Part 28

Quiet did not immediately ensue. After Harshaw had been ushered up the rickety ladder to the roof-room he heard voices below in low-toned conference. Occasionally he noted the peculiar chuckle of “hongry Jeb,” suppressed even beneath its usual undertone; for it was a sort of susurrus of laughter, never absolutely vocal,—a series of snorts and pantings. It was not jocular at best, and now conveyed sinister suggestions to Harshaw, as he listened to the vague sound of words he could not distinguish. He had not been conscious of an effort of close observation during the evening, and he was surprised to discover how definitely he could differentiate the murmurs, the mere methods of speech, of the various members of the household. As they discussed his fate, he knew who urged measures, who was overpowered in argument, who doubted. Now and then a word or two in the woman’s shrill voice broke from the huskiness of her whisper, for she was the most insistent of the group. He divined that her views were not mild, and he took hope from the intimations of opposition in the tones of the men as they gruffly counseled quiet. She it was, he felt sure, whom most he had to fear.

He had thrown himself, dressed as he was, on the sorry couch, which was made by placing two poles between the logs of the house, supported at the other end by a cross-bar laid in two crotched uprights on the floor. It was not a stable contrivance, nor, although it upheld a heavy feather bed, conducive to slumber, but Harshaw cared little for sleep.

The rain came through the leaks in the roof, now in an intermittent, sullen pattering, and now the drops falling in quick succession, tossed by the wind that whistled through the crevices, and piped a shrill refrain to the sonorous cadences trumpeted by the great chimney. Once, in a sudden flash of lightning, which was far distant and without thunder, he saw through gaps in the chinking, the white clouds pressing close to the house.

Again and again his courage would reassert itself, of its own sheer force, and he would experience a sort of affront that it had ever lapsed. He hardly knew how he could hereafter face that fact in his consciousness. Then, in arguing to reinstate his self-respect, he would review the dangers of his position,—and thus rouse anew the fears he had sought to still. He would wonder that he did not die of fright; that he made no effort to escape, to fire the house and force his way out in the confusion,—his fingers even fumbled the matches in his pocket; that he could lie still and listen to the sound of words impossible to distinguish; that he could turn, with the heavy gesture of one roused from sleep, when he heard a footfall on the rude stairs, and look yawning over his shoulder, and demand in a slumbrous voice, “Why in the hell do you make such a racket?”

A glimmer of light quivered on the brown rafters; it grew momently less flickering; it revealed the wretched apartment, the slanting floor, one or two pallets rolled up against the wall. And finally, as from a trap-door of a theatre, through the rude aperture in the floor, Jeb’s gaunt black head appeared among the shadows which the tallow dip, that he carried in his hand, could not dispel.

He came in, and placed the sputtering light on a strut that supported one of the rafters, and was converted to shelf-like utility. Marvin followed, sitting down on the foot of Harshaw’s bed. His face was more lowering than that of the other man; he leaned his hands ponderingly on his knees, his elbows turned outward, and bent his eyes on the floor in deep meditation.

There was a short silence.

“Hello?” said Harshaw interrogatively, raising himself on his elbow and boldly taking the initiative. “Anything the matter?”

Jeb sat down on a keg close to the chimney, and the perturbed hosts glanced at one another.

“Waal, stranger,” said Marvin, “ye hev gone an’ put us in a peck o’ troubles, ter kem interruptin’ us in this fur place, whar we hev been hunted an’ hounded ter.”

“Yes, sir,” remarked “hongry Jeb,” “same ez the varmint, ez be specially lef’ out’n salvation by the Bible.”

Marvin cast a glance over his shoulder at Harshaw. Then he continued, evidently striving to put the worst possible interpretation on the situation and to work himself into a rage: “We-uns air a-thinkin’ ez ye mought be a spy fur the revenuers.”

Harshaw let his head fall back on the pillow. His resonant, burly laugh rang out, jarring the rafters, and rousing in its hearty jocundity the reciprocity of a smile on “hongry Jeb’s” cadaverous face. Even Marvin, casting another hasty look over his shoulder, was mollified.

“Ye’d better be keerful how ye wake Philetus up, with his nap haffen out; ye’ll ’low ye air neighborin’ a catamount,” he admonished his guest.

“I tell you,” said Harshaw, clasping his hands behind his yellow head as he lay at length, “you fellows live up here in these lonesome woods till your brains are addled. Why on earth would I, single-handed, mind you, a lawyer, a member of the legislature, with a good big farm of my own and half a dozen houses in town,” (he had never before thought to brag of them,) “risk myself here, for the little reward I could get _if_—mighty big _if_, folks—if I could get away again?”

He lifted his eyes, with a bluff challenge of fair play.

“You know who _I_ am. You’ve seen me in Shaftesville. You know my farm down there in Kildeer County, on Owl Creek. Spy! Shucks! it makes me laugh. Do the quality often come spying for the revenuers in this neighborhood?”

Ten days ago he could not have believed that, however closely harried, his tongue would ever so forget its formula as thus to repudiate his alignment with the Plain People, and to claim to rank with “the quality.”

Under other circumstances the two mountaineers might have resented this arrogation of superiority. They were, however, by virtue of their law-breaking, a trifle more worldly-wise than their stolid compatriots of the hills. It had been in some sort an education; had familiarized them with the springs of commercial action, the relations of producer and consumer, the value of money or its equivalent; had endowed them with an appreciation of emergency and an ingenuity in expedients and makeshifts; had forced upon their contemplation the operations of the law; and their great personal risk had superinduced care, thoughtfulness, and the exercise of a certain rude logic.

As they unconsciously sought to realize Harshaw’s position in the world, resources, opportunity, their suspicion that he was a spy gradually waned.

There was a pause. The candle sputtered on the timber where it had been placed, the flame now rising apparently with an effort to touch a resinous knot in the wood just above it, and now crouching in a sudden gust from a crevice hard by. The rain came down with redoubled force for a few moments, then subsided again into its former steady, monotonous fall. Harshaw’s senses, preternaturally keen now, detected an almost imperceptible stir on the ladder that ascended to the loft. He knew as well as if he had seen the coterie that Marvin’s wife and the rest of the moonshiners were sitting on the rounds, listening and awaiting the announcement of his fate. Perhaps it was this which prompted his reply, when Marvin said pettishly,—

“It air all M’ria’s fault. Ef she hedn’t been so powerful quick ter git down the gun, ye’d hev never knowed nor axed whar ye war, nor s’picioned nuthin’.”

“Yes, I would, though,” Harshaw declared.

Marvin once more looked over his shoulder, and the lawyer quaked at the risk he ran.

“I saw Tad, you know, and I was figurin’ round, big as all-out-of-doors, how I was going to produce him in court, and she thought I meant right off. Then, the minute I saw _you_ I knew you,—and I had heard that girl say you were moonshining.”

“Ai-yi! Sam Marvin!” cried a shrill feminine voice from the primitive stairway, “that’s what ye got fur tryin’ ter put the blame on me!”

Sam Marvin turned his bushy head toward the aperture in the floor. It might seem that Mrs. Marvin had left him nothing to say, but the versatility of the conjugal retort is well-nigh limitless, and he could doubtless have defended himself with an admirable valor had not Jeb “the hongry” interfered.

“Shet up, Sam,” he said, looking positively famished in his lean anxiety. “We-uns hedn’t thunk o’ that. Mink Lorey hev got ter be tried agin.”

It was all that Harshaw could do to restrain some expression of despair at this infelicitous turn given to the consultation, at which he seemed to assist to devise his own doom. He found a certain relief in shifting his position, and still, with his hands clasped under his head, briskly participated in the conversation.

“Yes,” he assented in a debonair way which caused Marvin to look at him in lowering amazement, “I’m Mink’s lawyer, but I couldn’t testify for him. I couldn’t swear of my own knowledge that this Tad is the same boy, for I never saw him before.”

Both of the men lapsed into the attitude of laborious pondering. Now and then each looked at the other, as if to descry some intimation of the mutual effect.

Harshaw, with another bold effort to possess the situation, yawned widely and stretched his muscles.

“Oh—oh—oh—oh!” he exclaimed on a steadily descending scale. “Well, gentlemen,” his features once more at rest, his voice normal, “I should be glad to continue our conversation to-morrow”—he waved his hand bluffly—“or next week. I ain’t used to huntin’,—that is, huntin’ deer,—and I’m in and about knocked up. If you’ve got anything to say to me, say it now, or keep it till to-morrow.”

The two looked doubtfully at each other.

“Mr. Harshaw,” said Marvin, “we-uns air feared to let you-uns go.”

“Go to sleep?” asked Harshaw jocosely.

Jeb grinned, weakly, however, and Marvin continued:—

“Ter go ’way at all.”

“Well,” said Harshaw, easily, with another demonstration of somnolence, “I’ll stay just as long as you like; you’re a clever lot of fellows, and I’ll be contented enough, I’ll be bound. Your sitting up all night is the only fault I’ve got to find with you.”

They apparently submitted this answer from one to the other, and each silently canvassed it.

“Ye know too much,” said “hongry Jeb.”

“I’ll know more if I stay. I’ll find out whether you _are_ moonshining now, sure enough, and where the still is.”

“That’s jes’ what I hev been tellin’ ye!” cried Mrs. Marvin’s shrill voice from the ladder.

“Shet up, M’ria!” exclaimed Marvin, before “hongry Jeb” could interpose his pacifying “Shet up, Sam.”

“Waal,” resumed Marvin, in angry perturbation, “it’s mighty ill-convenient, yer nosin’ us out this way, up hyar, an’ many a man fixed like me an’ Jeb would fling ye off’n a bluff, ez ef ye hed fell thar, an’ turn yer mare loose.”

Once more Harshaw’s rich, round laughter jarred the room.

“I’m in earnest,” said Marvin, sternly. “That’s what most men would do.”

“Oh no, they wouldn’t,” said Harshaw, cavalierly.

“Why wouldn’t they?” demanded Marvin, his curiosity aroused by this strange indifference.

“Because these fellows I was hunting with will be sure to find this place, and _they_ would know I wouldn’t go fall off a bluff of my own accord, after such a good supper as I had here, and such a good bed. They wouldn’t know I wasn’t allowed to sleep in it, though, on account of a long-jawed couple like you two.”

He looked the picture of unconcern,—as if he had not really credited their words.

“They couldn’t track ye hyar,” argued Jeb; “ground too dry in the evening fur yer critter’s huffs to make enny mark.”

“Bless your bones!” cried Harshaw, contemptuously, “I broke a path nigh a yard wide in the brush, and I blazed every oak-tree I met with my hunting-knife,—look and see how hacked it is,—and I cut my name on the first beech I came across. Think I was going to get lost in this wilderness without leaving any way for my friends to find me? They know pretty well where they left me. As soon as it’s light enough they’ll be on my track.”

He lied seldom, but with startling effect. The verisimilitude of his invention, which had flashed upon him at the last moment, carried conviction. The other two men looked at each other in consternation.

This they thought was the secret of his ease of mind. This was the reason that he was willing to abide with them as long as they listed. These mysterious friends, these lurking hunters, might materialize at any moment when day should fairly dawn. The moonshiners asked with eager curiosity the names of the party. Marvin knew none of them, for it was a new region to him, and his vocation restricted his social opportunities. He had sprung up from the bed, and stood holding his ragged beard with one hand, and gazing with perplexed eyes at the recumbent lawyer. The frightful deed that he and his confederates had contemplated, that had seemed their only safe recourse,—to fling the intruder over a precipice, and to leave his mare grazing near, as if in his search he had fallen,—had a predestined discovery through the craft of the man who had marked the devious trail of his footsteps to their door. The moonshiner trembled, as he stood so near this pitfall into which he had almost stumbled.

There had been a stir on the ladder; clumsy feet descended the rickety rungs. The movements below continued; there sounded the harsh scraping of a shovel on the rude stones of the hearth, and presently the newly kindled flames were crackling up the chimney; the flickering tallow dip was not so bright that the lines of light in the crevices of the flooring might not indicate how the room below was suddenly illumined. A smell of frying bacon presently pervaded the midnight.

“By Gosh!” cried Marvin, rousing himself from his brown study with a quick start, “air M’ria demented, ter set out a-cookin’ o’ breakfus’ in the middle o’ the night?”

He turned himself suddenly about, and started down the ladder. “Hongry Jeb,” looking after him with a keen anxiety, rose abruptly, took the candle, and, holding it above his lean, cadaverous face, vanished by slow degrees through the trap-door, feeling with his feet for each round of the ladder before he trusted his weight upon it. Harshaw lifted himself upon his elbow, watching the gradual disappearance. His face was pink once more; the flesh that had seemed ten minutes since to hang flabbily upon it was firm and full; his opaque blue eyes were bright; the last feeble, ineffective rays of the vanishing candle showed his strong white teeth between his parted red lips, and his triumphant red tongue thrust out derisively.

Then he fell back on his pillow and tried to sleep. He felt, however, the pressure of the excitement; his pulses, his nerves, could not so readily accord with his calm mental conclusions, his logical inference of safety. The tension upon his alert senses was unrelaxed. The stir below-stairs made its incisive impression now, when he hardly cared to hear, as before, when he had strained every faculty to listen. He knew that it was Mrs. Marvin who had first devised the solution of the difficulty; she had already set about its execution while she advocated the measure, and insisted and argued with the men, who were disposed to canvass alternatives, and doubt, and wait. Often her shrill voice broke from the bated undertone in which they sought to conduct the conference, or she whispered huskily, with vibrant distinctness, hardly less intelligible.

“Ye an’ Jeb take him,” she urged. “Let the t’others go an’ hide round ’bout the still. When the hunters git hyar they’ll find me an’ Mose an’ the chillen, an’ I’ll tell ’em my old man be gone with Mr. Harshaw, a-guidin’ him down the mounting. They’ll never know ez thar be enny moonshinin’ a-goin’ on hyar-abouts,—nuthin’ ter show fur it.”

She clashed her pans and pots and kettles, in the energy of her discourse, and Harshaw lost the muttered objection.

“Ef ye don’t,” she persisted, in her sibilant whisper,—“ef ye kill him, fling him off’n the bluff or sech,—they’ll find the body, sure!”

A chill ran through the listener as he bent his ear.

“The buzzards or the wolves will fust, an’ them men’ll track him ter our door, an’ track _ye_ ter the spot.”

The rain pelted on the roof; the flames roared up the chimney; the frying meat sputtered and sizzled, and the coffee dissipated a beguiling promissory odor. One of the men—the lawyer thought it was “hongry Jeb”—suggested in a dolorous whisper that they could depend in no degree on Harshaw’s promise of secrecy. No man regarded an enforced pledge as sacred.

“Them’s all _old_ offenses, ennyhows,” argued the woman. “But this hyar, what ye men air a-layin’ off ter do”—

“‘Ye _men_’!” sneered her husband. “_Ye_ war the bouncin’est one o’ the whole lay-out fur doin’ of it.”

“But, Lord A’mighty,” she protested, “who’d ever hev thunk o’ sech a smart thing ez markin’ his trail ter the very door? He mus’ be the devil. Smart enough, ennyways!”

She clashed her pots and pans once more, and moved about heavily across the floor.

“I ain’t misdoubtin’ but what he _air_ a big man whar he hails from, an’ they sets store by him, an’ they’d be mighty apt ter stir round powerful arter him ef he was los’. An’ this would be a new offense,—sure ter git fund out. An’ Lord knows, we-uns hev been runned mighty nigh ter the jumpin’-off place from the face o’ the yearth, an’ I want ter be let ter set down, an’ ketch my breath, an’ see Philetus grow an’ git hearty, an’ let me hev a chance ter die in peace.”

Once more Jeb’s rumbling voice rose along the stairway.

“Shet up, Jeb!” she cried. “Ye hev jes’ been a-settin’ thar all the night a-shakin’ yer head, an’ a-lowin’ ye wisht he hed done suthin’ mean ter ye, so ez in gittin’ rid o’ him yer feelins wouldn’t be hurt. Now yer feelins air safe, an’ ye ain’t got no mo’ thankfulness ’n that thar cross-eyed, mangy hound fur the loan o’ a pipe.”

The mystery of cerebration; the strange, unmeasured force which works in uncomprehended methods to unforeseen results; the subtle process now formulating, and now erasing, an idea, like the characters of a palimpsest, was never so potently present to Harshaw as in contemplating the inspiration, the lucky thought, that had given him back to life, to hope, to sheer identity. He took himself to task, knowing that the obvious, the natural, the simple suggestion had lain all the evening in his mind, waiting the effective moment. He reproached himself that he should have suffered the agony of fright which he had endured. “I might have known,” he argued within himself, in his bluff vanity, “that _I_’d come out all right.”

He fell asleep, presently, and when he was roused he rose with so genuine a reluctance that the last lurking doubt which Marvin and “hongry Jeb” had entertained vanished, as he went yawning down the ladder.

“I hate ter hev ter turn ye out’n my house ’fore day,” Marvin remarked, “but ye know I’m hunted like a b’ar, or suthin’ wild, an’ I can’t be expected ter show manners like folks. Me an’ Jeb air a-goin’ ter take ye pretty fur off, so ez ye kin never find yer way back, an’ by daylight ye’ll be set in yer road. I’m hopin’ yer friends won’t git hyar; ef they does, I don’t want ’em ter kem in, an’ ef they hain’t got no reason ter stop I reckon they’ll go on. I’m powerful sorry ye kem along.”

“Though ye be toler’ble good com’p’ny, an’ we-uns ain’t got nuthin’ agin you-uns,” remarked “hongry Jeb,” politely.

“’Kase,” continued Marvin, in a sing-song fashion, as he sat down at his table, on which the corn-dodgers and bacon smoked, “’kase we-uns air hunted an’ driv by the law,—ez ’lows we sha’n’t still our own corn ef we air a mind ter,—we hev been afeard ye’d tell ’bout’n we-uns an’ whar we air hid.”

“What for?” demanded Harshaw, with an incidental manner. He too was seated at the board; one elbow was on it, and he passed his hand over his eyes and yawned as he spoke. “So as to be dead sure to get beat like hell the next time I run for anything? An informer is mighty unpopular, no matter what he has got to tell. And make the biggest kind of hole in my law practice?”

“That’s a fac’,” said Jeb, impressed with the logic of this proposition.

“The favor of Cherokee and Kildeer counties is the breath of my political life, and you don’t catch me a-fooling with it by letting my jaw wag too slack,” continued Harshaw.

Philetus, the only member of the family that had gone to bed, slumbered peacefully in a small heap under the party-colored quilts. The dancing firelight revealed his yellow head, and again it was undistinguishable in the brown shadow. The pullet and Mose sat on a bench at one side of the fire, and the moonshiners tilted their chairs back on the hind legs, and watched the bright and leaping flames, which were particularly clear, the fire being rekindled upon a warm hearth and in a chimney already full of hot air. The occasional yawning of the group gave the only indication of the hour. The sharp-faced woman sat in her chair, with folded arms, and ever and anon gazing at her guest, who had so strangely commended himself. His clever ruse to insure being followed by his friends had induced infinite admiration of his acumen.

“I reckon ef ye wanted ter go ter Congress or sech, thar wouldn’t be nuthin’ ter hender,” she said slowly, contemplating him.

She was a simple woman, and he a wise man. He flushed with pleasure to hear his cherished thought in another’s words. He bore himself more jauntily at the very suggestion. He toyed with his knife and fork as he protested.

“There’s a mighty long road to travel ’twixt me and Congress.”

“Waal, you-uns kin make it, I’ll be bound,” she said.

And he believed her.

As he rose from the table, at the conclusion of the meal, he took out his purse.

“Nare cent,” said Marvin hastily. “We-uns hev been obligated by yer comp’ny, an’ air powerful pleased ter part in peace.”

Harshaw insisted, however, on leaving his knife for Philetus, and expressed regret that one of the blades was broken.

“He can’t cut hisself with that un, nohow,” said the anxious mother, in graciously accepting it.

Harshaw divined that she might have valued it more if all the blades had been in like plight. She placed it carefully on the high mantelpiece, where, it was safe to say, Philetus would not for some years be able to attain it.

Harshaw never forgot that ride. As the light flickered out from the door into the black midnight, vaguely crossed with slanting lines of rain, to the rail-fence where his mare stood, saddled, the pistols in the holster, he experienced an added sense of confidence in his own methods and capacities, and an intense elation that so serious an adventure had terminated with so little injury.