Part 7

He appreciated, however, that the midnight caper at the mill had shaken all the securities of the mountain community, and it was to the immediate personal interest of every man within twenty miles that he should be dealt with as harshly as the law would allow. But if, he argued, without waiting for arrest, he should go down to-morrow,—not to old Griff (bold as he was, he hardly dared encounter the miller’s rage), but to some man of influence, some mediator, old Squire White, perhaps,—and tell what he had done, and offer in reparation to give the miller all he possessed, his mare, his gun, his hogs, might he not thus avert the more serious phases of a prosecution, or perhaps escape altogether?

Turn as he might, he could see only the sacrifice of his little all as the price of his orgy.

“I’d hev ter pay it ter the lawyer ter defend me; or mebbe old Griff could git it out’n me ez damages ennyhow. I can’t holp losing it. I’ll gin it up, an’ begin over, an’ make it up with Lethe,—I don’t keer a straw fur all the t’others,—an’ git married an’ be stiddy. I never war so wild nohow when me an’ her war promised. Mebbe bein’ jawed at, an’ sech, air good fur folks, an’ holped ter keep me quiet in them days,—leastwise ez quiet ez I war able ter be,” he qualified, the recollection of sundry active vagaries constraining him.

Although doubts and fears still lurked in his mind, he found himself waiting for dawn, not with hope or impatience, but with the dull resolution of reluctant decision. He could hardly have said why, but he experienced a disappointment as he noted the weather signs. The mists thickened and pervaded the moonbeams in gigantic wavering spectral effects. Over toward the Great Smoky they slowly tended, those veiled mystic figures, with diaphanous trailing garments, and with sometimes a lifted hand as if to swear by the heaven it almost touched. He watched the throngs grow denser, lose the similitude of individuality, take on the aspect of lowering clouds. The moonbeams glittered faintly and failed. When the day broke at last, the light expressed itself only in the dull visibility of the enveloping vapors. Not the depths of Hazel Valley, not the slopes of Big Injun Mounting, could be seen as he clambered out of the niche and down upon the road. Even the log at its verge serving as a curb seemed a sort of defense against the usurping immateriality which had engulfed the rest of the world. He heard the moisture dripping from the summit of the craggy heights; sometimes, too, the quick, tumultuous patter of a shower in Hazel Valley, as if a cloud had lost its balance on the brink of the mountain and had fallen into the depths beneath.

He trudged along, seeing nothing but the blank inexpressiveness of the encompassing fog, with only the vaguest divination of the locality and the distance.

“I wouldn’t feel so weighted ef the weather would clear,” he said.

Once he paused, suddenly recollecting that the county court was in session, and that Squire White was doubtless at Shaftesville. When he thought of the unaccustomed scenes of the town, the people, their questions and comments, he wavered again. Then he remembered Alethea. “She ’lowed ’twould be jestice an’ the bes’ ez I could do ennyhows, an’ somehows the critter ’pears ter be right in her jedgmints. So I reckon I’ll jes’ ’bide by Lethe’s word.”

Presently the mists began to lift. He could see along the green aisles of the forest how they wavered and shifted in the tops of the trees. Everywhere the flowers were blooming,—the trumpet blossom and the jewel-weed, the delicate lilac “Christmas flower,” the “mountain snow,” the red cardinal blossoms, and, splendid illumination of the woods, the Chilhowee lily. All along the wayside, silvery cascades tumbled over the rocks amongst fantasies of ferns, and the laurel and the ivy crowded the banks of the torrent. When he was fairly in the valley, fences bordered the road, with poke-berries darkly glittering in corners crowded with weeds. He was nearing Shaftesville now. A little house appeared here and there, a stretch of open land, stacks of fodder, an occasional passer.

High up in the air were suggestions of sunshine, yellow, diffusive, but not penetrating the vapors below. All at once the beams burst through. The mists dallied for a moment longer; then with a suggestion of spreading wings they rose in slow, shining, ethereal flights. Among them, as he skirted the crest of a hill, appeared the roofs of the little town, the tower of the court-house, the church steeple, all dissolving into invisibility like some vain vagary of the mist, as he descended into the intervenient dale.

The grass-grown streets were astir with jeans-clad countrymen already in with wagons drawn by oxen, or with a flock of bleating sheep running helter-skelter, and demonstrating their bucolic proclivities by a startling lack of adaptation to the thoroughfares of Shaftesville; a few loungers were sitting on the barrels and boxes in front of the doors of the stores; Mink met no one he knew as he went. One man on the rickety steps of the court-house knew him, perhaps, for he looked hard at him as he passed; then turned and stared after him with an expression which Mink could hardly analyze. He scowled fiercely in return, and took his way into the room in which several of the justices sat, amicably chatting together, for the day’s proceedings had not yet been inaugurated. With a sudden irritation and bewilderment Mink beheld upon each countenance, the moment they caught sight of him, the same amazed intentness which had characterized the look of the man on the steps. He felt a sort of dull ache in his heart, a turbulence in his blood pulsing fast, a heavy, dazed consciousness which gave the scene the dim unreality of a dream: the sunshine, pale and flickering, outlining the panes of the windows on the dirty floor; the stove, that stood in its place winter and summer; the circle of bearded, jeans-clad justices, all their faces turned toward him, seeming not unlike, with the same expression upon each.

Mink began abruptly, but with an effort, addressing the chairman. “I kem over hyar, Squair,” he said, “’kase I wanter leave ter men what I done. I ain’t goin’ ter hide nuthin’ nor run away from nuthin’. I ain’t sayin’ what I done war right, but I’m willin’ ter abide by my deed ez fur ez leavin’ it ter men, an’ furder.”

He was fluent now. There was an exhilaration in this close attention from these men whom he esteemed mighty in the law, in this pose of importance before them, in the generosity of the offer he was about to make. He spoke responsive to the respectful surprise with which his fancy had endowed them.

“I war drunk, Squair. I ain’t denyin’ it none. Naw, sir, I ain’t.”

He nodded his head, and pushed his broad hat further back on his long, auburn locks.

“I’ll jes’ tell ye how it war, Squair.” He shifted his weight upon one stalwart leg, and bent over a little, and looked down meditatively at his boots as he arranged his ideas in his mind. “I war drunk, Squair,” he reiterated, as he rose once more to the perpendicular. “How I kem so, it don’t consarn me to say. But me an’ old man Griff, we hed hed words ’bout my l’arnin’ Tad ter play ‘five corn’; he ’lowed ’twar a gamblin’ game,—mighty old-fashioned game, ye know yerself, Squair,—an’ ez I kem along back that night I ’lowed I’d start the mill an’ see him run out skeered. An’ I dunno what I done ter the wheel, but it jes’ seemed ter be plumb ’witched when I lifted the gate. It jes’ performed an’ cavorted round like it hed the jim-jams;—ye never seen nuthin’ act like it done sence ye war born, Squair. An’ I tried ter let the gate down, but war plumb shuck off’n the race. An’ the mill begun ter shake, Squair, an’ fust I knowed down it went inter the ruver. An’ ez I seen a light in the old man’s house I ’lowed he war a-comin’ fur me.” He laughed a little. “Old Griff be a powerful survigrous old man when his dander hev riz, so I jes’ rid off ez fas’ ez I could.”

There was no responsive smile upon the stony, staring faces turned toward him. But he was quite at ease now. He hardly cared to notice that a man went hurriedly out of the room and came back. “I’m mighty sorry fur the old man, Squair,” he resumed, “surely I am. An’ ter prove it, me an’ the gal I’m a-goin’ ter marry, we-uns ’greed tergether ez I’d gin him my mare, an’ my hogs, an’ a gun, an’ fower sheep, an’ ’twould build him another mill better ’n the one he hed, ef he could git the mill-stones hefted. I’d go holp myself.”

Still not a word from the justices. Other men had begun to come in. They, too, stood silently listening. Mink was all debonair and cheery again, so fairly had he exploited his mission. As to the man who had gone out and returned, Mink stared hard at him, for he was not an acquaintance, yet he approached and held out his hand. Mink slowly extended his own. A sudden grip of iron encircled the unsuspecting member; the other hand was caught in a rude grasp. A harsh, grating sound, the handcuffs were locked upon his wrists, and the deputy sheriff lifted a countenance scarlet with repressed excitement. He passed his hands quickly all along the prisoner’s side to make sure that he carried no concealed weapons, then ejaculated, “Now ye’re all right!”

The young mountaineer’s head was in a whirl. His heart beat tumultuously. His voice sounded to him far away. His volition seemed to rebel. Surely he did not utter the stammering, incoherent, foaming curses that he heard. They terrified him. He strove with futile strength to tear off these fetters, every muscle strained. For the first time in his life, he, the wild, free creature of the woods, felt the bonds of constraint, the irking touch of a man he could not strike. Old Squire White, who had moved out of the way with an agility wonderful in a man of his years, exhorted the deputy to his duty.

“Ye mus’ gin him the reason fur his arrest, ez he hev axed fur it, Mr. Skeggs, sech bein’ the law o’ Tennessee. Ye’d better tell him, sence the sher’ff hev kerried off the warrant, that he air arrested fur the drownding o’ Tad Simpkins.”

Mink hardly heard. He did not heed. He only tore desperately at the handcuffs, every cord standing out, every vein swelled to bursting; stamping wildly about while the scuttling, excited crowd nimbly kept out of his way. He turned the glare of reddened eyes upon the deputy, who mechanically repeated the justice’s words, still following the prisoner with soothing insistence. Suddenly Mink made a burst toward the door; he was seized by a dozen willing hands, thrown down and pinioned. He fainted, perhaps, for it was only the free outer air that roused him to the knowledge that he was borne through the streets, followed by a gaping, hooting crowd, black and white. Then ensued another interval of unconsciousness. When he came to himself he stared blankly at his unfamiliar surroundings.

He was alone. He felt weak, sore. He turned his bewildered eyes toward the light. The window was barred. He sprang up from the bed on which he lay, and tried the door. He beat upon it and shouted in baffled rage. Stealthy footsteps sounded outside from time to time, excited whispers, and once a low titter.

Somehow, ridicule conquered him as force could not. He slunk back to the bed, and there he lay quiet, that no stir might come to the mocker without. Sometimes he would lift his head and listen with a sort of terror for the step, for the suppressed breathing, for the low laugh. Often his eyes would rest, dilated, fascinated, on the door. Then he would fall back, reviewing futilely the scenes through which he had passed. What was that strange thing they had said? It was indistinct for a time; he could not constrain his reluctant credulity. But those terrible words, the drowning of Tad Simpkins, beset his memory, and came back to him again and again. And then he recalled that weird cry from out the crash of the falling timbers of the mill. Could the ill-treated little drudge have slept there? He had a vague idea that he had once heard that when the old man was angry he would swear that he would not give Tad house-room, and would cast him out into the night, or shut him into the mill and lock the door upon him. And remembering that cry of despair, so anguished an echo rose to Mink’s lips that he turned and buried his head in the pillow because of the scoffer in the hall without.

The room darkened gradually; shadows were glooming about him. The moon rose after a time. The beams in radiant guise came slanting in, and despite the bars stood upon the floor, a lustrous presence, and leaned against the wall. It reminded him of the angel of the Lord,—tall, ethereal, fair, and crowned with an amaranthine wreath,—who burst the bars and appeared to the disciple in prison. With that arrogation of all spiritual bounties, so pathetically human, he perceived no incongruity that such a similitude should appear to him. In some sort it comforted him. It moved from time to time, and slowly crossed, pace by pace, the floor of the cell.

VI.

That terrible isolation of identity, the burden of individuality which every man must bear alone, is never so poignantly appreciated as when some anguish falls on the solitary soul, while those who would wish to share it are unconscious and others uncaring.

News, the worldling, was never a pioneer, and hangs aloof from the long stretches of the wildernesses of the Great Smoky Mountains. It seemed afterward to Alethea that she had lacked some normal faculty, to have been so tranquilly uncognizant, so heedlessly placid, in the days that ensued. The glimpse of the world vouchsafed to Wild-Cat Hollow was silent, peaceful, steeped in the full, languorous sheen of the midsummer sun. To look down upon the cove, with its wooded levels, its verdure, its silver glint of waters, and its sheltering mountains, it might have seemed only the scene of some serenest eclogue—especially one afternoon when the red west flung roseate tints upon the strata clouds and the delicate intervenient spaces of the pale blue heavens, and suffused the solemn ranges and the quiet valley with a tender glamour. The voices projected upon this mute placidity had a strident emphasis. There was the occasional clamor of guinea-fowls about the barn, and some turkeys were flying up to roost on the naked boughs of a dead tree, drawn in high relief and sharp detail against the sky; they fluttered down often, with heavy wings, and ungainly flappings, and discordant cries, in their vain efforts to settle the question of precedence that harassed them. The lowing of the homeward-bound cows had fugue-like communings with their echoes. Alethea, going out to meet them, doubted within herself at times whether they had crossed the mountain stream that coursed through Wild-Cat Hollow. The blackberry brambles swayed full fruited above it; in the lucid, golden-brown, gravelly depths a swift shadow darted, turned, cleft the surface with a fin, and was gone. A great skeleton tree, broken half-way, hollow long ago, stood on the bank, rotted by the winter’s floods that ceaselessly washed it when the stream was high, and bleached by the summer’s suns to a bone-like whiteness. A great ball of foam, mysterious sport of the waters, caught in an eddy, was whirling giddily. One could fancy a figure of some fine ethereal essence might just have been veiled within it. The woods, dense, tangled with vines, sombre with shadows, bore already the downcast look of night. Alethea eyed them languidly as she came down to the lower fence, her piggin on her head, one hand staying it, while the other gave surreptitious aid to the efforts of L’onidas and Lucindy to take down the bars, as they piqued themselves upon rendering her this stalwart service. Tige had come too, and now and then he pawed and pranced about the calves, that were also expectantly waiting at the opening of the inclosure. One of them who had known him of yore only lifted his ears and fixed a remonstrant stare upon him. But the other, young and of an infantile expression, ran nimbly from him, and bleated plaintively, and pressed in between Alethea and the children, in imminent danger of having his brains knocked out in the wild handling of the bars.

“That’s enough,” she drawled presently, moderating their energies; “the calf’ll git out ef ye take down enny mo’. The cow kin step over sech ez be left.”

The faint clanging of cow-bells stirred the air. The little house on the rise at one side was darkly brown against the irradiated mountains seen in the narrow vista of the gap. The martins fluttered from the pendulous gourds and circled about the chimneys, and were gone again. The sky cast its bright gold about the Hollow, on the tow heads of the barefoot children, and multiplied the shimmers in the swirls of the stream.

Alethea looked once more toward it, hearing again the far-off lowing. A sudden movement attracted her eye. Against the great hollow whitened tree a man was leaning, whittling a stick with a clasp-knife, and now and then furtively eying her.

For a moment she did not move a muscle. The color surged into her face, and receded, leaving it paler than before. A belated humming-bird, its breast a glistening green, beat the air with its multiplied suggestions of gauzy wings close to her golden head, and was gone like a flash. The children babbled on. Tige was afraid of a stick which L’onidas had brought to keep off the calf while the cow was milked, and he yelped before he was struck, without prejudice to yelping afterward.

The man presently drew himself erect, closed his knife with a snap, and walked up slowly toward the fence.

“Howdy?” he said, as he came.

She leaned one elbow on the rails, and with the other hand she held the empty piggin. She only nodded in return.

He had an embarrassed, deprecatory manner. He was tall and lank, and clumsy of gait. He had an indifferent, good-natured expression, incongruous with the gleam of anxiety in his eye. His face was almost covered by a long, straggling brown beard.

“What made ye run off so t’other night down yander ter Boke’s Spring? I hed a word ter say ter ye.”

“I war sorry I seen ye.”

He fixed a keen look upon her.

“What fur?”

“I didn’t want ter know who ’twar a-moonshinin’,” she said.

“Waal, ye air the only one,” he declared.

He looked about him dubiously.

“I ain’t keerin’ none,” he added. “Me an’ yer mother war kin somehow; I disremember how, edzac’ly—through the Scruggses, I reckon. Ef she war alive she’d gin ye the word ez she air kin ter Sam Marvin, sure. Nobody ain’t ’spicioned nuthin’ ’bout moonshinin’ but you-uns, ’cept them ez be in it.”

He put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the fence. The clanking of the cow-bell was nearer. The little calf bleated, and thrust its soft head over the bars.

“I wanted ter say a word ter ye,” he continued, still more ill at ease because of her silence. “I seen ye comin’ along o’ all them chill’n,” nodding at Leonidas and Lucinda, who seemed to deserve being accounted more numerous than they were, having engaged in a wordy altercation over the bars; the little fellow dragging them off to some special spot which he had chosen, of occult advantage, while the girl, older and wiser, insisted that they should lie handy where they were. Only Tige listened to the conversation, slowly wagging his tail. “I ’lowed I couldn’t talk ter ye ’thout bein’ hendered, but I reckon I’ll try. I’m kin ter ye,—that be a true word. An’ I’m moonshinin’. Ye ain’t tole nobody ’bout seein’ me an’ the jug thar in Boke’s barn?”

He fixed his eyes, eager with the query, upon her face.

She slowly shook her head in negation.

“An’ ye won’t, eh?”

He smiled beguilingly, showing his long, tobacco-stained teeth.

“Ef nobody axes me.”

His countenance fell suddenly.

“Look-a-hyar, Lethe Sayles, don’t ye fool with me, a-doublin’ on yer words like a fox on his tracks,” he said roughly. Then, more temperately, “I’m afeard o’ that very thing,—ef somebody axes ye.”

“’Tain’t likely,” said Alethea.

“I dunno,” he insisted, wagging his big head in doubtful pantomime. “I want ye ter ’low ye won’t tell.”

“I don’t b’lieve in sech ez moonshinin’ an’ drinkin’ liquor.”

“What fur?” he demanded, with an air of being ready for argument.

“’Tain’t religion.”

“Shucks!” exclaimed Sam Marvin contemptuously. “D’ ye reckon ef ’twarn’t religion I’d plant corn an’ raise my own damnation, an’ sit an’ bile wrath, an’ still fury, an’ yearn Torment, by sech? Naw, sir! Ye oughter go hear the rider read the Bible: every one o’ them disciples drunk low wines in them days, an’ hed it at weddin’s an’ sech; the low wines is on every page.”

Alethea was for a moment overborne by this argument.

Then, “’Tain’t right,” persisted the zealot of Wild-Cat Hollow.

“Will ye listen at the gal!” he exclaimed, in angry apostrophe. But controlling himself, he added quietly, “Ye let older heads ’n yourn jedge, Lethe. Yer brains ain’t ripened yit, an’ livin’ off in Wild-Cat Hollow ye ain’t hed much chance ter see an’ l’arn. Yer elders knows bes’. That’s what the Bible says.”

Down the shadowy vista of the path on the opposite side of the stream the long horns and slowly nodding heads of the cows appeared. The little calf frisked with nimble joy on legs that seemed hardly bovine in their agility. Lucinda ran to bring the pail of bran, and Leonidas produced a handful of salt in a small gourd. The moonshiner saw that his time was short.

“What ails ye, ter think ’tain’t right, Lethe?” he asked.

“Look how good-fur-nuthin’ it makes Jacob Jessup, an’—an’ Mink Lorey, an’ all them boys in Piomingo Cove.”

“It’s thar own fault, not the good liquor’s. Look at me. I ain’t good-fur-nuthin’. Ever see me drunk? How be I a-goin’ ter keer fur sech a houseful ez we-uns hev got ’thout stillin’ the corn? Can’t sell the corn ’n the apples nuther, an’ can’t raise nuthin’ else on the side o’ the mounting, an’ I’m too pore ter own lan’ in the cove.”

The cows were fording the stream. The water foamed about their flanks. Their breath was sweet with the mountain grasses.

He looked at Alethea, suspiciously.

“Ye ain’t goin’ ter promise me ye won’t tell ef ye be axed?” he said, with an air of finality.

In her heart the compact of secrecy was already secure. Somehow she withheld the assurance. It was all wrong, she felt. And if in fear he should desist, so much the safer for him, so much the better would the community fare.

“I ain’t a-goin’ ter promise nuthin’,” she said, slowly, her lustrous eyes full upon his face. “I ain’t goin’ ter do nuthin’ ter holp along what ain’t right.”

“Waal, then, Lethe Sayles, ye jes’ ’member ez ye war warned,” he said, in a low, vehement voice, between his set teeth, and coming up close to her. “An’ ef ever we-uns air fund out an’ raided, we-uns will keep in mind ez nobody knowed but you-uns; an’ whether we be dragged off ter jail an’ our still cut up an’ sech or no, ye won’t git off scot-free. Ye mark my words. Ye air warned.”

She had shrunk from his glittering eyes and angry gestures. Nevertheless, she struck back with ready sarcasm.

“Then, mebbe I won’t tell,” she said, in her soft drawl, “fur I be toler’ble easy skeered.”

He stared at her in the gathering dusk; then turned, and took his way across the mossy log that bridged the stream and down the path through the woods.

For a moment she had an overwhelming impulse to call him back. Long afterward she had cause to remember its urgency. Now she only leaned upon the rail fence, even her golden hair dim in the closing shadows, and gazed with uncomprehended wistfulness after him as he disappeared down the path, and reappeared in a rift of the foliage, and once more disappeared finally.