rushed in; no fraternal embrace for the liberators who had risked so much in the cause of natural justice.

The cell was empty. The bars at the window were firm as ever. The locked door was broken but a moment ago. And he was gone!

The word rang through the building. The infuriated crowd pervaded the cell in a moment, like some tumultuous flood. The jailer himself was not to be found. His wife and children had sought refuge elsewhere.

The doors were guarded against the sheriff, while a select party searched every room in the house. Some serious fright was occasioned to certain malefactors, who had reason to fear the people more than the law, and esteemed the jail in some sort as a haven, but there were many who appealed for liberation. One of these, a victim of the federal court, Big Brandy Owen by name, made so earnest an insistence that his case was considered. But he was no genuine moonshiner, it was argued; he was only a saloon-keeper who had fallen a victim to the liquor laws. “We dunno ye,” they prevaricated. “Ye ain’t labeled Brandy, ye see.” And so they locked his door upon him.

They did as much damage as they could, in default of accomplishing their object, and on retiring they dispersed without recognition among the peaceful citizens who had weakly striven, half-heartedly, to uphold the law.

The moon was up. The Great Smoky Mountains, in magnificent immensity, clasped the world in the gigantic[209] curve about the horizon east and south. The trees seemed veiled in some fine, elusive silver gauze, so gleaming a line of light came to the eye from their boughs. Frost sparkled upon the grass-fringed streets. The shadows were sharp and black. The stars—few now—faintly scintillated in empyreal distances. The town was so still, not even a dog barked. The rescuers experienced a luxury of bravado in the realization that it was for fear of them that it was fain to hold its breath and lie in darkness, save for the light of the moon. Perhaps it was as well, and spared further mischief, that they exulted in riding their horses at a gallop through the streets, breaking now and then into wild fantasies of yells, with a fantastic refrain of echoes.

The rioters after a time disappeared. A long interval, and perhaps a single equestrian figure would ride down the straggling street and whoop aloud, and turn in his saddle to listen for a comrade’s response, and then ride on.

Finally silence fell. The waning moon was high. The night was well-nigh spent. Sundry movements of shadows on window blinds, sundry dim yellow lights showing through them, despite the lustre of the moon, indicated that the inhabitants considered that the drama had been played, and were betaking themselves to bed. Alethea Sayles, crouching in the dormer window of the cottage where the witness fee had sufficed to lodge her, looking with dilated eyes over the little town enmeshed in the silver net of its frosted trees, strained her ears in the silence, and exclaimed in the anguish of suspense, “They mus’ hev tuk him out, Aunt Dely, or they wouldn’t hev been so gamesome.”

She knew little of town ways. Had the mob been successful, the frost itself could not vanish more silently.

Mrs. Purvine, her wise head pillowed, for the first time in her life, as she remarked, on “town folkses’ geese,” sleepily assented.

The moon looked down in Alethea’s upturned eyes. The pine that stood by the window tapped upon the pane.[210] She felt as if it were a friendly and familiar thing, here where there were so few trees; for the sight of houses—crowded, indeed, they seemed—overwhelmed her in some sort, and embarrassed her. It was all a-shimmer with the frost; even an empty bird’s-nest on a bough was a miracle of delicate interweaving of silver gleams. Her hair in its rich dishevelment fell in coils and tangles half-way to her waist. She clasped her hands over one knee. It was an interval of peace.

“Lethe!” said Mrs. Purvine, rousing herself. “Ain’t that gal kem ter bed yit!” The admonition was a subterfuge. She was about to impart information. “Lethe, ef ye b’lieve me, these hyar crazy muskrats o’ town folks hev got sun-bonnets ready-made in these hyar stores.”

The vicissitudes of the trial had been the veriest trifles to her. She had utilized the metropolitan sojourn. She had pervaded the stores, as women of her sort do elsewhere. Mighty little there was in these stores that Aunt Dely had not rummaged.

“Ye tole me that afore,” said the absorbed Alethea.

Mrs. Purvine chuckled aloud as she reviewed the fact. It afforded her an occult complacence, yet she laughed at it.

Presently she recurred to it.

“My cracky! Lethe,” she exclaimed, “who makes ’em?”

And with this problem in her mind, she fell asleep among the comforts of “town folkses’ geese.”

The fires of discontent smouldered throughout the next day. Although many of the country people had left town, there was more than the usual stir upon the streets. Idle knots of men strolling about or standing on the corners neglected their avocations in eager discussion of the events of the previous evening. There was very general reprehension of the action of the mob,—so general that it might suggest a wonder as to whence came its component elements, and an unpleasant feeling that perhaps a satirical ringleader might be advancing these rebukes, and watching with secret laughter their effect. Many rumors prevailed, some so fantastic as to balk the credulity that sought to accept them, and others probable enough to be a solution of Mink’s disappearance. Some maintained that he had been liberated by the mob. Others said that at the time of the onslaught he had been hidden in the cellar with the jailer and the jailer’s family; and this was again roundly denied, for the cellars were reported to have been thoroughly searched. It was said, too, that the prisoner had been gagged, bound securely, and boldly carried forth from the back door through the crowd in the intense darkness, and that he was now held in retreat at the sheriff’s house. However it might have been, that officer received about noonday two or three threatening letters signed, “The men that elected you.”

He had since been disposed to exonerate himself, and he bore a troubled, anxious face about the town, and talked in a loud, strained, remonstrant falsetto. It was through some words which he let fall, in the perturbation of the discovery that he was liable to be held to account[212] personally by this unknown and numerous enemy, that it became public he had applied to Judge Gwinnan, not in his judicial capacity, but for advice in this emergency, and that it was Gwinnan who had devised the ruse which had baffled the rescuers.

The curiosity as to Mink’s fate grew so pronounced as the day wore on that a party of young roughs went openly to the jail and interrogated the jailer. For that functionary had returned. He showed himself at the window of his stronghold jauntily enough. He had a jovial expression, a black mustache that turned cheerfully upward,—for he laughed often and usually laughed last,—quick brown eyes, and a bushy, unkempt head; he was unshaven and in his shirt-sleeves. He seemed to care not an atom for the illogical views of his fellow-citizens.

“I’m appinted by the sher’ff o’ Cherokee County ter keep folks in jail, an’ by Hokey, I’m a-goin’ ter do it.”

They begged him to let them in; they had come to see him sociably,—a-visitin’, they protested.

“Can’t git in hyar, ’thout ye steal a horse or kill yer gran’mother, one.” He shook his keys jocosely at them, and vanished.

At noon, when the train was due at the little station, the mystery was solved. The jailer was strolling up and down the platform, grave enough for once in his life, and with apparently no purpose. Asked if he were going to Glaston he replied, with an effort at his usual manner, “Not in these clothes, if the court knows itself, an’ it rather think it do!”

It was a day of doubtful moods, of sibilant gusts of wind and intervals of brooding stillness. There was a pervasive suggestion of moisture in the air, but as yet no rain. The odor of decaying leaves came from the woods on the other side of the road. The sunshine was uncertain. White clouds were silently astir in the upper regions of the atmosphere; among the distant blue ranges the intervenient valleys could be distinctly located by the mist rising from them, elusively showing, then veiling[213] the farther heights, and anon falling like some airy cataract over a mountain side, seeming to cleave it in twain, and simulating a gap, a pass, in the impenetrabilities of the massive clifty range. The little stream that flowed along on the other side of the rails reflected the vacillating sentiments of the sky: now a cloud driving faster than its current showed upon its lustrous olive-green surface among the reflections of the crimson sumach bushes that lined its banks; and now it glittered in a burst of sunshine and emulated the azure of the changing heavens. The little town lay at a considerable distance; whether it hoped to grow up to the depot, or desired the advantages of civilization without its close contact, one might speculate in vain. Its clustering roofs were quite distinct among the thinning red and yellow and brown leaves of the trees.

A number of loungers waited to watch the train pass; for it was only a short time since the road had been completed, and the engine was still a mechanical miracle in the estimation of many of the country people, who came sometimes great distances to see it. Harshaw was going down to attend the court at Glaston. He was much smarter than usual, although he wore on his yellow head a soft wide hat, which gave him a certain highwayman-like aspect. A gay necktie of blue shot silk showed beneath his yellow beard; his stiffly starched cuffs, already much crumpled, protruded beneath his coat-sleeves.

“What are you about, my friend? Going to jump the country?” he demanded of the deputy-sheriff, who was embarrassed, and replied evasively that he was waiting to see a man. Harshaw turned to greet Gwinnan, who was also going off, having adjourned the court a few moments too late the preceding evening and thereby failing to catch the night train. Harshaw accosted him with a full expression of his large, bluff, familiar manner. It was received with a certain coolness, which may have been Gwinnan’s normal social temperature, but Harshaw was keenly alert to descry significance, and[214] was disposed to refer it to the hasty threat at the court-house door. Gwinnan’s impassive inexpressiveness gave him no intimation whether or not it had been repeated, and as the judge stood looking about the little unpainted wooden depot, all its business easily to be comprised in the two rooms, Harshaw began to detail to him how much the road had cost, how it was hoped it would aid in developing the resources of the country, how it had already begun to conduct itself like a sure enough grown-up railroad, and had got into law. Suddenly the two shining parallel rails trembled with a metallic vibration. A distant roar growing ever nearer and louder impinged upon the air. A cloud of smoke appeared above the trees, and with a glitter of burnished metal, a turmoil of sound, a swift gliding rush, the overpowering imperious presence of the engine gladdened the sight of the simple country folks.

Gwinnan was silent as Harshaw talked, until suddenly that worthy broke off, “Hello! what’s going on here?”

Some distance up the red clay road from the direction of the town, a buggy was driven at a furious rate, with the evident intention of forestalling the departure of the train.

All the loungers saw it. The conductor saw it, and yet he cried out, “All aboard!” and sprang upon the platform as the train began to move. The by-standers understood the ruse the next moment. There were two men in the buggy: one was handcuffed; the other was the sheriff. The deputy and two guards dragged the prisoner across the platform and upon the slowly moving train, which forthwith rattled away around the curve at the greatest speed of which it was capable, leaving the suspected rescuers gazing blankly at it, and realizing that because of the insecurity of the county jail Mink was to be lodged in the metropolitan prison of Glaston.

It is said that nothing so expands the mental horizon as the experience of emotion. In this sense Mink was becoming a wise man. He knew despair not as a word, a theory, a sentiment, but in its baffled, futile finality.[215] He had conned all the fine vacillations of suspense. He had exhausted the delusions of hope.

Only the passion of rage had as yet unsated capacities. As he sat in the car, shackled, among his guards, he fixed his shining eyes, full of suppressed ferocity, on Gwinnan’s face, who was absorbed in a book and heedless of his fellow-travelers. The guards did not notice the prisoner’s gaze, and after a moment it was diverted for a time. For Mink had quick enough perceptions and no mean power of deduction. He divined that his guards and fellow-passengers were in much perturbation lest the train should be stopped. At every intersection of the country roads with the track there was a perceptible flurry amongst them, an anxious outlook to descry mounted and armed men.

He had himself no further expectation of deliverance.

“Nobody’s goin’ ter resk ten year in the Pen’tiary fur rescuin’ me in broad daylight whar they could be knowed. Ef the mob wanted ter hang me, though, they would,” he said, with the cynicism of the truth.

“Nobody wants ter hang you-uns, Mink, nor hurt ye no-ways. All ye need is a leetle patience ter wait fur another trial,” said the deputy.

“I ain’t got no mo’ patience,” said Mink drearily.

His fatigued faculties, that had almost sunk into stupor under the strain of excitement and suspense, roused themselves to take note of the surroundings. The motion of the train filled him with amaze. He held his breath to see the fantasies of the flying landscape without. The panting snorts and leaps of the engine, like some great living monster, the dull rolling of the wheels, the iterative alternating sound of the clanking machinery, each registered a new estimate of life upon his intent, expressive face. His eyes rested on the lamp fixtures shining in their places as if he beheld enchantment. The tawdry ornamentation, the paneling of light and dark woods with occasional glimmers of gilding, the red velvet of the seats, were to his unaccustomed eyes unparalleled magnificence. He asked no questions. He[216] accepted it all simply, without comment, without consciousness. His fine head, with its rich coloring of complexion and eyes and hair, looked as if it might have been painted upon the panel of maple on which it leaned, he sat so still. His hat lay on the seat beside him; he was well used now not to wear it. It may have been because he was innocent, it may have been because he felt no shame, but the handcuffs on his wrists seemed not more ignominious than a wild creature’s captivity.

He had been so docile, so unresisting all the morning, that the deputy, who had grown to like the young fellow in their constrained intercourse, and valued him far more than a duller and a better man, was disposed to treat him as gently as was consistent with duty. The guards were jolly and they joked with him; but he had little to say, and presently they talked to each other, and looked over their shoulders at the rest of the company, covertly entertaining themselves with such fragments of the conversation as the roaring and clangor of the train permitted to be audible. They noticed after a time that the surroundings had ceased to interest him, and that he was looking with lowering and surly ferocity at Judge Gwinnan, intent upon his book.

“Look-a-hyar,” said one of the guards, nudging Mink violently, “ye ’pear like some wild varmint. Ye look ez keen an’ wicked an’ mean ez a mink. Quit eyin’ Jedge Gwinnan like that, else I’ll blindfold ye,—sure’s ye born, I will.”

Mink’s dilated eyes rested upon the unconscious, half-averted face for a moment longer. Then they turned to the face of the deputy in front of him.

“That thar man,” he said between his set teeth, and for all his voice was low it was distinct, even in the rumbling and noise of the train, so charged it was with the emphasis of intention, the definiteness of a cherished revenge,—“d’ye know what he hev done ter me? He put Pete Rood on the jury, though he knowed Pete hated me, an’ why. He put the jury in jail, ’kase they war fools, an’ ’lowed they hed a harnt on the panel, an’[217] bein’ jailed conflusticated ’em so they couldn’t find a verdict. He knows an’ they know Tad’s alive, but I hev got ter bide in jail fower month longer an’ resk the Pen’tiary agin, account o’ a drownded boy ez hev run away. An’ when my friends wanted ter take me out’n jail,—God A’mighty! I didn’t know I hed sech friends,—he goes out’n his way ter tell the sher’ff how ter flustrate ’em. An’ I war gagged an’ ironed, an’ toted out’n the back door, an’ kep’ at the sher’ff’s house, an’ am tuk off on the train. ’Twarn’t his business. Ye know thar warn’t ez much ez that done whenst the lynchers kem fur Tim Jenkins,—not ter save the man’s life.”

“Waal, he hed ter be hung some time, ennyhow,” said the deputy indisputably.

“What did this hyar Jedge Gwinnan do all this hyar fur?” continued Mink.

“Waal, Mink, he war obleeged ter, by his office. Ye know I don’t hold no grudge ter ye, yit I’m ’bleeged ter iron ye an’ gyard ye. I couldn’t set no mo’ store by ye ef ye war my own blood relation,” said the deputy.

“Naw, sir! naw!” exclaimed Mink. “This hyar man have tuk a notion ter Lethe Sayles,—I seen it; an’ he ’lows I ain’t good enough fur her, an’ he be doin’ sech ez he kin agin me on account o’ her.”

The deputy sheriff broke into a horse-laugh. The others laughed, too, more moderately. “Ye air teched in the head, Mink,” one of them remarked.

“Mebbe so,” Mink responded quietly enough, but with a glancing gleam in his dark eyes. “But I’ll remember what he hev done ter me. An’ I’ll git even with him fur it. By the Lord, I’ll git even with him fur it. An’ ye shell see the day.”

He leaned back against the window, with his eyes bright, his lips curving, tossing his tangled hair with a quick, excited gesture, as if he saw his revenge an accomplished fact.

Somehow his look impressed the guards.

“Naw, ye won’t,” said one of them. “Ye won’t do nuthin’ like it. Ye air goin’ ter jail fower month, an’ arter[218] that ter the Pen’tiary five year, an’ time ye git out’n thar ye’ll be so powerful pleased ter be foot-loose ye’ll mind yer manners the rest o’ yer days, an’ ye will hev clean furgot Jedge Gwinnan.”

He evidently thought some harshness salutary. Mink made no reply, and they presently fell to talking together of their town affairs and gossip, excluding him from the conversation, in which, in truth, he desired to take no share.

In contrast with the steam-cars, the old ox-cart was a slow way of getting through the world, and had little of that magnificence which forced itself upon Mink’s jaded and preoccupied faculties. But as Alethea turned her face toward the mountains, it seemed the progress into Paradise, so happy was she in the belief that the rescuers had prevailed. For she, aunt Dely, and Jerry Price had left town early that morning, before doubts and contradictions were astir. The waning yellow moon still swung high in the sky, above the violet vapors of the level west. Long shadows were stalking athwart the fields and down the woodland ways, as if some mystic beings of the night were getting them home. A gust of wind came shivering along the road once and again,—an invisible, chilly presence, that audibly rustled its weird garments and convulsively caught its breath, and was gone. Above the Great Smoky Mountains the inexpressible splendors of the day-star glowed and burned. She walked behind the cart much of the time with Jerry, while aunt Dely sat, a shapeless mass, within it. A scent of tar issued from its clumsy wheels, heavy with the red clay mire of many a mile; a rasping creak exuded from its axles, in defiance of wagon-grease. The ox between his shafts had a grotesque burliness in the moonlight. The square, unpainted little vehicle was a quaint contrivance. Four of the dogs ran beneath it, in leash with their nimble shadows. And aunt Dely’s sun-bonneted head, nodding with occasional lapses into sleep, was faithfully reproduced in the antics of the silhouettes upon the ground that journeyed with them.

Now and again the Scolacutta River crossed their[220] way in wide, shining curves scintillating with the stars, and then Alethea would perch upon the tail-board, and Jerry would clamber into his place as driver, and the dogs would yelp and wheeze on the bank, reluctant to swim, and the ox would plunge in, sometimes with a muttered low of surprise to find the water so cold. Fording the stream was slow work; the wheels often scraped against great hidden bowlders, threatening dislocation and destruction to the running gear. The transit was attended with a coruscation of glittering showers of spray, and left a foaming track across the swift current. Sometimes it was a hard pull up the steep, rocky bank opposite. The old ox had a sober aspect, a resolute tread, and insistently nodding horns. His sturdy rustic demeanor might have suggested that he was glad to be homeward bound, and to turn his back upon the frivolities of civilization and fashion. Not so aunt Dely. It seemed for a time as if her enforced withdrawal from these things had impaired her temper. She woke up ever and anon with caustic remarks.

“I reckon now, Lethe Ann Sayles, ye be goin’ ter bide along o’ yer step-mother?”

“Ye know that’s my home. I hev ter, aunt Dely.”

The girl’s voice was clear, sweet, thrilling with gladness, like some suddenly awakened bird’s singing a stave before dawn.

“I b’lieve ye!” satirically. “Ennybody but you-uns would be ’shamed ter own up ez ye hev got no home. Old ez ye be, an’ ye ain’t married yit! How old be ye? Lemme see,”—with a tone intimating that she would give no quarter,—“nineteen year, five month, an’ fower days. It’s plumb scandalous,” she muttered, arranging her shawl about her. “Ye Bluff!” addressing the ox in a querulous crescendo, “ye goin’ ter jolt the life out’n me, a-tryin’ ter ape the gait o’ the minchin’ sinners ye seen in Shaftesville! Actially the steer hev got the shuffles! I tell ye, Sodom an’ G’morrah warn’t nowhar fur seethin’ sin ter Shaftesville. The devil be a-gatherin’ his harvest thar. His bin an’ barn air full. Them folks[221] will know some day ez store clothes ain’t no defense agin fire. They hev bartered thar salvation fur store clothes. But I do wisht,” she broke off suddenly, dropping her voice from her sanctimonious whine to her cheery drawl, “I hed one o’ them ready-made sun-bonnets. I hed traded off all my feathers an’ truck for store sugar an’ sech afore I seen ’em. I was so full o’ laff that I couldn’t keep my face straight whenst I viewed the contrivance.”

The darkness had fled; the moonlight had failed; the fine, chastened pallor of the interval—the moment’s pause before the dawn—showed the colorless sky, the massive dusky mountains, the stretches of woods below, almost leafless now, the gaunt, tawny fields here and there, the zigzag lines of the rail fences, the red clay road. There were gullies of such depth on either side that the ox, who received so little supervision that he appeared to have the double responsibility of drawing and driving the cart, demonstrated, in keeping out of pitfalls, ampler intellectual capacities than are usually credited to the bovine tribe. But indeed his gifts were recognized. “I ain’t s’prised none ef some day Bluff takes ter talkin’,” his mistress often averred, with her worldly pride in her possessions.

The wind freshened; the white frost gleamed; a pale flush, expanding into a suffusion of amber light, irradiated the sky; and the great red wintry sun rose slowly above the purple ranges.

They had barely passed through a gap of the mountains and entered Eskaqua Cove, when they saw riding along an intersecting road close to the bank of the river a girl in a yellow homespun dress, with a yellow bonnet on her head, and mounted on a great white mare. She had the slaie of a loom in her hand which she had borrowed of a neighbor, and which served to explain her early errand.

Alethea, in her joy, had forgotten Elvira Crosby’s sneers and gibes the night she had brought to the Hollow the raccoon which Mink had given her. All other[222] considerations were dwarfed by the rapturous idea that he was at liberty. Eager to tell the news, she sprang forward.

“Elviry!” she cried. The girl drew up her mare and turned about. Alethea ran down the road and caught the bridle. “Elviry,” she reiterated, “Reuben air out o’ jail! He’s free! He’s free!”

The news was not received as she expected. Elvira put back her bonnet from the soft rings of short hair that lay about her head. She fixed her dark eyes on Alethea in doubting surprise.

“Waal,” she demanded, as if herself sitting in judgment, “who killed Tad?”

“Tad be alive ez I be!” cried Alethea, harried by the reawakening of those questions which she had thought were forever set at rest.

“An’ did the jury say sech?” Elvira asked. It might have seemed that with the breach between her and Mink irreparable, she was not rejoiced to hear of his good fortune.

“The jury couldn’t ’gree,” said Alethea breathlessly. “The rescuers tuk him out.”

“Sech ez that be agin the law,” said Elvira staidly.

“I ain’t keerin’ fur the law!” cried Alethea. “He hev done no harm, an’ all the kentry knowed it. An’ ’twarn’t right ter keep him cooped in jail. So they tuk him out.”

She lifted her head and smiled. Ah, did she indeed look upon a wintry landscape with those eyes? So irradiated with the fine lights of joy, so soft, they were, it might seem they could reflect only endless summers. The gaunt, bleak mountains shivered in the niggardliness of the averted sun; the wind tossed her loose locks of golden hair from beneath her brown bonnet as if they were flouts to the paler beams.

Elvira looked down at her with the pitiless enmity of envy.

“Waal,” she said, “’twixt ye two ye hev done me a powerful mean turn. Mink kep’ a-tryin’ ter cut out Pete[223] Rood till I didn’t know my own mind. An’ then ye a-tellin’ them tales ’bout harnts till Pete drapped dead,—ye knowin’ he hed heart-disease! Yes, sir, he’s dead; buried right over yander in the graveyard o’ the church-house in the cove. An’ I reckon ye be sati’fied now,—ef ye kin be sati’fied.”

She looked away over the swift flow of the river, and began to fleck her shoe with the hickory switch she carried.

Alethea’s face fell. She still stood holding the mare’s rein, but aunt Dely’s voice had broken upon the silence. For Bluff had followed Alethea when she turned from the main road, and had refused to be guided by Mrs. Purvine’s acrid remonstrance. As to Jerry, he was stalking on ahead, unaware that the others were not close on his steps. Sawing upon the ropes on Bluff’s horns which served for reins, Mrs. Purvine succeeded in drawing him up when she reached the spot where the two girls stood. She suddenly joined in the conversation with an astute intention.

“Yes, sir, Mink’s out,” she said, confirming her niece’s statement. “An’ ye’ll hev ter do mighty little tollin’ ter git him back agin, Elviry,” she added beguilingly.

“I don’t want no jail-bird roun’ me,” said Elvira, with a toss of her head.

“Mebbe ye air right, child!” cried Mrs. Purvine. “That’s edzacly what I tole Lethe.” She nodded gayly, and her head-gear, swaying with the expressive gesture, could not have seemed more jaunty had it been a ready-made sun-bonnet from the store. “Ye mark my words, Lethe air goin’ ter marry a man she seen in Shaftesville.” Elated with this effort of imagination, she continued, inspirationally, “He ’lowed she war a plumb beauty, beat ennything he ever dreampt could hev kem out’n the mountings. He air a town man, an’ he be a fust-rate one.”

“Oh, aunt Dely!” faltered Alethea, amazed and almost speechless.

[224]

But aunt Dely, charmed with the image she had conjured up, had no mind to relinquish this mythical man, and added another touch of verisimilitude: “He’s well off, too. Lethe, she don’t keer nuthin’ ’bout riches, but bein’ ez I hev ’sociated so much with town folks, I sorter set store by worldly goods,—though not enough ter resk my soul’s salvation, nuther.”

Aunt Dely’s evident desire was to combine spiritual and material welfare, and in this she was not unlike more sophisticated religionists.

The opinionated Bluff being induced to turn around at last, Mrs. Purvine let fly a Parthian dart: “But ez ter you-uns, Elviry, I dunno whether ye hed better be lookin’ down on fust one boy, an’ then another. Ye’ll git lef’ hyar a lonesome single woman, the fust thing ye know,—the only one in the cove! But then, mebbe ye’d better jes’ bow yer mind ter the dispensation, fur arter all ye moughtn’t be able ter ketch Mink. The gals honey him up so ez he air toler’ble sp’iled; they ’low he air special good-lookin’, though I hev never been able ter see good looks in him sence he kem ter my house, one night, an’ bedeviled my front steps so ez they hev never been so stiddy sence.”

“Aunt Dely,” cried Alethea, when they were once more on their homeward way, “what ailed ye ter tell Elviry sech a pack o’”—Respect for her elders restrained her.

“I war prompted by my conscience!” replied the logical Mrs. Purvine, unexpectedly. “I can’t be at peace with my conscience ’thout doin’ all I kin ter purvent a spry, good-lookin’ gal like you-uns from marryin’ a wuthless critter sech ez Mink Lorey.” She made no secret of her designs. “He be good a plenty an’ ter spare fur that thar snake-eyed Elviry Crosby, but I want ye ter marry Jerry Price, an’ kem an’ live along o’ me.”

The immaterial suitor evolved by Mrs. Purvine’s conscience dwelt in Alethea’s mind with singular consistency and effect afterward. When she was once more in[225] Wild-Cat Hollow, and day after day passed,—short days they were, of early winter,—and Mink did not come, expectation was supplanted by alternations of hope and disappointment, and they in their turn by fear and despair. Was it possible, she asked herself, that he could have heard and credited this fantastic invention of Mrs. Purvine’s affection and pride; that Elvira had poisoned his mind; that he was jealous and angry; that for this he had held aloof? Then the recollection of their old differences came upon her. His sorrows had obliterated them in her contemplation. It did not follow, however, that they had brought her nearer to him. He had long ago fallen away from her. Why should she expect that he would return now? She remembered with a new interpretation his joyous relief the morning that she had told to him and his lawyer in the jail the story of her glimpse of Tad; although she had shared his gratulation, it was for his sake alone. She remembered his burning eyes fixed with fiery reproaches upon her face in the court-room, when the disclosure was elicited that it was in a graveyard she had seen the missing boy. After all, she had done nothing for him; her testimony had fostered doubt and roused superstition, and other and stronger friends had effected his release.

She became silent, sober-eyed, and absorbed, and went mechanically about the house. Her changed demeanor occasioned comment from Mrs. Jessup, who sat idle, with a frowzy head and an active snuff-brush, by the fireside instead of on the porch, as in the summer days. “When Lethe fust kem back from Shaftesville she ’peared sorter peart an’ livened up. Her brain war shuck up, somehow, by her travels. I ’lowed she war a-goin’ ter behave arter this like sure enough folks,—but shucks! she ’pears ter be feared ter open her mouth, else folks’ll know she hev got a tongue ’twixt her teeth.” For Alethea found it hard now to reply to the continued queries of Mrs. Sayles and Mrs. Jessup, who had relished her opportunity, and in the girl’s observation of village life were enjoying all the benefits of travel without impinging[226] upon their inertia or undertaking its fatigues. The elder woman sat smoking in the corner, her pink sun-bonnet overhanging her pallid, thin face, ever and anon producing a leaf of badly cured tobacco, and drying it upon the hearth-stone before serving her pipe. Now and then she chuckled silently and toothlessly at some detail of the gossip. It had hurt the girl to know how little they cared for the true object of the expedition. Mink Lorey was naught to them, and they did not affect a picturesque humanity which they did not feel.

“Waal, sir!” Mrs. Sayles would say, “I’ll be bound them town folks air talkin’ ’bout Dely Purvine yit. I jes’ kin view in the sperit how she went a-boguein’ roun’ that town, stare-gazin’ everything, like she war raised nowhar, an’ warn’t used ter nuthin’. Didn’t the folks laff powerful at yer aunt Dely?”

“I never seen nobody laffin’,” protested Alethea, loyally.

Jacob Jessup, sober enough, but surly, was wont also to sit in these days idle by the fire. The farm work, such as it was, had been done. The stock he fed when he liked. He chose to consider Alethea’s metropolitan trip as a bit of personal self-assertion, and sneered whenever it was mentioned, and sought to ignore it as far as he might. For his own part, he had never been to Shaftesville, and he grudged her the distinction. He would not recognize it; he treated the fact as if it were not, and thus he extinguished it. He seemed somehow, as he sprawled idly about, to take up much more room by the fire than the women, despite their skirts, and he was often engaged in altercations with the dogs, the children, and the pet cub as to the space they occupied. The bear had been reared in a bad school for his manners; he had grown intelligent and impudent and selfish in captivity among his human friends. He would stretch himself along the hearth in front of the family, absorbing all the heat, snarling, and showing his teeth sometimes, but steeling himself in his fur and his fat and his fortitude, and withstanding kicks and blows till his persecutor[227] was tired. Sometimes Jessup would catch him by the rolls of fat about his neck and drag him to the door, but the nimble beast would again be stretched upon the hearthstones before the man could reach his chair. Jessup did the brute no great hurt, for, lowering and ill-natured as the fellow was, he was kindly disposed toward animals, and this made the more marked a sort of spite which he seemed to entertain toward the raccoon which Mink had given Elvira, and which she had brought to Alethea. The grotesque creature was in some sort a domestic martyr. As it scuttled about the uneven puncheon floor, he would affect to stumble over it, swear at it, seize it by the tail, and fling it against the wall. But the coon’s griefs were readily healed. It would skulk away for a time, and then be seen eating stolen delicacies in its dainty fashion, washing the food between its two fore-paws in the drinking pail. Old man Sayles, silent, subdued, sat a sort of alien at his own fireside, sorting seeds, and bits of tobacco, buttons, herbs, tiny gourds, which went by the name of “lumber” with him, in a kind of trough beneath the window that served in lieu of sill. Now and then he passed his hand over his head and sighed. Perhaps he regretted his second matrimonial venture; for the domestic scene was one of frowzy confusion, very pronounced when crowded into one small room, instead of being shared with the porch, which the wind swept now and shook, and where the mists congregated in the evenings or the frosts convened. The Jessup children were shrill at play. The baby had got on its feet, and was walking into everything,—unwary pans and kettles and tubs of water. Tige’s overbearing disposition was very manifest in his capacity as fireside companion. And when the chimney smoked, and L’onidas preferred his complaints at Alethea’s side as she sat and carded wool, and the cub leaned his weight against her as he contemplated the fire with his head upon her knee, and her step-mother scolded, and Jacob Jessup fumed and contradicted, and the experimental baby brought down the churn with a[228] crash, while the cat lapped amidst the waste, Mrs. Jessup would shift her snuff-brush to the other corner of her pretty mouth, and demand, “Now ain’t Lethe a plumb fool ter live hyar along o’ sech cavortin’ ways up on the side o’ a mounting, a-waitin’ fur a pore wuthless scamp like Mink Lorey, when she could hev a house ter herself in Piomingo Cove, with no hendrance but Ben Doaks, a quiet respectable boy, ez I don’t look down on ’kase he ain’t got religion! I know some folks ez religion itself can’t holp.”

Sometimes, however,—it was at long intervals,—even Mrs. Jessup would be summoned to rouse herself from the heavy sluggishness that made all exertion, beyond the necessary routine, positive pain. The code of etiquette that prevails in the mountains, simple as it is, has yet its rigorous requirements; and when the death of a kinsman in Eskaqua Cove presently occurred, the graceless creature deplored it less than the supervening necessity of attending the obsequies. There was no snow, nor ice, nor rain, to urge as an excuse. The weather was singularly fine and dry. It was easier getting down the mountain now than in the summer. And so she was constrained to go.

The sunshine was still, languid; the air was calm, Wild-Cat Hollow wore its wintry aspect, although below in the cove one might have glimpses of red and yellow, as if the autumn yet lingered. Everywhere there was a wider outlook because of the denudation of the woods, and the landscape was the more gaunt, the more rugged. It was like a mind stripped of the illusions of youth; the stern facts are the plainer, and alas! more stern. The purplish-garnet hue of the myriads of bare boughs in the forests covering the mountain slopes contrasted with the indeterminate blue of the sky. There was a fibrous effect in their fine detail; even the great mass, seen at a distance, was like some delicate penciling. Singularly still it was, the air very dry; the dead leaves on the ground did not rustle; the corn-stalks, standing withered and yellow in the fields, did not stir.[229] The only motion was the slow shifting of the shadows as the day went on, and perhaps high, high even above the Great Smoky, a swift passing of wild geese flying southward, their cabalistic syllable Houk! houk! floating down, seeming in the silence strangely intoned and mysterious. At night a new moon looked through the rigid, naked trees. The feeble glimmer from the little log cabin was solitary. The stars themselves were hardly more aloof from the world. The narrow vista through the gap only attested how darkly indistinguishable was the cove, how annihilated in the blackness were the mountains.

No sound of cattle drifted down now from the bald; the herds were gone; sometimes in the midnight the howl of a wolf echoed and re-echoed in all the tortuous ways of the wilderness; then silence, that seemed to tremble with fear of the reiteration of the savage cry. Alethea was prone to be wakeful and sad and anxious, so perhaps it was well that she had much to occupy her thoughts during the day. The baby fretted for his mother. Mrs. Jessup was not a model mother, but she was the only one the baby had, and he was not recreant to filial sentiment. He exacted a vast number of petty attentions from Alethea which he had never before required. Tige and the cub resented the pampering she gave him; they were jealous and made their feeling known in many dumb manifestations: they kept themselves sadly in the way; now they were hungry and now they were thirsty, and they whined continually about her.

She hardly noticed at first that a thick haze had appeared over the cove, but as yet did not dim the sky. It climbed the mountain sides, and hung like a gauze veil about the cabin and the sheds. Suddenly she became aware of the pungent odor of smoke. She put the child away from her, as he clung to her skirts, and stepped out upon the porch. The dog and cub pressed close after her, fancying that they had scored one against the baby, who had sunk, squalling because of his desertion, upon the floor.

[230]

She looked about for a moment at the still white presence that had usurped the earth, the air, the sky.

“Somebody hev set out fire in the woods!” she cried.

“Hev ye jes’ fund that out?” drawled Jacob Jessup, as he sat on the porch. Her father and he were languidly discussing whether they should fire against it. It was far enough away as yet, they thought, and with the annual conflagrations in the woods they had become experts in judging of the distance and of the emergencies of fighting fire with fire.

She listened as they talked, thinking that Sam Marvin’s home, miles away, would presently be in danger, if they were right as to the location of the fire. The cruel flames would complete the desolation she had wrought. Her conscience winced always at the recollection of its bare, denuded plight. Some small reparation was suggested in the idea that she might save it; she might go thither now and fire the dead leaves on the slopes below. Above there was a desolate, barren stretch of rocks, covering many acres, which the flames could hardly overleap. There was no wind, but a slight stir was now in the air. Its current was down the mountain.

She set out, Tige and the coon with her: the wild thing ambling demurely along with all the decorum of cultivated manners; the domestic animal barking and leaping before her in mad ecstasy for the simple privilege of the excursion. The cub looked after them from the doorway, whined, and crept within to the fire.

As she went she was vividly reminded of the day when she had journeyed thither before, although the woods had then worn the rich guise of autumn, and they were now austere and bleak and silent, and shrouded in the white smoke. She even noted the lick-log at the forks of the road, where she had sat and trembled and debated within herself. She wondered if what she had said in the court-room would pursue the moonshiner in his hiding place. Would it harm him? Had she done right or wrong?

Still walking on up the steep slant to the moonshiner’s[231] house, seeing only a yard or two before her, she at last came upon the fence. She paused and leaned upon the rails, and looked about her. The corn-field comprised more acreage than is usual in mountain agriculture. The destination of the crop was not the limited legitimate market of the region. It was planted for use in the still. She experienced another pang when she realized that it too was a grievous loss; for Sam Marvin had been forced to leave the fruit of his industry when it stood immature. Now, early in December, the full crisp ears leaned heavily from the sere stalk. She wondered that the abandoned crop, a fine one, had not been plundered. Then she bethought herself how deep in the wilderness it stood secluded. All at once she heard a rustling among the corn. Her first thought was the bear. In amaze she discerned a wagon looming hard by in the smoke. Then the indistinct figures of a man, a woman, and a half-grown girl came slowly down the turn row. To judge from their gestures, they were gathering the corn.