Part 22

"Cornsider'ble fallin' weather," admitted Taft incidentally, and, seating himself in the chair indicated by Kenniston, he proceeded to take part in the conversation, his big booming voice rendering interruption impossible save as he listed.

"I hev viewed you-uns afore at old Cap'n Lucy Tems's house," he said to Kenniston, crossing his legs, and eying the steam casually as it rose from the damp boots under the persuasive heat of the stove. "Yes, sir, Taft is my name."

"I remember you very well," said Kenniston affably. "Won't you light your pipe?" He pushed a match holder and tobacco pouch across the table to him.

Taft, without comment, filled his pipe from an inexhaustible supply of tobacco that seemed always loose in his pocket; it was far stronger than that of his host, as the rank odor which rose on the air presently demonstrated. Rodolphus Ross had looked at him with a grin of hopeful anticipation, which shrunk at once when he recognized and adapted to his own needs the uses of the lucifer match.

"Yes, sir," Taft resumed, "I war toler'ble sorry ter hear 'bout'n yer hotel bein' burnt. I didn't view it at the time." He puffed the coals into a glow, and pulled away comfortably.

"Meanes' people on yearth, these hyar mountaineers!" cried Ross. "They jes' so durned ignorant they don't know sin from salvation, nor law from lying."

"Then they ain't 'sponsible," remarked Taft coolly. He pressed down the burning tobacco in the bowl with a callous forefinger indurated by long practice to crowding his pipe, and resumed: "I 'lowed it mought gin ye a start ef I war ter tell ye I hearn sev'ral men talkin' 'bout burnin' it,--long time ago, 'fore it war begun."

Kenniston was leaning back in his chair, much at his ease, noting with a sort of languid interest the intimations of force and ferocity in his visitor's face: the keen sagacity, rather as of the instinctive endowment of one of the lower orders of creation than an enlightened intelligence; the beaklike nose; the contradictory geniality of the full blue eye and broad floridity. He brought his tilted chair suddenly to the floor, leaned forward on the table, with a slight exclusive gesture toward Rodolphus Ross, which, although it escaped that worthy, caused Taft a sharp regret for his precipitancy.

The deputy sheriff was all a-clamor.

"Why, now, my big bull o' Bashan, ye hev got ter make that statement under oath with full partic'lars,--names, dates, and place!" He rose up on the opposite side of the monkey stove, with the lifter in his hand, with which he gesticulated imperatively.

Kenniston could hardly repress his impatience.

"Of course, Mr. Ross, of course,--all in due season," he said irritably.

"But abuse the authorities, in season an' out, an' 'low the devil will ketch the officer, in due course o' jestice, 'fore the officer'll ketch the malefactor. I ain't a-goin' ter lose you, Mr. Durham, ye bet high on that!" he added, turning to Taft.

"Mr. Taft expects to swear to the facts, of course," said Kenniston. He paused abruptly, meditating a remonstrance with the tumultuous brute; but Ross's very vulgarity, his clamorous brutality, the impossibility of reaching through his hardened exterior any sensitiveness, or pride, or sense of decorum, or whatever sanction may control the heart of a man who is a gentleman in jeans, gave him an advantage over a man of breeding which no culture could compass. Kenniston could not cope with him; his training had prepared him for no such encounter.

Only Taft's great sonorous voice could overbear the deputy's words, which sounded in his first utterance with the disjointed effect of Christmas firecrackers enlivening the booming of Christmas guns.

"I'll make oath ter statements ez ter date an' person, but not place,--I hev no call ter drag other folks inter sech. I dunno ez they fired the hotel; I only heard 'em threat it."

"But why?" demanded Kenniston eagerly.

"Deviltry,--deviltry, o' course," protested Ross. He had contrived to smirch his face in the careless handling of the poker of the monkey stove, which added a certain grotesque effect to his appearance, if one were in the mood to be amused by it.

Kenniston's mood was far from such influences.

"I must ask you to be quiet, sir," he said, with acridity.

"Ye must?" sneered Rodolphus Ross. "An' who war that ez 'lowed ef the local force war so 'torpid,'--_torpid_, ye hed it,--ye'd hev up private detectives from Bretonville ter settle the hash o' these kentry varmints?"

He threw up his eyebrows almost to the smirches obliquely laid across his forehead, laughed with a gleam of white teeth and an intent widening of the dark eyes, the whole facial expression gone in an instant.

"Waal, we ain't 'torpid' no longer. 'Wake up, snakes!' Now, old buck, answer my questions, an' tell me why they warn't willin' ter let Mr. Kenniston build his hotel in the Cove."

Kenniston folded his arms as he tilted himself back in his chair, and resigned the conversation to its unique leadership. The ceaseless motion of the falling lines of rain gave a spurious effect of motion to the great monastic forms of the mountains cowled with mists and robed in dreary hue, seeming continually in sad processional along the horizon. The ochreous pools near at hand had lost all capacity for reflection, although the dark green branches of the firs here and there bent above them, and the gray rain dripping from the fibrous fringes upon the unquiet tremulous surface took its color, and was seen no more. His returning glance met Taft's eye as he was about to speak, and somehow in that momentary contact a quiet understanding was established between them.

"The reason, I reckon, they didn't want Mr. Kenniston ter build his hotel hyar war 'kase 'twould bring too many strangers round."

"An' what's the objection to strangers?" asked Kenniston anxiously. It was not merely a retrospective interest that the question served. He asked for the future.

"Waal, I reckon they hed some moonshinin' or sech on hand," returned Taft coolly.

"Thar, now! what did I tell ye?" vociferated Rodolphus Ross, appealing to Kenniston. "An' I'll bet this hyar Larrabee war one of 'em."

Taft nodded, and Kenniston meditatively eyed the dull flashes from the stove, recollecting the strange conversation of Larrabee here, and his sudden significant betrayal of secret knowledge of the origin of the fire when it was mentioned.

"Strangers air powerful onhealthy fur the moonshinin' business," said Taft, as a sort of corollary of his former statement.

"Speak from experience?" sneered Rodolphus Ross.

"I do so," declared Taft unequivocally. Then turning to Kenniston, "I sarved a prison term fur illicit distillin' whenst I war a young man. I 'lowed, like all these other young muskrats, ez I could do what I pleased with my own corn an' apples. But whenst I traveled all through six or seben States goin' to the North, an' seen this big kentry an' sech, I knowed I warn't ekal ter runnin' agin its laws; an' whether thar's reason in 'em or no, I ondertook ter keep 'em arterward."

This unexpected confession disconcerted Ross in some sort. He silently eyed Taft, whose criminal experience seemed rather an error of an unripe judgment than the turpitude of law-breaking, and his candor in admitting it bluntly did not detract from the serious impression he had evidently made upon Kenniston. With Ross nothing was serious long. There was a sudden breaking up of the gloss of intentness in his round dark eyes, and as they shifted they fell upon the poker of the stove, and he once more thrust it through the bars and rattled it smartly.

"I oughter say," said Taft, meditatively sucking his pipestem, "that 'twar Espey ez fust 'lowed ter burn ye out. 'Burn his shanty!' he say."

A picture as definite as if it were the reality of pigments and canvas glowed suddenly before his contemplation,--the red walls of his den a-flicker in the flare of the furnace fire, the burnished gleam of the copper, the burly forms of the tubs of mash, familiars of the brown gloom, and the circle of faces, definite with those sharply marked shadows and striking high lights that a strong artificial glow elicits from the darkness. For his life he could not repress a long-drawn sigh, and then he shifted his position and cleared his throat raucously. But the picture, like many another masterpiece of the painter Memory, was not on general exhibition. For all its close detail and strong salience and brilliant reality of hue, it was invisible to Kenniston. As to the regretful sigh, fat men are often wont to sigh for very fatness, and it passed without significance.

After a meditative pause, "Did it ever occur to you that this Larrabee is a crank," asked Kenniston, "what you call, and very aptly, touched-in-the-head?"

"Who? Larrabee?" exclaimed Taft vehemently, all alert once more, his eyes on fire, his angry breath quick. "He's smart ez the very devil! Don't you let him pull the wool over yer eyes with the lunacy purtense."

Rodolphus Ross gave a final rasping clatter of the poker between the bars; then flung it, resounding, down upon the floor. He rose to his feet, stamping with first one and then the other to shake out his trousers from their persistent kneed effect, and, turning to Taft, he said, with an off-hand manner, "Now, look-a-hyar, Prize Beef, when did ye an' this sca'ce buzzard Lar'bee meet the last time?"

The "Prize Beef" apparently perceived no sort of offense in this form of address.

"I ain't viewed him in--I dunno when. I 'lowed he hed lef' the kentry till he war up at my store, a few nights ago. I warn't thar, but my leetle gal, she seen him."

The sly, predatory look was in Rodolphus Ross's eyes. He lifted his knee and smote it as if he had discovered a very apt coincidence.

Taft hesitated; then he said, "Ye'd better go up yander an' talk ter my leetle darter 'bout'n it." He hesitated once more. He feared that Copley might be inadequate to the situation, but, with his ever alert suspicions, he would doubtless fly at the very sight of a stranger; and as to Sis, he could rely upon Rodolphus Ross's address and manner to arouse the enmity of old Mrs. Jiniway's disciple in etiquette, and he knew of old that Sis was wont to give her adversary no quarter. A dozen of such as Rodolphus Ross would hardly be a handful for Sis. He would learn naught from her which he wanted to know. "Take my mare out thar, bein' ready saddled," he said hospitably. "I'll wait hyar till ye kem back."

Contrariety was the breath of the deputy's life. The congeniality of his vocation lay much in the opposition of his duties to the desires of those of his fellow-men with whom he was brought into official contact. He earnestly wished to negative Taft's suggestion, but the possibility of getting at closer quarters with Larrabee, of once more finding his trail, which had seemed to disappear from the face of the earth, was stronger for the moment. His enmity had not grown cold; it was the more vehement the more it was baffled. He lingered a moment; then, turning up his collar, and pulling down the broad rim of his hat all around to afford eaves to conduct the rain from his head, he plunged out into the steady torrents with a discordant yawp that made the little shanty ring.

Taft gazed thoughtfully after him as he vaulted into the saddle and rode off with a good deal of unnecessary heel-and-toe exercise in the region of the animal's ribs. The restive mare apparently resented the ungentle treatment, for the last that was seen of mount and rider was a profile rampant against the blank white expanse of the closing mists ere they were enveloped in the opaque multitudinous folds.

"They tell me that Gawd made man," said Taft at last. "'Pears ter me ez the Almighty slighted _that_ job, sure."

Kenniston was a man of painfully orderly instincts. He could not satisfactorily resume the conversation without gathering up the poker, the lifter, and other appurtenances of the stove which Ross had scattered about the little zinc square on which it sat, replacing them, rearranging the writing materials, newspapers, tobacco, and cigars on the table, and stirring the fire to brightness and a possibility of burning. As he threw himself into his chair he marked how the encroaching mists had invested the house. Not half a dozen paces of the path remained visible from the door; even upon the threshold the vapor hung in vague white wreaths, to vanish in the heat, and be replaced by white clouds floating in with a rolling motion,--never disappearing utterly, but venturing no further. On the roof and in the invisibilities of the white mists outside they could hear the chilly rain still steadily falling. The seeming isolation gave a certain confidential character to the conversation even before its developments warranted this.

"How did the percessionin' turn out?" Taft demanded.

"The rain stopped it," returned Kenniston, gloomily eying the thickening mists, while Taft critically but covertly observed him.

"Satisfied ez fur ez it went, I s'pose?" Taft flicked off the ashes from his pipe, and pressed down the remainder of its contents with that salamander of a forefinger.

"No," said Kenniston irritably. "It is a great surprise to me."

"Mr. Kenniston," said Taft, with that blunt directness which so commended him to the experienced man and so warped his judgment, "that thar Big Hollow Boulder, the beginning o' yer survey, hev been bodaciously moved."

Kenniston lifted his head suddenly, the excitement of the moment showing red in his face. A half-scornful incredulity was in his eyes, almost on his lips. He was about to speak; then paused doubtfully. The testimony of his recollections of Cap'n Lucy's significant insistence on the phrase "Big Hollow Boulder" and a thousand satiric allusions to the stationary functions of a monument of boundary overwhelmed him for the moment; for their incongruity with a culpable knowledge or agency in the fact was more than inexplicable; it was mysterious. There needed no dexterous jugglery with phrase and fact, however, to account for Luther's furtive, hang-dog manner and averted eye.

"It seems impossible! But I will not believe that old man Lucy had anything to do with moving it," Kenniston began. He suddenly caught his lip and bit it hard. It was evident from his flaunting remarks that the old mountaineer had not been similarly generous to his neighbor.

"A heap o' land," suggested the politic Taft. "But then I s'pose ter run yer eastern line out would show whar yer corner is?" He asked the question eagerly.

"Oh no. Calls for permanent natural objects usually control calls for distance. I suppose that rule would hold fast in this instance. My eastern line can only run to the boulder, which is presumably immovable."

Taft's countenance fell. He had thought that the further survey of the eastern boundary would serve to reëstablish the corner where the boulder should be; on the contrary, Cap'n Lucy was invested with many hundred acres for which he had given no equivalent in goods, or money, or even occupancy.

"I saw that something was mighty wrong with the line that the surveyor was running; and so did Cap'n Lucy, for that matter," said Kenniston, revolving the events of the processioning. "He looked dumfounded when he saw Wild Duck Falls in his boundary, and the hotel,--or rather the place where the hotel ought to be."

Taft caught a quick inspiration. "That's it,--them boys is a-moonshinin' fur true. They must hev moved the boulder ter crowd ye out of a buildin' site. An' then they burnt the hotel."

"Well, they've got me pretty badly crowded,--I'll say that for them."

Kenniston was looking out of the door, with that sullen sense of injury and hopelessness which oppresses a city man in the country in bad weather. The world had slipped away, somehow; he was left to the vague unresponsiveness of the inexpressive white mists; the rain would probably continue forever; the day was of a longevity known to no other that had ever dawned; without the prompting of his watch he could not have said if it were morning or afternoon. The roof leaked; the boots of his uncouth visitors tracked up the floor with red clay mud. A saddle in one corner gave out an obtrusive odor of leather, and the monkey stove, despite all this dankness, filled the room with that baking, dry, afflicting aroma common to all its kindred. His pugnacity was abated under these untoward conditions; his enthusiasms were overwhelmed beneath the depression of the rain. He thought wistfully of Bretonville, and of a cosy corner in the reading-room of a certain club, and of his office, and sighed as his mind reverted to the jeopardy of the present, the futility of the money and thought he had spent here, and the froward tangle which must needs be untwisted if these unpromising assets were to be utilized at all.

"Mus' hev been Lar'bee an' Espey a-moonshinin'." Taft once more sought to prompt that inimical sense of injury. "An' moved the boulder bodaciously,--the corner landmark."

"A felony," said Kenniston thoughtfully.

The patter of the rain came heavily through the silence, and in that bleak whiteness without they heard far away the wind rousing from its lair in furthest denies. The terrors of its voice did not shake the mists; only the sound touched a responsive chord of feeling, and the day was the drearier for the broken stillness.

"A felony," he said, and fell a-musing. He vaguely repudiated the idea, and then bethought himself, contradictorily, of the strange subterfuge with which he had been summoned to the door. For no harm, surely, he argued. There was a certain fascination in the thought of the new star that the mountaineer had brought to his contemplation. Not a bad face, this star-gazer's, and with a coloring which had always commended itself to his artistic sense. A good face and finely cut, he would have said but for that association of ideas, "a felony," that sudden conscious expression as of some guilty knowledge of the burning of the hotel. He could not believe it of his star-gazer, with his elated upward look! He remembered afterward that he thought then that the dankness of the weather, in relaxing all manner of tension, had slackened his rigid standards and his taut personal exactions. He was morally limp, doubtless, as well as physically; but he shrunk from the phrase in this application, and he considered that the most definite sensation of that most indefinite day was the relief he experienced when Rodolphus Ross came plunging out of the mists.

In high dudgeon the deputy was with the events and results of his mission, and he had wreaked his resentment on the unoffending animal which he rode. The mare's sides showed the marks of his stinging lash, and she had retaliated as well as she could by perversely refusing to pause where he wished to dismount to avoid the pools. A false start or two dragged him through water knee-deep, and as he came into the house his eyes were flashing with his various anger, and his lip curled scornfully.

"I tell ye," he said to Taft, with his fractious mirthfulness, "thar's money in that brat o' yourn, that Cornelia Taft! Buy her a muzzle an' a chain an' jine a show, an' she'll draw a crowd ez the Leetle She-B'ar o' Persimmon Cove! Bless my boots! I'm glad I'm all hyar. The leetle b'ar like ter tore me ter fringes!" he exclaimed metaphorically. He canted his head mockingly to one side as he threw himself into a chair beside the stove, seized the poker, and administered a rousing shake. "I tell you what," he said, eying Taft gloweringly, "I'd keep her nails an' teeth well pruned, my friend."

For Miss Cornelia Taft and Rodolphus Ross had failed signally to hit it off amicably. Copley had watched the interview through the open door of the store with varying emotions of anxiety: first, lest Ross was a "revenuer" or a spy; then, lest, as an officer of the state law, he had some charge against them; again, lest he cause Sis some apprehension; and lastly, lest the temerity of the doughty Sis bring woe and wreck upon the devoted household. Joe cowered in a corner of the fireplace, leaning against the great jamb, essaying only a few of the writhings and twistings of his anatomy which he affected, and sometimes sitting still altogether, so did the interest of the colloquy over-master the tendency of his muscles.

"Hello, youngsters!" was Ross's affable greeting as he tramped in when Joe opened the door. He flung himself into a chair before the fire, then turned and surveyed Cornelia, whose prim, pale, precise face looked more unfriendly and forbidding and negative than usual, as she sat, her hands demurely crossed on her lap, on the opposite side of the fireplace.

"My Lord! is this all? I 'lowed yer dad hed a heap bigger gal 'n you. Some similar ter a shrunk-up gran'mammy; ye look like ye mought hev lasted sence the flood. How's yer fambly, ma'am?"

The juvenile heart resents a scoff. Cornelia Taft's faculties were limited, but she gathered herself for revenge.

"Waal, then," he demanded, as she sat stiffly silent and insulted, "how's rats?"

"I couldn't jedge," she piped up suddenly. "We-uns hain't hed a terrier happen in hyar afore now fur a consider'ble time."

He was fairly silenced for the nonce. Elated by the execution of her sally, and not propitiated by his subsequent effort to ignore this passage at arms, she took full advantage of the opportunity to harass him which was presented when he announced himself an officer of the law, and demanded to know when and where she had seen Larrabee the last time. No perverse adult witness could have more dexterously baffled him with indefinite statements; and when he appealed from her to Joe, whose clumsy efforts to remember were hopelessly inadequate, her open glee was peculiarly tantalizing to Ross; for none can so resent a jest as a confirmed joker. Then it was that he made his fatal false step.

"Look-a-hyar, Small Female, leetle ez ye be, I'll arrest you-uns an' kerry ye off ter jail, ef ye don't spry up an' answer my question."

And then it was that Sis, bracing her small back, defied the majesty of the State of Tennessee as exemplified in Rodolphus Ross. So it came to open war. She was animated, too, by a partisan spirit for Larrabee. She remembered, with her infrequent approval, how he had conducted himself on the occasion in question; how quiet, how gentle, he was, how observant of the graces of her housekeeping, how commendatory of her dominion over Joe. Their conversation had since been often in her mind; she had rehearsed it, as she sat in the gloaming on her stool before the flickering fire, with the history of the Biblical worthies of which it was redundant. With no one else could she talk of these things. With quick adulation she had transformed Larrabee into a hero, and she longed to see him again. Her tongue, being feminine, could not be held altogether, but she told Ross naught which he desired to hear. She sounded the praises of Larrabee on many a key, and "disremembered" persistently whether it was Friday or Monday, or last week or week before, when she had seen him.

"Waal, what war he a-doin' of hyar, ennyhows?" queried Ross.

"Talkin'."

"'Bout what, gal?"

"'Bout no gal," Miss Taft responded, with a flash of the eye.

"Waal, then,"--even he was fain to concede, in the hope of finding some thoroughfare in thus beating about the bush,--"'bout what boy?"

She hesitated. She had not intended to cheapen the subject of her interest and enthusiasm by mention in this queer symposium. The talk with Larrabee had been in the nature of a confidence, as in the admiring canvass of mutual friends; she had a sense as if it were not the thing for general public and unworthy conversation. Nevertheless, her affinity for the subject constrained her. There was a light in her face, a placid softening of feature. Her flabby little colorless cheek mustered up a dimple.