Part 35

It was the impulse of the moment,—he never could afterward explain it to his will, he never could justify it to his policy; he was shocked with an extreme surprise when the keen, abrupt tone of a pistol rang upon the chill night air, and he became conscious that he was shaking a smoking weapon in his right hand, jarred in some manner by the discharge. The young man had flung himself upon him; he saw as in a dream Kinsard take one convulsive step backward and fall from the verge of the great portico to the stones below. There was a moment of intense silence. Harshaw looked wildly to the doors, the windows, expecting the issuance of startled men, roused from their deliberations. It was strange; if the pistol-shot had been heard, it had doubtless been accounted some violation of the law prohibiting target-practicing within the corporate limits. Hardly a minute had elapsed when Harshaw ran down the long flight to where the man lay, half in the shadow and half in the light, at the foot of the stone wall.

“Are you hurt?” he cried in an agonized voice, as he bent over the motionless figure. “Are you dead—already?”

He took one of the listless white hands,—very listless it was, and chill.

As he moved the submissive figure he felt the pistol in the pocket; he drew it forth, glad at least that the man was armed. As he turned it in his hands he saw in despair that it was unloaded. What theory of self-defense could this bear? The next moment his quick eye noted that the bore and make were the same as his own weapon’s. He slipped in a cartridge, two, three, and replaced it in Kinsard’s pocket. Then he rose to his feet to summon help. He turned as he was about to ascend the steps, and looked back fearfully over his shoulder.

The sudden remembrance of his vision smote him. He gazed upon the scene as if he had before beheld it. The man lay there at the foot of great rocks, motionless and with an averted face.

He had braced himself as well as he might to endure the shock of public reprehension, surprise, repulsion, reacting on his own nerves, sensitive to every variation of popular opinion, when he should go to his associates, his weapon in his hand, the report of his own foul deed upon his lips. And yet, strong as he was, he faltered, he tottered, he fell almost fainting against the door at which he entered. He had a vague idea of the startled faces turned toward him, the expectant stillness, the sound of his hoarse, disconnected words in an appalled staccato, the sudden rush, the wild clamor. He hardly recognized the two men who disengaged themselves from the turmoil and came to him,—the best friends he had in the world, he might be sure now. He was only aware of what he had said and how well he had said it, when he was supported between them to a carriage, and was driving with them and with the officer who had been summoned at his request, to the magistrate’s house. His friends were talking together in respectful undertones of this “unfortunate affair,” and arranging the details,—a little complicated because of the late hour,—that there might be naught more unseemly than giving speedy bail. Neither intruded on his reserve. The officer was silent, unofficial, respectfully null, effaced. The stars were bright in the dark sky. The horses’ hoofs flashed fire.

The magistrate, roused to the fact that justice may not sleep when wrongs are to be righted, made the necessary inquiries in so grave and courteous a tone that it seemed he recognized that the occasional killing of a gentleman may be lamentable to the deceased and inconvenient to the surviving, but was nothing to unduly stretch the limits of his elastic impartiality and abeyance of harsh opinion. He promptly accepted the proffered bail, and Harshaw’s friends left him only at his bedroom door, where they shook hands gravely and kindly with him, and in response to some muttered thanks declared they proposed to see him through.

He found beneath the door the cards and notes of other friends who, hearing some wild rumor of the trouble, had called to proffer services. His lips curled triumphantly as he scanned them one by one. They represented the estimation in which he was held. They intimated a reliance on his good faith and motive in any deed.

“But I tell you, Mr. Harshaw,” he said ceremoniously to himself, “’twould have been mighty different if ’twasn’t for your own smartness!” For he could hardly thank his craft enough for the timely expedient of slipping the cartridges into Kinsard’s empty pistol.

He slept badly in the earlier part of the night, but toward day he fell into a deep and dreamless slumber, and woke refreshed. It was later than usual, and he was solitary at breakfast save for the company of strangers. The corridors were well-nigh deserted when he came out with his unfolded newspaper in his hand,—he would not look at it earlier. Most of the members who sojourned at the same hotel had gone to the Capitol. The reading-rooms were quite empty, but for the presence of the sunlight in glittering white blocks upon the carpet. He had lighted a cigar and flung himself into a chair, nerving himself to read the accounts of the shooting and the comments, when suddenly one of his bondsmen came into the room with so precipitate a manner, so perturbed a face, that the trouble so cleverly manipulated assumed anew an indefinitely threatening aspect. He felt his muscles tighten, his pulses quicken as he asked hastily, “What’s up?”

He could not mistake the nature of the look the man bent on him; it made him tingle from head to foot. And yet his errand was the last offices of friendship.

“You’re too quick on the trigger in more ways than one, Harshaw,” he said. “Kinsard was not hit.”

If Harshaw’s conscience had suffered one pang, this announcement might have weighed more with him than all that was to come. The extreme surprise told only on his nerves: his heart thumped heavily; his breath was short, his face flushed; he looked at his interlocutor with eyes that seemed lidless in their intentness.

“Kinsard was not shot. He lost his balance and was stunned by the fall. They have been working with him all night long, but the doctor says he’ll pull through now.” The man faltered a little. It was hard to look into another man’s eyes and say this. “He revived once before you left. He saw you in the gaslight load his pistol with your cartridges. And then he fainted again. I thought I’d tell you. The whole town’s talking.”

It was admirably managed,—Harshaw’s long, amazed stare, the slow rising from the chair, the rotund resonant laughter filling the room. It renewed his friend’s faith in him.

“Lie, eh?” he asked anxiously.

“Go away!” Harshaw bluffly waved him off. “I’m done with you. Coming to _Me_ with a cock-and-bull story like this,—the visions a stunned man saw between his faints!”

As he took his way boldly down into the rotunda amongst the crowds of men assembled there, the effect of his presence, his manner, his bluff hilarious voice as he canvassed the story, did much to annul its credibility, in fact might have destroyed it but for the recollection of the clerk’s declaration—silently pondered—that the pistol loaned was new, had never been discharged; that the box of cartridges was unopened in his possession; that Kinsard went straight from him to the Capitol; that the shooting occurred within fifteen minutes.

The subtle perception of this mental reservation had no influence on Harshaw’s capable swagger and burly ridicule, but as he noted it he was saying again and again to himself, “You’re a mighty smart man, Bob Harshaw. You’re just a little mite _too_ smart. There’s no mistake this time. It is you who are dead—politically as dead as Hector.”

No action was taken in the matter by the legislature, for it bristled with unprecedented difficulties. The session was drawing to a close, and Harshaw’s term ceased with it. His usefulness ceased previously. Whatever measures he had advocated were tainted with suspicion and encountered disfavor. Bereft of the influences of his enmity toward Judge Gwinnan, the committee appointed to investigate the charges against him deliberated, and dawdled, and finally reported adversely to the resolution to prefer articles of impeachment. Their doubt of the jurisdiction of the legislature was said to be the determining cause of their action. It was a perplexed and a troublous question. And thus they washed their hands of it.

It had been in this cause that Harshaw had flung himself away, and it was in this result that he experienced the extremest rigors of defeat. It added to the helpless chagrin with which he watched his future, coming on so fast that already its coarsened grotesque features were wearing the immediate aspect of the present. A fine contrast he was, to be sure, to the man whose seat on the bench he had sought to shake, still serenely immovable, while he, the loiterer about the tavern at Shaftesville, beginning to drink heavily now, although his habits had been temperate, telling idle stories to the other loiterers with the zestful skill acquired as a politician, useless now, must needs watch all the interests that he had spent his life to conserve dwindle by degrees, till, case after case withdrawn from him, he should become a mere hanger-on in those courts in which he had aspired to preside.

And then there came to him news for which he felt he had no commensurate capacity for astonishment. Gwinnan, aggrieved by the indecision of the legislature, was clamoring for a vindication. It was nominally at the relation of a third party that the attorney-general brought a suit in the chancery court to test his title to office; and in the interval before the trial Mr. Harshaw had a great deal to say about judicial whitewashing, and speculated much concerning the probable result of the case, and pondered deeply on Gwinnan’s motives in encountering its hazards.

Sometimes he was half minded to accredit their probity, and then, ambitious of all that may serve to lift, he fell envious again, and railed at his harsh penalty, that, being not all base, one crafty deed—sequence of how many crafty thoughts!—should determine his future and affix his life sentence.

XXIX.

It seemed to Mink Lorey, trudging on toward the mountains, as if they had been suddenly caught up in the clouds. The horizon had fallen from their invisible summits to the levels of the cove, and where the flat stretches of the perspective met the nullities of the enveloping vapors the scene had all the prosaic, denuded desolation of prairie distances. Yearning for the sight of the blue peaks, he felt as if it were in rebuke, in alienation, that they had hidden their faces from him, had drawn the tissues of the air about them and veiled their heads. As the day unfolded hour by hour, as the distance lessened mile by mile, he sought if perchance in a rent of the mist he might not glimpse some dome, the familiar of his early life, unchanged through all the vicissitudes that time had wrought for him. Once he was not sure if it were mountain or cloud outlined in individual symmetry amongst the indeterminate, shapeless masses of vapor. Then the haze thickened, and he lost the semblance, whether of earth or air.

It was before dawn that he had escaped from the haven he had found, and Mrs. Purvine, throughout the day, keeping watch over these snug quarters, guarded an empty nest. After the first deep, dreamless slumber of exhaustion he had silently slipped out, taking his way toward the Great Smoky, the thought of Alethea heavier than all his calamities. He knew naught of the report of his pardon; he hardly cared now what might betide him. He would see her and tax her with her fickle heart, and then he would flee whither he might. Sometimes, as he toiled along, he would raise his arm with a frantic gesture, and again and again his lips moved unconsciously as he forecast in sibilant mutters the words that he would say.

There was little danger at this early hour of meeting any traveler along the deserted road, but he hardly felt safe until he reached the base of the Great Smoky, and was amongst the dense laurel of those mighty forests, still veiled with the mists and effaced from the day. He turned back often, despite the numbing clutch of despair in his heart and the turbulence of his rage, hoping that he might see again Chilhowee with the sunshine on it; with the circuit of birds in the adjacent domains of the sky; with detached flakes of mist, like stole-clad figures, in airy processional pacing the summit to elusive evanescences; with its colors of bronze-green, and anon purple, and, stretching far away, more finely, softly azure than the heaven it touched. Alas, no,—this he might remember. And yet he had chance rencontres with old familiars. A torrent, gray-green, glassy, whitely foaming, darted out from the vapors suddenly, and was suddenly withdrawn into the blank spaces. And was he akin to the balsam firs; could he have met brethren with more joy? Even when they towered undistinguishably above him, they whispered to him a word now and then, and filled the air with the cordial, inspiriting sense of their presence. And what was this? He stood still to listen, staring into the white vagueness of the invisible woods. A fitful, metallic tinkling. Was he so high up the great steeps that already he could distinguish the bells of the herds, or was this a stray? He heard a hoof struck upon the ground presently, the sound of munching teeth, and suddenly a horse’s head was thrust forward amongst the mists, showing a black mane and wide brilliant eyes and the arch of a clay-bank neck.

“Thar ye be, Grasshopper! At it agin, air ye?” Mink called out, with the rancorous formula of an old reproach.

It was a horse that he knew, and knew well,—one of the charges of the herders during the previous summer,—a wild young creature, with a proclivity for breaking bounds and straying. The animal pricked up his ears at the sound of his name, and his eyes met Mink’s with seeming recognition. The young mountaineer reflected that it was he who had usually salted the animals. With a hope of bettering his plight he held out his hand.

“Cobe! Cobe!” he called seductively. The horse looked dubiously at him, as he stood, one hand thrust in his leather belt, his white hat—an old one belonging to Jerry Price, which Mrs. Purvine had loaned him—perched on the back of his head, his red hair limp with the moisture of the damp day. The creature approached gingerly, snuffing at the empty hand. He moved back abruptly, detecting the deception; but Mink had caught him by the halter which he wore, and sprung upon his back.

“Gimme a lift up the mounting, Grasshopper,” suggested Mink placidly.

The stray reared and plunged and kicked, striving to unhorse the rider, who, although without saddle or bridle, contrived to maintain his seat, but could neither govern nor guide the animal, that at last bolted off through the woods, running as rapidly as the nature of the ground would permit. On he went, invading the mists; piercing the invisibilities of the wilderness; up hill and down; among bowlders and gigantic trees, dimly looming; fording streams and standing pools and morasses; pausing to kick and rear and plunge anew, and away once more. Mink waited calmly till the stray should exhaust his energies. This proved longer than he had anticipated. But after several delusive intimations of abating speed the horse fell into a canter, then into a trot, and as Mink pulled on the halter the comity with his rider was renewed once more, and he lent himself to guidance. Looking about him, the young mountaineer could hardly say where he had been carried. Once as the mist shifted he saw through the limbs of stunted trees a great peak, a mile away perhaps, appearing and disappearing elusively among the rifts. He began to understand that he was on the summit of the ridge in the interval between two great uprising domes. Often he must needs lie flat on the horse’s back, lest the low boughs of the ancient dwarfed trees sweep him to the ground; as it was, they played cruel havoc with his old jeans coat, and once snatched his hat away. He drew up with difficulty, and as he clapped it on his head he heard again, in the momentary silence of his horse’s hoofs, the tinkling of bells other than the one which the nomadic Grasshopper wore at his neck. He rode toward the sound. It led him into a limited open space where the trees, struck and burned by the lightnings, had fallen charred upon the earth: two or three cows were pausing to crop in the lush grass, despite the crack of a whip and the call of a herder. Mink recognized the voice of his old comrade, Doaks.

The mounted figure of the fugitive loomed, half discerned, gigantic in the mist, as Ben Doaks stood and stared. The horse, restive, freakish, rose upon his hind feet, pawing the air. The young mountaineer, half doubting the policy of revealing himself, his prudent fears returning, hesitated, then leaned forward and waved his hand. He did not speak, for Doaks suddenly, with a wild shrill cry of terror, turned and fled.

Mink sat his horse motionless, staring in amazement. An angry flush rose to the roots of his hair.

“Ben’s ’feared ter hev enny dealin’s with law-breakers an’ sech,” he sneered. “’Feared the law mought take arter him.”

He rode along for a few moments, pondering his jeopardy and the long imprisonment to which he was sentenced. If this demonstration were any indication of the feeling against him, he would be taken again here amongst the herders, or at his home in Hazel Valley, or in Wild-Cat Hollow.

“I oughtn’t ter go ter see Lethe,” he said to himself. “I ought jes’ ter hustle over inter North Carliny, whar they dunno me, an’ git in with some o’ them folks ez lives lonesome, the herders, or them Injuns at Quallatown, till the sher’ff gits tired o’ huntin’ fur me. Nobody ’lows but what I’m dead ’cept Mis’ Purvine, an’ she ain’t a-goin’ ter tell on me. I dunno ’bout Lethe; mebbe she’ll ’low ’tain’t right, ’specially sence she air so powerful pleased with the jedge. I’ll git cotched sure ef I keep a-roamin’ ’round hyar like a painter, or that thar harnt o’ a herder ez rides on Thunderhead.”

With the words there flashed upon him a new interpretation of Ben Doaks’s sudden flight. He recollected the significance of an equestrian figure here, strangely silent, looming in the mist. As he looked about him, catching vague glimpses of the neighboring peaks, he recognized the slopes of Thunderhead.

“Ben mus’ hev been over ter s’arch fur strays, an’ I reckon ye air one of ’em, Grasshopper,” he said.

His lips were curving, and his eyes brightening beneath the brim of the old wool hat. His prudent resolves vanished. He leaned forward and deftly divested the horse of the bell. He tossed his head gayly as he struck his heels against the flanks of the animal with an admonition to get up.

“Ef I don’t ride up thar an’ skeer them herders on Thunderhead inter fits, I’m the harnt Ben takes me fur, that’s all.”

That misty morning was long remembered on Thunderhead. To the herders, busy with their simple, leisurely, bucolic avocation on the great elevated pastures, as aloof from the world, as withdrawn from mundane influence, as if they herded on lunar mountains, there appeared, veiled with the mist and vague with a speedy gait, the traditional phantom horseman: more distinct than they could have imagined, more personally addressing its presence to the spectators, silently waving its hand, and once leaning forward and clutching at the empty air, as if it would fain reach them, and once assuming an aggressive aspect and leveling an unseen weapon.

The cattle had not all arrived at their summer pastures from the coves and the “flat woods.” To-day young Bylor, whose father was a farmer on the slopes below, had driven up a “bunch” of cows, and while he was standing quite alone at some distance from the cabin, engaged in readjusting a brass tag which had been lost from the horn of one of the animals, he heard the sound of an approach, and glanced about him in the fleecy white nullity that had taken the place of the erased world. He did not recognize in the dim figure of the horseman the terrible ghostly herder, the steed rearing and plunging, the erect figure looming gigantic, merging with no distinct outlines into the enveloping uncertainty of the mist. He stood stolidly gazing for a moment; then he hailed it.

“Howdy, stranger!” he cried.

The figure paused; the horse fell upon his haunches and pawed the air with his forefeet, while the rider leaned forward, beckoning slowly as Bylor approached. What monition induced him to pause he could hardly have said. The significance of the insistently beckoning apparition flashed upon him in the moment. He turned precipitately, stumbling over the roots of a tree and falling prone upon the ground; then recovering himself, he ran at full speed through the blinding fog toward the cabin. He swore afterward that he heard behind him the tramp of a horse’s hoofs and a voice laughing mockingly.

At the herders’ cabin he found Ben Doaks and his partner from Piomingo Bald, pallid and shaken, among the other herders who had gathered there, all panic-stricken, and each arguing to shift to his partner the responsibility of the care of the cattle, that he might leave the weird, haunted summits, and find rest and peace and reassuring human comradeship in the prosaic depths of the cove.

“From what I hev hearn tell ’bout that thar herder,” said Doaks, with his facile credulity, “none o’ we-uns air a-goin’ ter hev sense enough ter keer fur cattle ’n’ nuthin’ else fur a year an’ a day. Leastwise that hev been the ’speriunce o’ other folks ez hev viewed the harnt.”

He laid on another stick of wood, for the day was chill, and the great fire crackled and sparkled, and the red and yellow flames darted up the rude and tremulous chimney, and gave the one bright element of illuminated color to the dark interior. The bearded men grouped about the fire were seated one upon a keg of salt, three on a log, and Ben Doaks had dropped on a saddle flung down upon the hearth. The door was closed; once it came unbuttoned, and every face turned quickly to scan the shivering mists, pallid and cold and opaque, crowding to the entrance, to be shut out summarily into the vast vagueness of the outer world.

“I dunno ez I feel ennywise lackin’,” observed another, after a long introspective pause. He rubbed his hand meditatively over his beard. “I never ’lowed ez I war special gifted, but I ain’t a spang fool yit.”

“I reckon we hain’t hed time ter ’speriunce it,” said Doaks, as he settled himself to wait for the dreaded doom, a little astonished, subacutely, to be conscious of no diminution of mental power.

“I seen him so close!” cried Bylor. “I wish ter goodness I hed shot at him!”

“Bullet would jes’ hev gone through him,” said Doaks, “’thout interruptin’ him none.”

“Waal,” rejoined Bylor, “I hev hearn some folks ’low ef ye shoots at a harnt they don’t like it, an’ sorter makes tharse’fs sca’ce arter that. I dunno what ailed him ter take arter me. I never herded with him on Thunderhead. I ain’t no herder, an’ never war. I hate powerful ter go down inter the cove ter drivel fur a year an’ a day. I never done no work sca’cely las’ year, through feelin’ sorter keerless ’bout’n it. An’ ef I hed drempt bout’n’ this hyar harnt a-takin’ arter me I’d hev put in my work then.”

“Waal, ye can’t git the time back,” said Ben Doaks; and many an idler before and since Bylor has learned this melancholy truth.

He sat silent for a time, ruefully pondering upon his blasted industrial prospects. Then he broke forth fretfully once more:—

“I war fool enough ter go so close. I seen the very hat he wore,”—his tones were full of a despairing regret,—“a big white hat sot onto the back o’ his head.”