Part 19

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 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 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. 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.

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 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.

XVII.

Alethea stood motionless for some little time, still leaning on the fence. A stalk of golden-rod, brown and withered, its glory departed, touched the rails now and then. Its slight, infrequent swaying was the only intimation of wind, except that the encompassing smoke, filling the vast spaces between heaven and earth, shifted occasionally, the dense convolutions silently merging into new combinations of ill-defined shapes,—colorless phantasmagoria, dimly looming. It might have seemed as if all the world had faded out, leaving only these blurred suggestions of unrecognized forms, like the vestiges of forgotten æons.

Even the harvesters did not maintain always a human aspect. Through the haze they were grotesque, distorted, gigantic; their hands vaguely visible, now lifted, now falling, in their deliberate but ceaseless work. They looked like vagrants from that eccentric populace of dreams, given over to abnormal, inconsequent gestures, to shifting similitudes, to preposterous conditions and facile metamorphoses of identity. Alethea felt a strange doubt, in recognizing Sam Marvin, whether it were indeed the moonshiner whom she saw.

An insistent silence possessed the air, broken only by the rustle of the crisp husks as the three dim figures pulled the corn. Suddenly there sounded a mad, scuttling rush, shrill canine yelps, and a series of nimble shadows vaulted over the fence. The coon ran up a tree, while the moonshiner’s dogs ranged themselves beneath it, with upturned heads askew, and gloating, baffled eyes, and moans of melancholy frustration, punctuated ever and anon with yaps of more poignant realization of the coon’s inaccessibility. Tige, irresolute, showed fight at first to the strangers; then he too sat down, and with quivering fore-paws and wagging tail wheezed and yelped at his fireside companion, as if he had no personal acquaintance with the raccoon, had held with him no relations of enforced amity, and could not wait one moment to crunch his bones.

The half-grown girl, desisting from her work, turned her head in the direction of the noise, and caught a glimpse of Alethea. She had an excited eye, high cheek-bones, and a thin, prominent nose. Her face looked peculiarly sharp inside her flabby sun-bonnet. She was at the “growing age,” and her frock was consequently short for the bare, sun-embrowned legs which protruded from it. Her bare feet were long and bony. She seemed to be growing lengthwise only, for her shoulders were narrow, her arms slim. She had a callow, half-fledged look, not unlike a Shanghai pullet. Her manner was abrupt and fluttered, and her voice high and shrill.

“Laws-a-massy!” she exclaimed, jumping precipitately backward on her long, attenuated legs, “yander’s Lethe Sayles!”

Both the man and the woman started violently,—not because of the matter of the disclosure, but of its manner, as was manifested in his rebuke.

“By Gosh, Sereny! ef ye ain’t mighty nigh skeered me ter death!” he cried angrily. “S’pose it air Lethe Sayles!” He bowed his body grotesquely amidst the smoke, as he emphasized his reproof. “Air she ennything so powerful oncommon ez ye hev ter jump ez sprightly ez ef ye hed stepped on a rattlesnake, an’ squeech out that-a-way? Howdy, Lethe,” he added, with an odd contrast of a calm voice and a smooth manner, as if Alethea were deaf to these amenities. “Thrivin’, I s’pose?”

Alethea faltered that she was well, and said no more. The imperative consciousness of all that she had done against him, of all for which she feared him, prevailed for a time. She knew that it would have been wiser to venture some commonplace civility, and then go. But that insistent conscience, strong within her, forbade this. She was all unprepared now for the disclosure of her testimony in the court-room, but the fact that she had ever intended to warn him made it seem as if this were due. She felt as if she had missed a certain fortification of her courage in that she had not had the privilege of trembling over the prospect, of familiarizing herself with it, of approaching it slowly, but none the less surely, by lessening degrees of trepidation. She wondered that he did not look at her with more of the indignation which she knew he must feel toward her. Bitterness, however, was acridly manifested in the woman’s manner, her averted head, her sedulous silence. She continued industriously pulling the corn, as if no word had been spoken, no creature stood by. The gallinaceous girl, silent too, returned to her work, but often looked askance at Alethea over her shoulder.

The man spoke presently. His face and figure were blurred now in the smoke. It was as if a shadow had purloined a sarcastic voice. Alethea’s nerves were unstrung by the surprise of the meeting, and the fact that she could see only this elusive suggestion of his presence harassed and discomposed her.

“Waal, Lethe, I dunno ez I be s’prised ter see ye. I hev seen ye sech a many times whenst I never expected ye,—startin’ up yander at Boke’s barn ez suddint ez ef ye hed yer headquarters in the yearth or the sky. An’ jes’ at this junctry, whenst we air a-tryin’ ter steal our _own_ corn away from hyar, ye kem a-boundin’ out’n the smoke, like ye hed no abidin’ place more ’n a witch or that thar Herder on Thunderhead, or sech harnts. I never see yer beat ez a meddler. Satan ain’t no busier with other folkses’ souls.”

She made no reply. The shifting vapor hid the tree where the bright-eyed coon hung fast by his claws, and the wheezing yapping of the foiled dogs besieging his stronghold seemed strangely loud and near since they were invisible.

The shucks rustled sibilantly. The ears of maize fell with a monotonous sound upon the heaps in the turn row.

“What did the revenuers do when they kem up the mounting?” Marvin asked suddenly. His tone was all alert now with curiosity. He could reserve his rebukes till his craving for gossip should be satisfied. Conversation, a fine art elsewhere, assumes the dignity of a privilege in these sparsely settled wilds, where its opportunities are scant.

“They ain’t never kem, ez I knows on,” said Alethea tremulously. They might come yet, and here he was still unwarned and at the mercy of accident. She had climbed the fence, springing lightly down on the other side, and had mechanically begun to assist them in their work,—the usual courtesy of a guest in the mountains who finds the host employed.

“Slip-shuck it, Lethe,” he remarked, calling her attention to the fact that the outer husks were left upon the stalks, and the ear, enveloped merely in its inner integuments, was thrown upon the heap. “I hates powerful ter be obleeged ter leave all this hyar good roughness;” he indicated the long rows of shucks upon the stalks. “My cattle would be mighty thankful ter hev sech fedded ter ’em. But the corn itself air about ez much ez I kin haul so fur”—

“_Don’t_ ye tell her wharabouts we-uns lives nowadays,” broke out the woman.

She was standing near Alethea, and she turned and looked at her. The girl’s fresh and beautiful countenance was only more delicate, more sensitive, with that half-affrighted perturbation on it, that piteous deprecation. The elder woman’s face was furrowed and yellow in contrast; her large, prominent eyes, of a light, hazel color, were full of tears, and had a look as if tears were no unfamiliar visitants. She wiped them away with the curtain of her pink sun-bonnet, and went on pulling the corn.

“I dunno whar Sam Marvin lives, myself,” the moonshiner declared, with reckless bravado. “I don’t go by that name no mo’.”

He straightened up and set his arms akimbo, as he laughed.

“Ye needn’t send no mo’ o’ yer spies, Lethe, arter me,” he declared. “My neighbors way over yander dunno no sech man ez Sam Marvin.”

Alethea’s lifted hand paused upon the shuck on the sere stalk. As she turned half round he saw her face in the smoke; her golden hair and fresh cheek, and the saffron kerchief tied beneath the round chin. He was not struck by her beauty; it always seemed a thing apart from her, the slightest incident of her personality, so much more forceful were the impressions of her character, so much more intimately her coercive opinions concerned those with whom she came in contact. But in her clear eyes he detected a surprise which he hardly understood at the moment. And he paused to look at her, wondering if it were only simulated.

Her heart throbbed with a dull and heavy pain. So angry were they because she would not promise to keep their secret. She shrank from their rage when she should tell that she had voluntarily disclosed it.

“Ye’ll be purtendin’ ez ’twar somebody else ez sent the spy ter make sure o’ the place whar we kep’ our still. I _know ye_!” He wagged his head in more active assertion that her machinations could not avail against his discernment.

“I never sent no spy,” faltered Alethea.

“Thar now! What did I tell ye!” he broke out, laughing disdainfully; the woman added a high, shrill, unmirthful refrain; even Serena the pullet, stepping about in the smoke on her long, yellow feet and in her abbreviated garments, cackled scornfully.

“Ye may thank yer blessed stars,” cried the woman scathingly,—she could hold silence no longer—“ez ye done nuthin’ agin we-uns. An’ the revenuers never raided our still, nor got nare drap o’ our liquor, nor tuk nuthin’ o’ ourn. Yer bones would be a-bleachin’ on the hillside ef they hed! Jes’ afore yer spy kem them white-livered men—Sam thar, an’ the t’other distillers—war a-talkin’ ’bout how they could make ye hesh up yer mouth, ez ye wouldn’t keep it shet yerse’f. They ’lowed it never seemed right handy ter them ter shoot a woman same ez a man, an’ I jes’ up-ed an’ tole ’em ez ye desarved no better ’n a bullet through that yaller head o’ yourn, an’ they could git a shot at ye enny evenin’ whenst ye war a-drivin’ up the cow. An’ I ’lowed ez whenst a woman went a-meddlin’ an’ informin’ like a man, let her take what a man hev ter take. Naw, sir! but they mus’ run away, ’count o’ a meddler like you-uns, an’ go live somwhar else! An’ I hed ter leave my home, an’ the three graves o’ my dead chill’n, yander on the rise, ez lonesome an’ ez meagre-lookin’ ez ef they war three pertater hills.”

She burst into a tumult of tears. The smoke wafted down, obscuring her,—there was commotion in its midst, for the wind was rising,—and her sobs sounded from out the invisibility that had effaced the earth as if some spirit of grief were abroad in it.

“Shet up, M’ria! Ye talk like ye hed no mo’ sense ’n a sheep. The chill’n ain’t in them graves,” Marvin said, with the consolations of a sturdy orthodoxy.

“Thar leetle bones is,” said the spirit of grief from the densities of the clouds.

And he could not gainsay this.

She wept on persistently for the little deserted bones. He could not feel as she did, yet he could understand her feeling. His under-jaw dropped a little; some stress of melancholy and solemnity was on his face, as if a saddened retrospection were evoked for him, too. But it was a recollection which his instinct was to throw off, rather than to cherish as a precious sorrow, jealously exacting for it the extremest tribute of sighs and tears.

“Lethe,” he said suddenly, with a cheerful note, “bein’ ez they never cotch us, did they pay ye ennything ez informer? I ain’t right sure how the law stands on that p’int. The law ’pears ter me ter be a mighty onstiddy, contrariwise contrivance, an’ the bes’ way ter find out ennything _sartain sure_ ’bout’n it air ter ’sperience it. Did they pay ye ennything?”

“I never informed the revenuers,” declared Alethea, once more.

He turned upon her a look of scorn.

“I knowed ye war a powerful fool, a-talkin’ ’bout ‘what’s right,’ an’ preachin’ same ez the rider, an’ faultin’ yer elders. But I never knowed ye war a liar an’ a scandalous hypocrite. The Bible say, ‘Woe ter ye, hypocrites!’ I wonder ye ain’t hearn that afore; either a-wrastlin’ with yer own soul, or meddlin’ with other folkses’ salvation.” It occurred to him that he preached very well himself, and he was minded, in the sudden vanity of the discovery, to reiterate, “Woe unto ye, hypocrite!”

“What makes ye ’low ez I gin the word ter the revenuers?” demanded Alethea.

“’Kase the spy kem up thar with yer name on his lips. ‘Lethe Sayles,’ he sez,—‘Lethe Sayles.’”

The girl stared wide-eyed and amazed at him.

Marvin’s wife noted the expression. “Oh, g’long, Lethe Sayles!” she cried impatiently; “ye air so deceivin’!”

“The spy!” faltered Alethea. “Who war the spy? I never tole nobody ’bout seein’ ye at Boke’s barn, nor whenst I war milkin’ the cow, nuther, till a few weeks ago. Ye hed lef’ hyar fur months afore then.”

The woman, listening, with an ear of corn in her motionless hand, turned and cast it upon the heap with a significant gesture of rejection, as if she thus discarded the claims of what she had heard. She sneered, and laughed derisively and shrill. The pullet, too, broke into mocking mirth, and then both fell to pulling corn with a sort of flouting energy.