Part 32

The moon was a-journeying, too, with all the train of stars. Always through the open window one could find a serene transition from the interior, with its gaudy colors, its lounging masculine figures, its wreathing tobacco smoke, and the suffusion of yellow light and alternating brown shadow. The sky was pure and blue; the young mountaineer marked the weather-signs; the wind was astir,—a breeze other than that caused by the motion of the train; he saw the trees on the hillsides waving in the sweet spontaneity of the air; he noted the shadow of the great locomotive swiftly traversing the wheat-fields, with its piles of smoke scurrying behind it, and seeming not less material. He leaned toward the window, and called to the deputy to mark how forward the crops were. And then he fell back with a white despair on his face, for the train was thundering through a forest, and the interfulgent sheen and shadow amongst the great trees had caught the woodland creature’s eye. The sylvan fragrance came to him for a moment. The fair, lonely vista lured him. How long, how long it had been since he had trodden such wilds! Rocks towered in the midst, and he was glad when they closed about the way, and the reverberating clamors of the cut drowned the groan that burst from him. And then they grew fainter, and here were the levels once more, and suddenly—the Tennessee River! How should he fail to know its splendid breadth and muscle, its majestic sinuosity as it curved! He leaned once more toward the window, catching at the sill; the man with whose hand his own was manacled complained of the strain. He dropped his hand, and once more looked out as the train, at a bated and circumspect pace, drew its slow length upon the bridge. Most of the passengers were looking out, too, under the fascination that the water of a landscape always exerts upon travelers. The moon hung above the broad vista of the dark, lustrous stream, flinging upon its surface some gigantic magical corolla, softly refulgent, to float on the water like a great white lily. The dense forests, with a deeper gloom of shadow at their roots, stood solemn and silent on either hand. The glare of the head-light fell distorted on the ripples, and the lanterns of the brakemen evoked twinkling reflections below. The dank vernal odors from the banks came in on the breeze, and the wheels rolled slowly, and yet more slowly; they were just beginning to accelerate their speed when one of the passengers, glancing within to comment to a friend, saw the lithe young prisoner rise suddenly and liberate his hand with a violent jerk, while his companion in shackles with a hoarse cry, clutched frantically at him. The guard turned with a start, as the young mountaineer, with an indescribably swift and elastic bound, sprang through the window and caught the timbers of the bridge. A violent jerk, a bell’s sharp jangle, and an abrupt shiver ran through all the length of the train. Then the reflection of the glare of the head-light and the lesser gleaming points in the river were motionless. The train was at a stand-still in the middle of the bridge. A wild clamor arose from many voices; the brakemen on the platforms flashed their lanterns back and forth; a heavy body sprang into the swift waters with a great splash, and the sharp crack of a pistol echoed from the dark woods on either bank.

The startled passengers were treated to a fine display of conflicting authorities as they poured out on the platform of the smoking-car, where it seemed that the conductor of the train was laboring under the delusion that he could arrest the deputy-sheriff of Cherokee County.

“You had no right to pull the bell-cord and stop my train,—and stop it on the bridge!” he exclaimed.

“I’m bound ter ketch my prisoner!” cried the deputy-sheriff, wildly. “He was handcuffed with this one, and he slipped his paw out somehow, an’ lept through the window, an’ perched thar on that timber o’ the bredge; an’ I knowed he war expectin’ the train ter go right on, an’ I pulled the rope ter stop it. I’d hev hed him,—I’d hev hed him, ef the durned Mink hedn’t tuk ter the water! Lemme go! Lemme go!”

But the train was in motion again, slowly crossing the bridge, and the officer could only rush to a window and look wildly over the waters, illumined by the head-light and the glimmer of the moon, and fire at devious black floating objects that showed resemblance to the head of a swimming man struggling for his life. Several of the passengers derived great sport from this unique target-shooting, and the quiet was invaded with cries of excitement mingled with the reiterations of the pistol pealing over the water. There! a fair shot! the object sinks,—only a floating rail, for it is distinct as it rises once more to the surface; and again the balls make havoc only among the ripples. The quarry eludes,—eludes strangely. He must have had great practice in diving, or, as one hopeful soul cries out, he must be at the bottom of the river.

Its current was placid enough when the train was safely on the other side at a stand-still, and the people from the little log-cabin below climbed the embankment to hear the cause of the unprecedented stoppage. The bridge did not break on this occasion, but the old man is very sure they cannot do this “fool trick” again.

Although the train waited for a time while the banks of the river were patrolled, it was gone clanging on its way long before the rocks had ceased to echo the tramp of excited horsemen and their hoarse cries, as they beat the bushes in the neighboring woods, for the whole country-side was roused. The opinion that the reckless young mountaineer had, in leaping into the river, struck against some floating log, and had been killed by the concussion, or had gone to the bottom among the bowlders with a fatal force, gained ground as the day gradually dawned and no trace of him was detected.

By degrees the search degenerated into the idler phases of morbid curiosity. Many people visited the spot, ostensibly to join in the effort, who stared at the bridge and speculated on its height, and strolled up and down the banks, wondering futilely. Even when the sunset was reddening the river; when the evening star was tangled in the boughs of a white pine on the bank; when the sound of lowing kine was mellow on the air; when the bridge doffed its massive aspect, and became illusory, a shadow not more material than its shadow in the current below,—footing for the moonbeams, lodgment for the dew, a perch for a belated bird, familiar of the mist,—vague figures still lingered about the water-side, and raucous voices grated on the evening air. But at last the darkness slipped down; the train came and went; silence fell upon the river, save for its own meditative, iterative voice, the croaking of frogs, and the exquisite melody of the mocking-bird, as he sang in the slant of the moonbeams glistening through fringes of the pines. A wind rose and died away. The night was inexpressibly solitary. Far off a dog howled. The constellations imperceptibly tended westward. And presently, in the dark loneliness of the dead hour, something,—an otter, a musk-rat, a mink?—some stealthy wild thing, stirred itself at the water’s edge, beneath a broad ledge of the jagged, beetling rocks along the bank, under the current, on the gravelly shallows. It made much commotion; the water receded in widening circles far out toward the middle of the river,—a scramble, a stroke or two, and it rose to its full height, and waded to the shore; for it was the battered image of a man. He wore no hat; his long locks hung in straight wisps down upon his shoulders. He glanced about him continually with fearful eyes, as he hobbled stiffly up the bank. Once he sat down on the roots of a tree in the shadow, and essayed to draw off the great boots, heavy with water, and hampering his every motion. But the leather, so long steeped, had swelled, and he could not divest himself of them.

“Mought lose ’em, ennyhow, ef I war ter take ’em off,” he said, sturdily adapting his optimism to the cumbrous impediments. And so he limped on. He shivered in every limb. Over and again his breath seemed to fail him. More than once his head whirled, and he leaned against a tree to steady himself. The air was chill, but although the wind blew he was not sorry; it would the earlier dry his garments.

“An’ I reckon I hev done cotch all the rheumatiz I kin hold, ennyways, a-layin’ thar under the aidge o’ the ruver, half kivered with water fur a night an’ a day.”

When the woods began to give way to fields he hung back, feeling desolate and affrighted. How could he barter these sheltering shadows, this nullifying darkness, for those wide, exposed spaces of the pasture? Its dewy slope, with here and there an outcropping rock, but never a bush nor a tree, lay under the slanting light of the moon. The mountains, however, he knew were in that direction; and presently he took courage to climb the fence, and with his hobbling shadow at his side,—from which he sometimes shrunk with sudden fear, glancing over his shoulder askance,—skulked across the grassy expanse, now in the melancholy sheen, and now in the vague shade of a drifting cloud. There were sheep huddled and white, at one side of the slope, all asleep, save one, that held its head up and looked at him with a contemplative eye as he passed. A dog seemed their only guardian. He did not bark, but came down toward the stranger with a sinister growl. Mink had no fear of dogs, and somehow they trusted him. The shepherd sniffed in surprise at his heels, bounded up to lick his hand, followed with a wagging tail till he climbed the fence, and regretfully saw him take his way down the road. For his courage was renewed by its own achievements. He was bold enough presently to invade a garden where potatoes had lately been planted, and he dug up the sliced fragments, each carefully cut that it might contain two or more “eyes.” He found, too, some turnips, and was greatly refreshed and strengthened by his surreptitious meal. As he rose from the garden border and turned away among the currant bushes, he was confronted suddenly by the figure of a man. He sprang back, his heart plunging. He thought for a moment that he was discovered. And yet—it stood so strangely still. Only a suit of clothes stuffed with straw, and surmounted by an ancient and battered hat.

Mink gazed gravely at the scarecrow, that had surpassed its evident destiny in frightening that larger fowl, a jail-bird.

It might seem that with the weight of his heavy cares, the anguish of his forlorn plight, the dispiriting influence of his imprisonment, the jeopardy of his tortured freedom, his doubtful future,—exhausted, chilled, sore,—he would find scant amusement or relish in the grotesque image. One might wonder at the zest with which he applied himself, with convulsive, feeble efforts, to uproot the pole that sustained it. He conveyed it across the garden,—daring the dogs,—and placed the scarecrow where it might seem to peer into the front window of the house. He stood looking at it with intense satisfaction for a moment,—so like a man it was! He could forecast how the women of the household would cry aloud with terror when they should see it, how the mystified men would stare and swear. He did not laugh; the feat in some other method satisfied his sense of the ludicrous. It did not occur to him as a futile waste of his time and strength,—of both he presently stood in sore need. For the day was breaking when he still trudged between the zigzag lines of farm fences, along a road that bore evidences of much travel, in a country which he did not know, of which the only familiar objects were the dying moon and the slowly developing outline of the Great Smoky Mountains, far away.

“I’ll git ter Shaftesville in time ter stan’ my trial, ef I don’t mind, ’fore the dep’ty does,” he said to himself in a panic.

Nowhere were forests visible promising shelter. Here and there a limited woods-lot lined the road; more often fields of corn, barely showing tender sprouts above the ground, or stretches of winter wheat or millet, or pastures. He was in the midst of a scene of exclusive agricultural significance, when the startling sound of wagon wheels broke upon the air, and the figure of a man driving a pair of strong mules rose gradually from over the brow of the hill.

Mink’s clothes were already dry; his hair curled freshly once more, but he was painfully conscious of the lack of his hat, and he knew that the teamster’s eyes rested upon him in surprise. The man drew up his mules at once. But the wily fugitive hailed him first.

“Howdy,” Mink remarked, advancing sturdily, putting one foot on the hub of the front wheel and his hand on the off mule’s back, and looking up with his bold, bright eyes at the driver. “Do you-uns hail from nighabouts?”

“Down yander at Peters’ Cross-Roads,” responded the stranger promptly.

“I ax kase I ’lowed mebbe ye hed hearn some word o’ that thar prisoner ez got away from the sher’ff o’ Cher’kee County,—Reuben Lorey.”

“_Mink_ Lorey, I hearn his name war,” corrected the teamster.

“Waal,”—Mink’s careless glance wandered aimlessly up and down the sunny road,—“he oughter be named Mink, ef he ain’t; mean enough.”

“Ye’re ’quainted with him, I reckon,” said the teamster, still looking at his hatless head.

“Mighty well! He hev gin me a heap o’ trouble. I dunno but I’d nigh ez soon he’d be in the bottom o’ the Tennessee Ruver ez not. We-uns hail from the same valley,—Hazel Valley.”

“What ye doin’ ’thout no hat?” demanded the saturnine, perplexed, and vaguely suspicious man.

“Lost it in the ruver. Been fishin’. I hev been visitin’ some folks in the flatwoods ez I be mighty well ’quainted with. I’m goin’ ter git me another hat at the store.”

There was a pause.

“They ’low that thar man war drownded,” said the teamster, discursively.

“Waal,” said Mink, drawlingly, “I ’lowed I’d ax, so ez when I git ter Hazel Valley I mought tell his folks a straight tale.”

The teamster’s wonderment, being satisfied as to the bare head of the young fellow, he was eager to proceed on his journey. Certainly all imaginable suspicions must have been allayed by the pertinacity with which Mink hung upon the wheel, and talked about the rheumatism he feared he had caught a-fishing, and declared he had found no sport in it.

Finally, with apparent reluctance, he took his foot from off the hub, and the teamster was glad to go creaking along on his journey.

Although the danger was so successfully thwarted, the strain upon his ingenuity, his nerves, and his presence of mind had told heavily upon Mink’s reserve force of strength and courage. When at last he reached the deep woods he was more dead than alive, as he flung himself down in the hollow of a poplar-tree, struck long ago by lightning,—its great length fallen, its branches burned, only its gigantic stump standing to boast the proportions this chief of the savage wilds had borne. The young mountaineer doubted, as he fell asleep, if he would ever wake. But exhaustion did not prevail. Over and again, with a nervous start, consciousness would seize upon him, and he would be himself long enough to contrast his forlorn plight with the feignings of his dream, and so sink again into troubled slumber. And yet it was with a deep satisfaction that he gazed out at intervals upon the lonely crowded sylvan limits. The underbrush closed about him; the great trees upreared their heads against the sky, showing only a glimpse of the blue or a flake of the burnished vernal sunshine. How restful the sight, how reassuring the sound of the wind in the leaves! A squirrel frisked by, sleek and dapper, with a brilliant, unaffrighted eye and a long curling tail. The familiar creature seemed like a friend. “Howdy, mister,” observed Mink. “Ye air one citizen ez I ain’t afeard on.”

But the squirrel came no more, although ever and anon Mink lifted himself to look out. He noted the moss, green and gray, on the bark of a rotting log; he started to hear the woodpecker tapping; he listened for a time to a crested red-bird’s song, but its iteration was somnolent in its effects, and when Mink next opened his eyes darkness enveloped the world. He could hardly say whom he might be; he did not know where he was. The oppression of his familiar cell in the Glaston jail filled his consciousness until, as he groped about him, he felt the rotting sides of the old tree and realized that he was free.

“I mus’ be a-travelin’,” he said to himself.

Free, but with so burning a pain in every limb that he could hardly stand upon his feet; and what was this new misfortune? His forlorn boots were bursting into fragments. As he staggered into the moonshine he sat down, and putting one foot on his knee examined the sole in rueful contemplation.

“Now don’t that thar beat kingdom come! Them boots war mighty nigh new when I went ter jail, an’ I never stood on ’em none thar sca’cely. Mus’ hev been the soakin’ they got. I ain’t useter goin’ bar’foot lately, an’ how’ll I travel thirty mile this-a-way?”

It was at a slow gait that he hobbled along; now and then he stumbled, and would have fallen but for his hasty clutch at a bush or a tree. His feet were pierced by flints through the crevices of his boots, and he was presently aware that he was marking his steps with his blood. He made scant progress, although he struggled strenuously, and it was long before day when he was fain to lie down in a rift in a great bank of rocks, and recruit his wasted energies with sleep. “I hope I ain’t a-goin’ ter die in sech a hole ez this,” he said, “ez ef I war a sure-enough mink. But Laws-a-massy, what be I, ef I ain’t a mink?”

He laughed sarcastically as he turned himself over. He had evolved some harsh theories of worldly inequalities. If he had knocked Jerry Price or Ben Doaks senseless with a bit of iron, he argued, he would have hardly been in jeopardy of arrest; the affair would perchance have been chronicled by the gossips as “a right smart fight.” But he must forfeit twenty years of his life for assaulting a man of Gwinnan’s quality. And he had some bitter reflections to divert his mind, with the functions of a counter-irritant, from his aching bones, his bleeding feet, his overpowering sense of fatigue.

It was the next night—for he again lay hidden all day—that he at last passed through the gap of the mountain and entered Eskaqua Cove. His spirits had risen at the sight of the familiar things,—the foam on the river dancing in the light of the moon, the dense solemn forests, the great looming, frowning rocks. He hardly cared how steep the hillsides were, how his sore feet burned and ached, how heavily he dragged his weight. He could have cried aloud with joy when he beheld the little foot-bridge which he knew so well, albeit he could scarcely stagger over the narrow log; the low little house on the bank where Mrs. Purvine lived. It was dark and silent under the silver moon, for the hour was late, reckoning by rural habits,—about ten o’clock, he guessed. He hesitated for a moment when he was in the road beside the fence. He thought he might shorten the way by crossing the corn-field, for the road made a bend below. He had climbed the fence and was well out in the midst of the sprouting grain, when suddenly he started back. There was a shadow coming to meet him. He could not flee. He could not hope to escape observation. And yet, when he looked again, the dim figure was curiously busy, and was not yet aware of his presence. It was the figure of a woman, and he presently recognized Mrs. Purvine. Her head was evidently much wrapped up against the night air, and her sun-bonnet was fain to perch in a peaked attitude, in order to surmount the integuments below; it was drawn down over her face, and by other means than the sight of her countenance he identified her. It might seem an uncanny hour for industry, but Mink could well divine that Mrs. Purvine had experienced belated pangs of conscience concerning sundry rows of snap-beans, left defenseless, save for her good wishes, against the frost. She was engaged in covering them,—detaching a long board from a pile beside the fence, and placing it with a large stone beneath either end above the tender vegetable. Her shadow was doing its share, although it gave vent to none of the pantings and puffings and sighs with which the flesh protested, as it were, against the labor. It jogged along beside her on the brown ground in dumpy guise, and stooped down, and rose up, and set its arms akimbo to complacently observe the effect of the board, and even wore a sun-bonnet at the same impossible angle. It started off with corresponding alacrity to the pile to fetch another board for another row, and was very busy as it stooped down to adjust a stone beneath. It even sprang back and threw up both arms in sudden affright, when Mrs. Purvine exclaimed aloud. For a deft hand had lifted the other end of the board, and as she glanced around she saw a man kneeling on the mould and placing the stone so that the delicate snap-beans might be sheltered.

“In the name o’ Moses!” faltered Mrs. Purvine between her chattering teeth, as she rose to her feet, “air that thar Mink Lorey—or—or”—she remembered how far away, how safe in jail, she had thought him—“or his harnt?”

Mink turned his pallid face toward her. She saw the lustrous gleam of his dark eyes.

He hesitated for a moment. Then, he could not resist. “I died ’bout two weeks ago,” he drawled circumstantially.

Mrs. Purvine stood as one petrified for a moment. Then credulity revolted.

“Naw, Mink Lorey!” she said sternly. “Naw, sir! Ye ain’t singed nowhar. Ef ye war dead, ye’d never hev got back onscorched.” She shook her enveloped head reprehensively at him.

Regret had seized upon him. The fleeting privilege of frightening Mrs. Purvine scarcely compensated for the risks he felt he ran in revealing himself.

He stood silent and grave enough as she set her arms akimbo and gazed speculatively at him.

“How d’ ye git out’n jail?” she demanded.

“Through thar onlockin’ the door,” said Mink.

Mrs. Purvine knitted her puzzled brows.

“War they willin’ fur ye ter leave?” she asked, seeking to fathom the mystery.

“Waal, Mis’ Purvine,” equivocated the fugitive, jauntily, “I ain’t never fund nobody, nowhar, right up an’ down _willin’_ fur me to leave ’em. They hed ter let me go, though.”

“Waal, sir!” exclaimed Mrs. Purvine, with the accent of disappointment. “I never b’lieved ez Jedge Gwinnan war in earnest whenst he promised Lethe Sayles ter git ye pardoned. Whenst she kem back rej’icin’ over it so, I ’lowed the jedge war jes’ laffin’ at her.”

The man, staring at her with unnaturally large and brilliant eyes, recoiled suddenly, and his shadow seemed to revolt from her words. “Jedge Gwinnan! pardon!” he cried, contemptuously, his voice rising shrilly into the quiet night. “He got me no pardon! I’d hev none off’n him, damn him! I’d bide in the prison twenty year, forty year,—I’d rot thar,—afore I’d take enny faviors out’n _his_ hand! Lord! let me lay my grip on that man one more time, an’ hell an’ all the devils can’t pull me off!”

His strength failed to support his excitement. He staggered to the pile of boards and leaned against them, panting. Mrs. Purvine noted how white his face was, how exhausted his attitude.

“Ye ’pear sorter peaked,” she remarked, prosaically, “an’ ye walk toler’ble cripple.”

“Yes,” observed Mink, with his wonted manner, “it ’peared ter me a toler’ble good joke ter jump off the middle o’ the bredge inter the Tennessee Ruver. But it turned out same ez mos’ o’ my jokes,—makes me laugh on the wrong side o’ my mouth.”

Mrs. Purvine began to understand. Her lower jaw dropped. “Whar hev ye hed ennything ter eat?” she demanded, with bated breath.