Part 26
“Somebody besides Mink Lorey’ll try ter beat some sense inter it, ef he do,” said Bylor. The bitterness of the affront offered to the jury by their imprisonment had grown more poignant as time went on, for while the general excitement had gradually subsided, the fact remained. Not one of the unlucky panel, venturing from time to time into town with peltry, or game, or produce for sale, could escape the gibes and laughter of retrospective ridicule. The dignity of the interests involved had ceased to be a shield to them. Even the acrimony excited by their failure to agree had yielded to light sarcasm and jocose scorn,—not ill-natured, perhaps, but sufficiently nettling to proud and sensitive men whom accident had succeeded in immuring behind the bars. Everywhere the subject lurked in ambuscade,—in the stores, at the tavern, on the streets. The jailer was the most hospitable man alive. “When’ll ye kem an’ take pot-luck agin, gentlemen?” he would hail them in chance encounters. “My door air easy ter open—_from the outside_.” Or he would call out, with a roguish twinkle in his brown eyes, “How’s ’rithmetic up in the cove?” in allusion to the unlucky thirteen on the panel. It seemed to them that humiliation was their portion, and the festive and gala occasion known as “goin’ ter town,” which had hitherto been so replete with excitement and interest, and was in the nature of a tour and a recompense of toil, had resolved itself into a series of mortifications.
Harshaw’s law-office proved in some sort a refuge to the coterie, as it had always been more or less a resort. It had some of the functions of a club-house, and its frequenters felt hardly less at home than its proprietor. He was a man difficult to be taken amiss by his country friends. He had a sonorous, hearty greeting for whoever came. If he were at work, half a dozen sprawling fellows talking about his fireside were no hindrance to the flow of his thought, the scratch of his pen, or the chase of some elusive bit of legal game through the pages of a law-book. More often he bore a part in the conversation. The bare floor defied the red clay mire that came in with the heavy boots; the broken bricks in the hearth were not more unsightly in his eyes for the stains of tobacco juice. The high mantelpiece was ornamented by a box of tobacco, a can of kerosene, and an untrimmed lamp that asserted its presence in unctuous odors. There were some of the heavy books of his profession in a case, and many more lying in piles on the floor, near the walls, defenseless against the borrower. There was a window on one side of the office, and another opening upon the street. At this a face was often applied, with a pair of hands held above the eyes to shut out the light, that the passer-by might scan the interior, perchance to see if someone sought were within; perchance merely to regale an idle curiosity. The unique proceeding occasioned no comment and gave no offense. An open door showed an inner apartment, where consultations were held when too important for the ear of the indiscriminate groups in the main office, and where there was a lounge, on which he slept during court week, or when political business was too brisk to admit of his driving out to his home on his farm, some miles from the town.
“Well,” said Harshaw, tilting his chair back upon its hind legs until it creaked and quaked with the weight, and clasping both hands behind his yellow head, “I wonder you ain’t willing for Gwinnan to be a fool, considering what Mink got for beating his skull into a different shape.”
The county boasted no weekly newspaper, and without it the news was a laggard. Ben Doaks looked up with interest; Bylor paused expectant. Jerry Price, too, was present, for there was an unusual number from the coves in town—this was county court week, and the crowd assembled offered special facilities for trading stock and small commodities.
The hickory logs crackled on the hearth above the gleaming coals, and the white and yellow flames were broadly flaring; great beds of gray ashes lay beneath, for they were seldom removed; the murmurous monotone of the fire filled the pause.
“Yes, sir,” said Harshaw, taking his pipe from his lips and knocking the ashes from the bowl, “Mink got a sentence for twenty years in the penitentiary for assault with intent to commit murder.”
There was dead silence. The clay pipe that Jerry Price was smoking fell from his hands unheeded, and broke into fragments on the hearth. This knowledge affected the group more than the news of Mink’s death might have done. That at least was uncertain. The mind flags and fails to follow in the journey to the unknown the spirit that has quitted the familiar flesh,—the entity for which it has merely a name, an impression, an illusion of acquaintance. But this sordid, definite fact, this measure of desolation bounded by four walls, this hopeless rage, this mental revulsion from ignominy, all were of mortal experience and easily imagined.
“Yes, sir,” resumed Harshaw, his florid face grave but firm. He had the air of a man whose feelings have been schooled to calmness, but who protests against a fact. “I did what I could for Mink. I couldn’t defend him myself,—couldn’t leave the interests of my constituents in the House for the sake of an individual; but I put the case in Jerome Maupert’s hands. Maupert couldn’t help it. Mink was locking the door of the state prison and double-locking it every time he lifted his hand to strike Gwinnan. A _judge_, you know,”—he rolled his eyes significantly at the group,—“a judge is a mighty big man, and Mink is just a poor mountain boy.”
He stuck his pipe into his mouth again, and vigorously puffed it into a glow.
“The crowd in court cheered when the jury gave their verdict,” he said.
The group looked at each other with quick, offended glances; then lapsed into gazing at the fire and contemplating the circumstances.
“’Pears like ez nobody kin git even with Gwinnan right handy,” said Bylor. “Ef ’twarn’t fur makin’ bad wuss fur Mink, I’d wisht ez he hed killed him.”
“Shucks!” said Harshaw scornfully. “Gwinnan thinks he’s mighty popular with the people. He’s always doing the humbugging and bamboozling dodge. Just before I left Glaston the attorney-general—Kenbigh, you know—showed me a letter from Judge Gwinnan asking him to take no notice of Mink’s assault, as he wasn’t willing to prosecute.”
He brought his chair down with a thump on its forelegs, and looked about the circle, his roseate plump face full of bantering sarcasm.
“What war his notion fur that?” demanded Doaks, slowly possessing himself of the facts.
“To impose on the people—so good—so lenient”——
“Mighty lenient, sure!” interpolated Bylor. He rubbed his wrist mechanically; he never was quite sure that he had not been shackled.
“Letter dated just about two weeks after Mink was sentenced,” Harshaw sneered.
“Waal, who war the prosecutor, then?” demanded Jerry Price, at a loss.
“Why, of course they didn’t wait for a prosecutor. Mink was tried on a presentment by the grand jury; and as the criminal court came on right straight, Kenbigh just hurried him through. He’s a regular blood-hound, Kenbigh is.”
There was a silence for a few moments. Several of the sticks of wood had burned in two and fallen apart, and were sending up dull columns of smoke, some of which puffed into the room,—an old trick of the chimney’s, if the testimony of the blackened ceiling be admitted.
“As if,” cried Harshaw, suddenly uncrossing and crossing his legs, reversing their position, “Gwinnan, of all the men in the world, wouldn’t know and think of that! But Kenbigh seemed to take it _all_ in,—seemed to think ’twas Gwinnan’s modesty. He showed me the answer he wrote to the judge.” Harshaw cast up his eyes meditatively to the ceiling, as if seeking to recall the words. “He begged to express his admiration of Judge Gwinnan’s modesty in thinking that so serious an injury to one of the most brilliant ornaments of the State judiciary could fail to be summarily punished, or would need his personal interposition as prosecutor.”
They all listened with an absent air, as if the refusal to hear the compliments nullified them.
Harshaw gave a short, satirical laugh, showing his strong white teeth.
“I wisht ter Gawd that thar Gwinnan wanted ter go ter Congress, or sech, ez would fling him ’fore the vote o’ Cher’kee County,—it be in the same congressional deestric’ whar he hails from,—I’d show him,” said Bylor, shaking his head with the savagery of supposititious revenge, and in the full delusion of unbridled power characteristic of the free and independent American unit. “_I’d_ show him.”
“I reckon everybody don’t feel like we-uns do,” said Jerry Price, who, although he smarted under the unmerited disgrace he had experienced at the hands of Gwinnan, had submitted to it as a judicial necessity. Its rankling pangs were manifested only when, chancing to meet the foreman, Jerry would ask, in a manner charged with interest and an affectation of mystery, whether he had had his tongue measured yet, and how many joints it had been ascertained to have.
“They’re a little more disgruntled over in Kildeer than you are here,” Harshaw declared. “You’d allow the court-room was a distric’ school, if you could know the way he domineers over there. I always look to see the learned counsel put his finger in his mouth and whine when Gwinnan gets on the rampage.”
“Why, look-a-hyar, Mr. Harshaw,” demanded Bylor, “do you-uns call this a free country? Ain’t thar no way o’ stoppin’ him off? Goin’ ter hev five mo’ years o’ him on the bench?”
“He’ll be impeached some day, mark my words,” Harshaw declared; and then he fell to eying the smoking fire with slow, sullen, vengeful speculation, and for the rest of the day he was not such jovial company as his general repute for good-fellowship might promise.
In this interval of leisure which the recess afforded him, both as legislator and lawyer, Harshaw devoted himself to furthering his political prospects and strengthening his hold upon the predilections of the people. He was a man of many mental and moral phases: he sang loud and long at the revival at the cross-roads church; he attended rural merry-makings; he connived at having his own house “stormed” by a surprise party, the preparations being profuse and exhilarating, and the flavor of his hospitality was not impaired by his shaking hands with his guests, and violently promising to vote for them at the next election, each enlightened and independent citizen being himself not quite clear as to who was the prospective candidate: but the whole episode faded from recollection with the evening, mingling with the vain phantasmagoria of wild elation, and subsequent drowsiness, and retributive headache, and physical repentance. He went on a camp hunt with a party of roaring blades. The weather in the changeful Southern winter had turned singularly fine and dry; the air had all the crisp buoyancy of autumn and all the freshness of spring; fires drowsed on hearths; doors stood ajar; the sunshine was pervasive, warm, languorous, imbued with pensive vernal illusions. One might wonder to see the silent sere grass; were there indeed no whirring songs, no skittering points of light, hovering in mazy tangles, and telling the joy that existence might prove to the tiniest insect life? Birds? The trees were empty, but one must look to make sure: only the rising quail from the clumps of withered weeds; only the infrequent cry of the wild turkey down the bare, sunny vistas of the woods. The shadows of the deciduous trees were spare and linear, distinctly traced on the brown ground or upon the gray rock. In these fine curves and strokes of dendritic scripture a graceful sylvan idyl might perchance be deciphered by the curious. But the dense masses of laurel and the darkling company of pines cloaked themselves in their encompassing gloom, in these bright days as ever, and in their shade the dank smell and the depressing chill attested the winter. Vague shimmers hung about the mountains, blue in the distance, garnet and brown and black close at hand. The terrible heights and unexplored depths, the vast, sheer, precipitous descents, the titanic cliffs, the breadth, the muscle, the tremendous velocity of the torrents hurling down the gorges, gave august impressions of space unknown to the redundant richness of the summer woods. There were vistas of incomparable amplitude, as still, with the somnolent sunshine and the sparse shadow, as if they were some luminous effect on a canvas, painted in dark and light browns, graduated through the tints of the sere leaf in ascendant transition to the pale gold of the sunbeams; affording, despite the paucity of detail, an ecstasy to the sense of color.
It was a moment of preëminent consequence to Harshaw one day, when far up a stately avenue a deer appeared with the suddenness of an illusion, yet giving so complete a realization of its presence that the very fullness and splendor of its surprised eyes left their impression. Then, as in some jugglery of the senses, the animal with consummate grace and lightness, vanished, bounding through the laurel.
The wind was adverse and the hounds did not readily catch the scent. A few tentative, melancholy yelps of uncertainty arose; then a deep, musical, bell-like bay, another, and the pack opened with a great swelling, oscillating cry, that the mountains echoed as with a thousand voices, and in a vast compass of tone. The mounted men, hallooing to one another, dashed off in different directions, making through the woods towards various “stands” which the deer might be expected to pass. Now and then the horn sounded to recall the stragglers,—inexpressibly stirring tones, launched from crag to crag, from height to height; far-away ravines repeated the summons with a fine and delicate mystery of resonance, rendered elusive and idealized, till one might believe that never yet did such sound waves float from the prosaic cow-horn of the mountaineer.
Harshaw’s pursuits had not been those of a Nimrod, and although a good horseman and a fair marksman, he had found himself at a grievous disadvantage with others of the party who were mountaineers and crack shots. Stimulated by rivalry, they had achieved prodigies in instances of quickness of sight and unerring aim in unpropitious, almost impossible circumstances. They had already had some good sport, in which he had acquitted himself creditably enough; but his inexperience and ignorance of the topography of the country had given him some occasion to perceive that without more familiarity with the localities he could not fully enjoy a camp hunt. He was not surprised when, becoming involved in an almost impenetrable tangle of the laurel, he lost his companions, who got over the broken ground with an amazing swiftness, divination of direction, and quickness of resource. He drew rein upon emerging, and listened to the baying hounds: now loud, now faint and far away; now sharply yelping for the lost trail, and again lifting the exultant, bell-like cry of bated triumph. He despaired of rejoining his friends till the deer was lost or killed, and, remembering the pluck of the _personnel_ of the diversion, of the deer, the hounds, and the mountaineers, he reflected that this result might not soon ensue.
The echoes infinitely confused the sounds, giving no reliable suggestion of the direction which the hunt was taking. He pushed on for a time—a long time, his watch told him—in the complete silence of the wintry woods. He began to experience a dull growing apprehensiveness. He had no faint approximative conjecture concerning the locality; there was no path, not even a herders’ trail. He could himself establish no landmark by which he might be guided. There was a lavish repetitiousness in the scene: grand as it might be with scarred cliffs and sudden chasms and stupendous trees, it was presented anew with prolific magnificence forty yards further, and ride as he might he seemed to make no progress. As time passed, there recurred to his recollection instances—rare, it is true, but as uninviting to the imagination as infrequent—of men who have been lost in these fastnesses, trained woodsmen, herders, the familiars of the wild nature into whose penetralia even they had ventured too far. A handful of bleaching bones might tell the story, or perhaps the mysterious disappearance would be explained by much circling of birds of prey. Mr. Harshaw felt a sudden violent appreciation of the methods and interests and affluent attractiveness of the civilized world. He could not sufficiently condemn his folly in venturing out of its beaten track; in leaving, even for a space, the things he loved for the things he cared not for. The scene was inexpressibly repugnant to him; the woods closed him in so frowningly; his mind recoiled from the stern, Gorgon-like faces of the crags on every hand. The wintry sunlight was reddening; he could see only the zenith through the dense forest, and upon its limited section were interposed many interlacing outlines of the bare boughs; nevertheless, he was aware that the sky was clouding. The wind did not stir; the woods were appallingly still; there was no sound of horn or hounds; the chase had gone like a phantom hunt,—suddenly evoked, as suddenly disappearing.
XXIII.
As Harshaw paused to let his mare breathe, an abrupt sound smote his ear; he lifted his head to listen. It was the fitful clank of a cow-bell—and again; nearer than he had thought at first. He experienced infinite relief. The prosaic jangling had a welcome significance. It intimated the vicinity of some dwelling-place, for at this season the cattle are not at large in the withered pasturage of the mountain. He heard the bushes cracking at a little distance; he pressed his reluctant mare in that direction, through a briery tangle, over the trunks of fallen trees, pausing now and then to listen to the sound. Suddenly there was a great thwack; a thick human tongue stammered a curse. There was something strange and repellent and unnatural in the mouthing tones. The next moment he understood. The laurel gave way into the open aisles of the brown woods; a red suffusion of the sunset lingered among the dark boles on the high slopes, contending with, rather than illuminating, the lucent yellow tints on the dead leaves. A red cow shambled along at a clumsy run amidst the pervasive duskiness, that was rather felt than seen; and driving her with a long hickory sprout was a tall mountain boy, who turned his head at the sound of the hoofs behind him, showing under the bent and drooping brim of an old white hat a pale and flabby face, on which pitiless nature had fixed the stamp of denied intelligence. He gazed, with open mouth and starting eyes, at the horseman; then, regardless of Harshaw’s friendly hail, he dropped his stick, and with a strange, unearthly howl he fled along the woodland ways like a frightened deer. He plunged into the laurel, and was out of sight in a moment.
Harshaw began to drive the cow along, hoping she would take the familiar barn-yard way. He could hardly gauge his relief when, almost immediately, he saw before him a rail-fence; and yet he had an accession of irritation because of the folly, the futility, of the whole mishap. His consciousness was so schooled to the exactions of political life that he experienced a sort of grotesque shame as if the misadventure were already added to the capital of a political opponent expert in the art of ridicule.
No one was visible in the little clearing. Smoke, however, was curling briskly from the chimney of a log hut; there was a barn of poles hard by, evidently well filled. Harshaw hallooed, with no response save that his hearty voice roused the dogs; they came trooping from under the house and from out of it, sharply barking, although two or three, still drowsy, paused to stretch themselves to a surprising length and to yawn with a vast dental display. The cow went in by the way, doubtless, that she had come out, stepping over the fence, where a number of rails had been thrown off. Harshaw, thinking it as well to encounter the dogs within the inclosure as without, followed her example, the mare resisting slightly, and stumbling over those of the rails that lay upon the ground. He saw that his approach had occasioned a commotion within the house; there was a vague flutter of skirts elusively appearing and disappearing. Across the doorway, low down, were nailed wooden slats, doubtless to restrain the excursiveness of a small child, who suddenly thrust his head over them, and was instantly snatched back by some invisible hand.
Nevertheless, the inhabitants were presently induced to hold a parley, perhaps because of Harshaw’s manifest determination to force an entrance, despite the dogs that leaped and yelped about his stirrup irons, their vocal efforts more shrilly keyed as his whip descended among them; for although he held his revolver cocked, he was too shrewd a politician to present its muzzle to a mountaineer’s dog save in the direst emergency. A woman suddenly appeared at the door. She looked at him with so keen and doubtful a gaze, with a gravity so forbidding, a silence so significant, that, accustomed as he was to the hospitable greeting and smile of welcome that graces the threshold of every home of the region, however humble, he lost for the moment his ready assurance. When he told her of his plight, she received the statement with the chilling silence of incredulity. Nevertheless, upon his request for shelter for the night and a guide the next morning, she did not refuse, as he had feared, but told him in a spiritless way to “’light and hitch,” and that the boy would look after his horse. He strode up to the house, the dogs, suddenly all very friendly, at his heels, and stepped over the barricade that restrained the adventurous juvenile who was now hanging upon it, looking with eager interest at the world of the door-yard, which was a very wide world to him. He followed Harshaw to his seat by the fire, eying with great persistence his boots and his spurs. The latter exerted upon him special fascinations, and he presently stooped down and applied a small inquisitive finger to the rowel. The interior was not unlike the other homes of the region,—two high beds, a ladder ascending to a chamber in the roof, a rude table, a spinning-wheel, at which a gaunt, half-grown girl was working as industriously as if oblivious of the stranger’s presence. The woman sat with her arms folded, her eyes on the fire, pondering deeply. A young man came to the back door, glanced in, and turned away.
When the woman fixed her grave, wide, prominent eyes upon Harshaw, there was something in their expression so unnerving that his refuge seemed hardly more comfortable than the savage wilderness without. But he said bluffly to himself that he had not stumped Kildeer and Cherokee for nothing; he rallied his traditions as a politician. Surely, he reflected, he who could so beguile other men’s adherents to vote for him could win his way to a simple woman’s friendship, if he tried.
He looked at the child and smiled, and said that the boy was “mighty peart.” He dropped into the vernacular as a conscious concession to the habits of the “plain people.”
The woman’s fierce face was transfigured. “That’s a true word, stranger,” she said, beamingly. “An’ Philetus ain’t three year old yit, air he, Sereny?”
The girl in an abrupt, piping way confirmed the marvel, and Harshaw looked again at Philetus, who had no sort of hesitancy in seeking to take off the spurs and convert them to his own use.
His mother went on: “Philetus, though, ain’t nigh so pretty ez three others I hed ez died. Yes, sir, we-uns lived up higher than this, on a mounting over yander thar.”