Part 14

Two of the men--shaggy of beard and of hair, and shabbier far of garb than the others--gazed at the proceeding with the eyes of deep wonderment and reluctant acceptance, as if it were some formula of necromancy which revolted credulity. They were denizens of a deeply secluded cove near by, lured hither by the report of the processioning, and looking for the first time upon the simple paraphernalia of land-surveying,--the chain, the Jacob's staff, and the compass; even the surveyor and the chain-bearers were only the verification of wild rumors that had reached them. They were not unintelligent; they were only uninformed. The knowledge and experience of the commonplace process which the others possessed might hardly be considered an adequate set-off against such fresh and illimitable capacities of impressionability. Few people can so enjoy a day of sight-seeing as fell to the share of these denizens of "Painter Flats."

Kenniston lingered for a few minutes, still sweeping with the field-glass the rugged ravine where Wild Duck Falls gleamed white, swift, amidst the deep, dusky green shadows: disappearing beneath the approaching gray cloud as its filmy gauzes expanded and floated into the larger spaces of the ravine, then piercing its draperies with a keen, glimmering shaft of white light, and vanishing again as the cloud thickened and condensed in its passage through the narrowing limits of the gorge. He turned away at last, the glass still in his hand, following hard on the steps of the surveyor, marking all the successive stages of the proceedings with a keen, alert, inimical observation. He wore a grim, set face, and his manner expressed a sustained abeyance, watchfulness, and a dangerous readiness.

The landmarks were such as were easily common to any line. When the deed had called for four hundred and fifteen poles northwest to a white oak-tree, the chain-bearers had brought up, without a link amiss, at the gnarled foot of one of a cluster of such trees. A half-obliterated indentation upon it the surveyor accepted as the specific mark of identification, although others considered it an old "blaze" indicating an ancient trail, and Kenniston declared it merely a "cat-face." Again, the line, diverging, ran due north eight hundred poles to a stake in the middle of Panther Creek. The chain found the middle easily enough, though not the stake, which was, of course, in the nature of things, a temporary mark, and liable to be carried away in a freshet, or broken down by floating logs or other obstruction. The stream, however, kept an almost perfectly straight line--barring the slight sinuous meandering inherent to a natural channel which did not affect the general direction--for more than a mile through a grassy glade almost free of undergrowth, purling along under the shadow of the great trees and rocks. Thus, if the previous markings were correct, this of necessity depended upon them. The surveyor had a stub driven down, in place of the missing stake, in the middle of the stream, re-marking the line according to the law. Once more the chain-bearers, dripping like spaniels from their excursions into the water, began their series of genuflections and their ringing outcry, "Stick!" "Stuck!"

All had observed Kenniston curiously during the halt, and the doubt and discussion as to the missing mark, expectant of some wrathful demonstration. If he did not coincide with the surveyor's opinion, he made no sign. In one sense, his demeanor balked them of the amusement which they had ravenously looked for. He made no protest, which, reasonable or unreasonable, they would have relished. His attitude, his face, his words, were constrained to a stern neutrality and inexpressiveness. He seemed only grimly watchful, waiting. The change itself afforded food for speculation, an entertainment more subtle and of keener interest than his previous outbreaks, although less alluring to the maliciously mirthful spectator. It seemed, however, to disconcert the surveyor more than active interference and aggression. Submissiveness is so abnormal a trait in a man of Kenniston's type that its symptoms indicate a serious moral crisis. Now and again, the surveyor, pausing to mark the "out," appealed directly to him. To be sure, the remark was in relation to the weather, for the clouds were gathering overhead, a slate-tinted canopy, seeming close upon the summits of the tall trees, till a white lace-like film scudding across it in contrary currents of the wind served to show, by the force of comparison, the true distance of the higher vapors. Kenniston had only monosyllables for reply, and the man of the compass could but mop his brow, and listen anxiously to the distant rumblings of thunder, and wish this troublous piece of work well over, and take his bearings anew. When the call in the deed for a girdled and dead poplar-tree was found to have no correspondent mark on the face of the earth, being, as he observed, a mark bound to be obliterated in the course of time, since the tree was dead when the deed, which was of remote date, was written, Kenniston's silence had evidently an unnerving effect.

"Why, look here," the surveyor broke out in self-defense at length. "I ain't got no sort o' interest in the line except to run it according ter the calls an' the compass. I'll git my fees, whether or no. 'Tain't nuthin' ter me which gits the most lan', you or Cap'n Tems."

As Kenniston still continued silent, he looked appealingly at Cap'n Lucy, and, receiving no encouragement, set his teeth, addressed himself to his work, and communed thenceforward with naught more responsive than his Jacob's staff.

But what, alack, had befallen Cap'n Lucy? Did ever a gamecock, that had never so much as felt his adversary's gaff, drop his feathers so suddenly? He was all at once old, tired, anxious, troubled. He tugged along at the rear of the party, lagging and flagging as he had never done on certain forced marches that had seemed a miracle of endurance. For Cap'n Lucy's frame had been upborne by his spirit in those ordeals, and now that ethereal valiance had deserted him. For what mystery was this? The moving of the monument of boundary "known as the Big Hollow Boulder"--he thought of it thus for the first time without the sneer of inscrutable offense which the rotund phrasing had occasioned--had, instead of stripping him of his possessions, resulted in throwing much land, which he doubted not belonged to his neighbor, within his own lines. That Kenniston had himself moved the corner landmark or connived at the commission of this felony, if not otherwise preposterous, was thus rendered absolutely incredible. But who, then, could have moved it? When? How? For what unimaginable reason? How strange that he should have discovered the change! And what mad freak of fate was it that it should be he, he himself, who should profit by it, acquiring the legal title to hundreds of acres at Kenniston's expense? Cap'n Lucy was an honest man, and the thought made him gasp. Had it been possible, he would at that moment have flung all the Great Smoky Mountains at Kenniston's feet. No recantation was too bitter, no renunciation was too complete, rather than be suspected, with any show of reason, as he had suspected Kenniston. Not that he cared for the groundless suspicion, but for its justification. This consideration summoned his tardy policy. He must needs have time to think. Were he bluntly to declare the corner-stone to have been moved, it might seem to criminate himself; for albeit the line was running to his advantage here, who could say how its divergences might affect his possessions lower down on the mountain? "Windin' an' a-twistin' like the plumb old tarnation sarpient o' hell!" Cap'n Lucy vigorously described it in a mutter to his beard.

Moreover, even if the later results were also to his benefit, as it had been notoriously contrary to his wishes that the land should be processioned at all, it might seem that moving the boulder had been his scheme to thus thwart any definite establishment of the line of boundary,--and this was a felony.

Cap'n Lucy experienced a sudden affection of the spine which seemed to him abnormal, and, at the moment, possibly fatal, so curious, so undreamed of heretofore, were its symptoms. A cold chill trembled along its fibres; responsive cold drops bedewed his forehead. His hand had lost its normal temperature, and was cold to the touch. For the first time in all his life Cap'n Lucy's nerves were made acquainted with the shock of fear. He did not identify it; he could not recognize it. He was spared this acute mortification. He only felt strangely ill and undecided and tremulous, and he doubted his survival. He began to wonder if Kenniston suspected aught. He no longer questioned the genuineness of his enemy's demeanor earlier in the day, when each unexpected divergence of the line had seemed by turns to perturb and to anger him. Cap'n Lucy noted the cessation of the protestations, the grimly set jaw, the smouldering fire of the eye, the attitude of tense expectancy and waiting. He wondered if Kenniston were "laying for" him now as he had been "laying for" Kenniston. He thought of the intention deferred from "out" to "out" to loudly proclaim his discovery of the removal of the corner landmark, of his relish of his enemy's fancied security in outwitting him. He had only given Kenniston a little line, a little more, as it were, that he might hang himself with it, and now, forsooth, this noose was at his own service.

He felt a moderate and tempered gratulation that he had not been precipitate in the matter, that as yet no one knew of his discovery; but suddenly he remembered his ill-starred confidence to Luther. For the first time he marked his son's furtive, skulking, downcast manner.

"Like a sheep-killin' dog!" said Cap'n Lucy to himself, in a towering rage. "What ef he do know it's been moved: did I move it?"

He remembered, too, his reiterated allusions to the perambulatory boulder, and Kenniston's amazement, which then he had thought affectation, but which he now believed to be quite genuine. Were they the exciting cause, so to speak, of that grim air of abeyance and biding his time?

"The boulder can't be put back," said Cap'n Lucy to himself, suddenly on the defensive. "Nobody could make out whar it kem from fust, 'kase it never lef' a trace on the rock; an' a dozen horse couldn't haul it up sech a steep slope. It mus' hev been blowed down by dam-i-nite."

It was a fine illustration of a moral descent, impossible to be retraced; but Cap'n Lucy did not think of that. His mind was full of the complications of his position, the dangers of disclosure, and the impossibility to him of accepting the boundary line, thus taking possession of another man's land, even if the owner would compose himself to sleep upon his rights. Judging from Kenniston's looks, it was easily to be argued that he would prove very wide awake in this emergency.

But for the changing weather signs the old man's altered demeanor might have encountered other notice than Kenniston's keen watchfulness. Now and again the thunder pealed among the mountain tops, and the slate-colored cloud had spread until it overhung all the visible world, when they once more drew so near to the verge of the precipice as to have glimpses of the densely wooded cove and the circling mountains. The ranges were all sombre gray or deeply purple, save far away, where some rift in the clouds admitted a skein of sunbeams suspended in fibrous effect over a distant slope that was a weird yellowish-green in this scant illumination which had fallen to its share, rendered more marked by the dull estate of its dun-tinted and purple compeers. Nearer at hand, the shadows were deepening momently in the forest. Once or twice, when the sharp blades of the lightnings cleft them, the lifeless bronze aisles of the woods sprang into a transient glare of brilliant green that was hardly less dazzling, and again the thunder pealed.

Two or three of the mountaineers left the party, evidently with no mind to be drenched. A man with a hacking cough remained, animated by that indisposition to self-denial, that avidity of enjoyment, that determination to seize all which niggard life holds out, characteristic of a type of consumptive invalids. "'Tain't goin' ter rain," he declared buoyantly. It might seem that nothing less potent than powder and lead could wean from the sight of processioning the land the two denizens of Panther Flats. They patrolled every step that the surveyor took. Whenever he paused, they came up and stared, fascinated, and at close quarters, at the Jacob's staff. They counted the chains from "out" to "out." As one of them observed to the other, he "was just beginning to get the hang of the thing." He could keep under shelter at a more convenient season.

A sudden flash that seemed to pierce the very brain, so did it outdazzle the capacity of vision, a simultaneous deafening detonation, beneath which the mountains appeared to quake and to cry out with a terrible voice, while again and again the echoes repeated the thunderous menace, and then all the air was permeated by a swift electrical illumination, visibly transient, but so instantly succeeded by a similar effect that it seemed permanent,--in this weird glare the surveyor bent once more to take sight.

"Old man sticks ter his contrac' like a sick kitten ter a hot brick!" cried Rodolphus Ross to one of the chain-bearers.

But the chain-bearers had scant sympathy for the spectators, and visited upon the company in general their displeasure because of the reflections upon the "old man's" work, for which Kenniston alone was responsible.

"Whyn't ye wear yer muzzle, 'Dolphus?" the one addressed retorted gruffly.

Most of the party had now deserted the spectacle, in deference to a timely admonition as to the fate of the horses picketed on the "bald," and their peculiar susceptibility to the fear of lightning. When the progress of the surveying again brought its adherents to the verge of the mountain and an extended outlook over the valley, there remained only the two men from Panther Flats, Rodolphus Ross, Cap'n Lucy, the chain-bearers, the surveyor, Luther, and the owner of the tract at whose instance the processioning was made.

As they looked out over the gray valley, distinct under the sombre sky, as though only color, and not light, were withdrawn,--Cap'n Lucy's cabin, the inclosures, the grim black crags beyond, the smouldering mass of the ruins of the burnt building, even the shanties of the workmen in the gorge at the foot of the cliffs, all perfectly distinguishable in their varied interpretation of gray and brown and blurring unnamed gradations of neutral tones, all overhung by the storm-cloud definitely and darkly purplish-black, with now and again, one knew not how, fleeting lurid green reflections,--Kenniston, brisk and dapper, lightly tapping his spurred boots with his riding-whip, smiling debonairly, but with a dangerous sarcastic gleam in his fiery eyes, stepped up to the surveyor. He carried his field-glass in one hand.

"Now, if you will come a few paces this way,--and you, colonel," in parenthesis to poor Cap'n Lucy,--"and use your telescope, you are obliged to see that if you run out the line seventeen hundred poles to the north, according to the deed, you will go beyond the site of the hotel. I seem to have built my house on the colonel's land. It was _your_ house that was destroyed, colonel. Let me beg you to accept my condolences,--ha, ha, ha!"

A flash brighter than all that had preceded it, and his satiric laughter was lost in the roll and the reverberation of the thunder. A sudden darkening overspread the landscape, like a visible thickening of the clouds; the form of a horse darted along the verge of the precipice, so swift, so gigantic, defined against the green suffusions of that purple-black storm-cloud, that it seemed like the materialization of the hero of some equine fable. A wild cry went up that the horses had broken loose, and were stampeding through the woods. A terrible wrenching, riving sound followed another flash, and they could see a stricken tree on the slope below, in the instant before the blinding descent of the torrents. The wind rose with a wild, screaming cry; the forests bent and writhed; no one of the party could discern his neighbor's face; and, despite the pluck of the surveyor, the processioning of the Kenniston tract remained unfinished.

XIII.

Cap'n Lucy enjoyed in his own family an immunity from interference, criticism, and filial insurgency that was truly patriarchal. His word was law; his every thought was wisdom; all his dealings embodied the fullest expression of justice. Until his unlucky disclosure to Luther of his discovery of the strange removal of the Big Hollow Boulder, and the interpretation he placed upon it, imputing to Kenniston a crime of such importance, involving consequences so grave, his son had never entertained a moment's doubt of the sufficiency of his prudence, the absolute infallibility of his judgment, the integrity of all his prejudices, notwithstanding his arbitrary temper, his high-handed methods, and his frequent precipitancy. Such remonstrance as ever was ventured upon usually emanated from Adelicia, in the interest of her pacific proclivities; or to sue uncle Lucy's clemency for some object of his most righteous displeasure; or to prevail upon him to blindly consider some untoward chance a blessing in disguise. Now and then, too, she indulged in some solicitude lest the affluence of his courage should lead him into danger. But to his own children "dad" had always seemed more than capable of coping with all the forces of nature, animate and inanimate; and as the day of the processioning of the land wore on, Julia listened, with her silent smile of sarcastic comment, to Adelicia's monologue of argument of alternate fears and reassurance for uncle Lucy's sake. First, lest Mr. Kenniston succeed in unjustly wresting some of his land from him. "But," she declared buoyantly, "the surveyor won't let him!" Then, lest a personal collision ensue, to her bellicose relative's injury. "But uncle Lucy ain't been often tackled; ennybody kin see he'd hev a mighty free hand in a fight." And again she was reduced to fear simply that things in general might fall out to the magnate's dissatisfaction. "But uncle Lucy's been mighty mad a heap o' times before, an' 'tain't set him back none," she argued blithely. And so the atmosphere within cleared as the sky without darkened, and the domestic industries went forward apace.

It was during one of the deceptive withdrawals of the lowering storm-cloud, revealing great expanses of blue sky, when the sunshine was a-flicker once more over the landscape, albeit somewhat wan and tremulous, and a wind had sprung up, faint and short of breath, and disposed to lulls and sighs, but still setting mists and clouds astir, that Julia went forth upon an errand some distance up the Cove. It had chanced that a hen, with the preposterous hopefulness of the species, had gone to "setting" in the orchard upon an unremunerative assemblage of fallen apples, in default of more appropriate material; for, in ignorance of the fowl's intention, Adelicia had fried the last eggs for breakfast. Her momentary dismay was dispelled by the recollection that Mrs. Larrabee had promised her a "settin' of special an percise tur-r-key aigs," and, equipping Julia with a basket, she sent her forth to claim this pledge.

But in lieu of the hospitable welcome and the eager fulfillment of the promise, the reminder of which Mrs. Larrabee would have regarded in the light of a courtesy and a favor, Julia encountered at the door of the queer little house Henrietta Timson, her snuffbrush, her small unlighted eyes, her narrow discontented face, and her little brief authority oppressively in evidence.

"Waal, I do declar'," she said, regarding Julia sourly, when the errand was made known. "I dunno what Sist' Lar'bee means,"--for Mrs. Timson was unfailing in the appellation of church-membership, and enjoyed no closer relation to Mrs. Larrabee. "She done gone off a-pleasurin' an' a-jauntin', an' lef' me hyar with this whole houseful ter 'tend ter, an' ter work fur, an' ter feed, an' ter mend, an' the neighbors ter pervide with aigs--an' tur-r-key aigs at that!"

Julia Tems's experience of life had been crude and scanty and monotonous. She had lived the successive uneventful years since her infancy at the little cabin down in the Cove in the humble domestic routine, without education of any sort, except perchance such as might be gleaned from the sermon of a stray circuit rider; without the opportunity of observation; with the simplest, most untutored, most limited association. It was to be doubted if she knew a score of people in the world. But this was her first encounter with discourtesy.

She flushed scarlet under the shade of her brown sunbonnet, not with anger, but with shame: she was ashamed for Mrs. Timson. She hardly felt the affront to herself at first; the flout at the proprieties in the abstract nullified for the moment all personal consideration. She was not conscious of a retrograde movement, for her instinct was to terminate the interview. She found herself murmuring, "It's jes' ez well,--jes' ez well," in an apologetic cadence which would have befitted Mrs. Timson's voice, and moving backward continuously, in her eager haste to be gone. Rather than prolong the ordeal for a moment she could with philosophy have beheld every hen that had ever owned the Tems sway in the grotesque catastrophe of patiently seeking to hatch apples.

But Henrietta Timson had hardly anticipated routing the invader so promptly. Noting Julia's eagerness to be gone, she perversely thwarted it by stepping briskly down out of the door, remembering to put her hand to her side, with a suffering look and an affected limp.

"I 'lowed ez I hed _hed_ tribulation, but I never seen none sech ez now. Sist' Lar'bee gone,--tuck one o' my chil'n with her!" She shook her head with a dolorous accusation that might have become her if "Sist' Lar'bee" had been a kidnapper, and if the hero of the rickets had gone for aught but to insure being properly fed and provided for. "Jasper Lar'bee's disappeared; an' old man Haight I do b'lieve hev gone deranged,--sets an' cusses the Lost Time mine all day; an' Jerushy's husband's drunk,--'pears like a rat-hole, ye can't fill him up; an'--hev ye seen Jasper Lar'bee down yer ways?"

"Not fur a long time," faltered Julia, still retreating a few steps at intervals down the rocky, ledgy dooryard.

"Waal, I'll tell him ez ye war hyar, an' 'lowed it 'peared like a long time sence ye seen him," said Mrs. Timson perversely, with the air of taking a message. "An'"--her small eyes narrowed--"ef I find enny tur-r-key aigs, I'll let ye know."

She looked with a sour smile after the girl's light figure, for Julia was now fairly routed.

"I'll let ye know, too," she muttered, "ez we ain't got none o' Mis' Lar'bee's slack-twisted ways hyar now,--givin' away a settin' of tur-r-key aigs, I say! Ef I find enny tur-r-key aigs, I'll send 'em down ter the store ter trade. I be mos' out o' snuff now."