Part 9

The next moment there was a sneer upon his face, for the young scoffer had changed color. It crept up from the flush in her cheeks to the roots of her hair; but she replied, with her air of mock seriousness:

"I seem ter disremember at the moment."

Adelaide was dulled by the trouble and the preoccupation that had fallen upon her. "He war hyar this mornin', an' yistiddy too," she remarked, all unconscious of any but the superficial meaning of what she said. "He 'pears ter be powerful troubled 'bout his soul."

"He seems ter 'low ez he _hev_ got a soul," observed Letitia, casually. "The pride o' some folks is astonishin'."

"He 'lowed he war goin' ter the woods ter pray," said Adelaide.

"An' I tole him," said Letitia, "that the Lord mought like him better ef he went ter the field ter plough. His corn is spindlin', an' his cotton is mightily in the grass. But it takes more elbow grease ter plough corn an' scrape cotton than ter pray, so the lazy critter is prayin'."

Her complexion had recovered its normal tints, and she laughed at this fling with manifest enjoyment, although the other two failed to respond--Adelaide deprecating its tone, and Cheever preserving an elaborate manner of ignoring that she had spoken at all.

"Waal, waal, Mis' Yates, I mus' be ridin'," he said, gathering up the reins. "Good-by. Ef ye want me fur ennything jes' call on me, an' ye'll do me a pleasure. Yes, 'm."

Her recognizant response was lost in the tramp of his horse, keen to be off on the first intimation that progress was in order, and in the wail which Moses set up in logical prescience that the admirable quadruped was to be withdrawn from his enchanted gaze. He lunged forward, bending his elastic body almost double, to see the horse go, mane and tail flying, and with the sun upon his neck and his sides that had a sheen like satin. As the rider was turning at right angles to cross the rickety bridge, he looked back over his shoulder at the group. Adelaide's dark attire and the diminutive size of Moses rendered them almost indistinguishable, but the faint blue of Letitia's dress defined her figure against the sombre green of the banks as if it was drawn in lines of light. She had not changed her posture; her face was still turned toward him. He knew that she was gazing after him as the fleet hoofs of the horse with the "nigh fore-laig crippled" swiftly bore him into invisibility. He could not hear her words, but he instinctively felt that she spoke of him, and he could only vaguely guess their import. So unflattering were these divinations that he ground his teeth with rage at the thought.

"I wisht I hed never seen her," he said, as the hollow beat of the slackened hoof sounded upon the bridge. "I wisht I hedn't stopped. But _who_ would hev thunk ez that darned leetle consarn would hev been so all-fired sharp ez ter guess it? I wisht I hedn't stopped at all."

An incongruous fear, surely, for a man like this; but more than once, as he rode, he looked over his shoulder with a knitted brow and a furtive eager eye. Naught followed but the long shadows which the sinking sun had set a-stalking all adown the valley. The world was still. He heard only here and there the ecstatic burst of a mocking-bird's wonderful roulades. Then the horse, with muscles as strong as steel, distanced the sound. Once, as the woods on either side fell away, he saw the west; it glowed with purest roseate tints, deepening to a live vermilion in the spaces about the horizon whence the sun but now had blazed; the nearest mountains were darkly purple; the northern ranges wore a crystalline, amethystine splendor, with a fine green sky above them that had an opaque hardness of color, which gradually merged into amber, giving way at the zenith to azure. In the midst of all a great palpitating star glistered, so white that with these strong contrasts of the flaunting heavens one might feel, for the first time, a full discernment of the effect of white.

Another moment the deep woods had closed around, and it seemed that night had come. He presently ceased to follow the road. The jungle into which he plunged had no path, no sign of previous passing, and the earth was invisible beneath the inextricable interlacings of the undergrowth. But if the sense of man was at fault, the good horse supplied the lack with a certain unclassified faculty, and with the reins on his neck and his head alert pushed on at fair speed, stepping gingerly over the boles of fallen trees, making his way around insurmountable boulders, swimming a deep and narrow pool; and finally, in struggling up the opposite bank, he uttered a whinny of triumph and recognition that bespoke his journey's end. The sound rang through the evening stillness of the woods with abrupt effect, repeated a thousand times by the echoes of the huge rocks that lay all adown the gorge. The place might realize to the imagination the myths of magic castles to be summoned into symmetry out of the craggy chaos by some talismanic word. It was easy to fancy, in the solitude and the pensive hour, castellated towers in those great rugged heights, a moat in the deep pool, even a gateway, a narrow space above which the cliffs almost met. Buck Cheever wot of none of these things, and no fancied resemblance embellished the stolidity of his recognition of the place as "mighty handy" for his purposes. Perhaps the horse had more imagination, for when his owner dismounted and sought to lead him through this narrow space, that seemed a broken doorway to an unroofed tunnel--so consecutive were the crags, so nearly their summits approached each other--he held back, making a long neck, hanging heavily on the bridle, and lifting each hoof reluctantly.

"D---- yer durned hide! ain't ye never goin' ter l'arn nuthin', many times ez ye hev been hyar?" cried his master.

Thus encouraged, the horse slowly followed Cheever along the narrow passway between the cliffs, that finally met in a veritable tunnel, which might have seemed an entrance into a cave, save that at its extremity Cheever emerged into a lighted space and the free out-door air, and stood facing the western skies.

Nevertheless, the ledges of the cliff extended, roof-like, far out above; its walls were on either side; the solid rock was beneath his feet. It was a gigantic niche in the crags, to which the subterranean passage alone gave access, one side being altogether open, showing the tops of the trees on the low opposite bank of the river, the stream itself in the deep gorge below, and many and many a league of cloud-land. This unexpected outlook, these large liberties of airy vision, formed the salient feature of the place, dwarfing for the first moment all other properties. On the resplendent background of the sunset, still richly aglow, the slouching figures of a group of half a dozen men about a smouldering fire had an odd dehumanized effect. Familiar though he was with these uncanny silhouettes, he started violently, and hesitated, as if about to turn and flee.

VI.

His gesture elicited a guffaw.

"Hold on, Buck," cried one of the men, affecting to clutch him to stay his flight.

"'Stan' the storm; it won't be long,'" trolled out another, a rich stave, with the resonance of the echoing walls. "What ye feared o', Buck--the devil? He don't keer ter 'sociate none with we-uns ez long ez ye air abroad an' afoot."

"I dun'no' what ails my eyes," said Cheever, visibly disconcerted, and passing his hand across his brow, as he still stood near the entrance, the bridle in his hand, the fine head of the impatient horse at his shoulder.

"Think ye see the devil?" cried another, jeeringly.

Cheever colored, and frowned heavily. The ridicule elicited what other means might have failed to lead forth. He could not brook this merry insolence, these flouts at his momentary fright. He justified it.

"I 'lowed I seen _another man_, what ain't hyar, an' never war," he said, gruffly, looking out at them from his drooping lids, his chin high in the air. The words seemed to have subtly transferred his transient terror. It took a longer lease in the exchange.

There was a momentary silence, while they stared with sudden gravity at him. A sort of remonstrance, a struggle against credulity, was in the square face of one burly fellow, seeming less a dark, illegible simulacrum of a man than the others, since he stood at an angle where the light fell slanting upon his features.

"What man, now?" Derridge said, in a deep bass voice, and the argumentative accents of one who will tolerate in evidence only fact and right reason. His tone seemed to challenge the name of the rash being who, in corporal absence, should venture in similitude among them.

"Dad burn ye, shet up!" cried Cheever. "I couldn't see his face. He turned it away. Whenst I looked at him he turned it away."

"In the name o' Gawd!" ejaculated one of the men, in a low-toned quaver.

Another, one Bob Millroy, Cheever's mainstay and lieutenant, glanced over his shoulder. "He ain't hyar now?" he demanded, in expostulatory haste.

"Naw, naw!" exclaimed Cheever, recovering himself, the more quickly as a monition of the possible disintegration of his gang, under the pressure of this mysterious recruit to their number, flitted across his mind. "Naw; he went ez soon ez I kem. Thar, now!" he continued, more lightly; "I know how it happens." He broke into a laugh that might have seemed strained, save that the rocks made such fantastic riot in the acoustics of the place. "It's Steve Yates. I'm used ter seem' _six_ men, an' whenst I count my chickens thar's _seven_. I looked ter see jes' six!" and he laughed again.

"But Steve air over yander in the shadder!" expostulated Derridge, the disciple of pure reason. "Ye couldn't hev seen him at all."

"Waal, then," sneered Cheever, "I seen double. They say thar air good men, an' ministers o' the gospel, ez kin view a few more snakes 'n air nateral ter thar vision whenst the liquor air strong; an' that thar whiskey o' old Pettingill's kin walk a mile, I reckon, ef need war."

The others had hardly recovered from the superstitious thrill induced by the explanation of the strange agitation that beset him upon his entrance. They were ill-prepared to so summarily cast the subject aside, and stood still, with preoccupied, dilated eyes, mechanically gazing at him as he turned lightly toward Yates, who rose from a saddle on which he had half reclined beside the fire. The young mountaineer's face had a tinge of pallor, despite its sunburn. His dull brown eyes were restless and anxious. He was hardly an apt scholar for scheming and dissimulation, but he sought an air of ease and satisfaction as he asked:

"Waal, did ye hear ennything o' my fambly in yer travels?"

Cheever, all himself again, clapped him on the shoulder with a heartiness that made the blow ring through the high stone vault. "I _seen_ 'em, my fine young cock, I _seen_ 'em. I wouldn't take no hearsay on it. I seen Mis' Yates _herself_, an' talked a haffen hour with her. An' I seen Moses."

Steve Yates made shift to glance at him once, then he turned his eyes away toward the western sky, nodding repeatedly, but silently, to the items of news with which Cheever favored him.

"Mis' Yates ain't wantin' fur nuthin', though Moses wants everything, _'ceptin' teeth_; like ter hev took my horse-critter away from me, willy-nilly! Mis' Yates hev got that thar ugly, leetle, frazzle-headed Pettingill vixen ter 'company her, an' Baker Anderson with his rifle bides thar o' nights. Mis' Yates war cheerful an' laffin'. 'Steve will kem back whenst he gits tired,' she say. 'He an' me had words 'fore he lef'. I'll hold out ez long ez he kin,' she say. 'I don't believe he hev done nuthin' agin the law,' she say. 'But _ef_ he hev,' she say, 'he air better off away than hyar at home, 'kase lynchers air mighty lawless round these parts.' An' she say, 'I know Steve air man enough ter take keer o' hisself an' do fur the bes', an' I'm willin' ter bide by what he do.'"

Alack! that a lie can so counterfeit the truth! To this wily and specious representation Stephen Yates listened with his eyes full of tears, afraid to trust a glance upon the face of his crafty companion.

"She say," Cheever went on, "ef Steve hev done ennything agin the law, I hope he'll make hisself sca'ce.'"

The other men, now affecting to stroll about in the ample spaces of the cavernous place, busying themselves with replenishing the fire or feeding the horses, of which there were half a dozen in a shadowy nook that seemed to extend downward to further subterranean regions, all gave furtive heed to these domestic reports. Ever and again they eyed the disingenuous face of the narrator with its half-closed lids and flexible lips. Then they would look at one another, and slyly wink their recognition of his craft. One of them, standing with his hands in his pockets and with a fire-lit face above the blazing logs, after a survey of this sort, grotesquely imitated the speaker's attitude and gesture, and silently worked his jaws with abnormal activity, as if in emulation of Cheever's ready eloquence, shook his head in affected despair, and desisted amid a smothered titter from the rest.

"Moses hev got another tooth; mighty nigh ez long ez a elephint's I seen at Colbury, I told him; an' it seemed ter make him mad--leastwise madder'n he war at fust. He wouldn't take no notice o' me, 'ceptin' whenst I put my finger in his mouth ter view his teeth, an' durned ef he didn't nearly bite it off. Oh, ye needn't ter trouble, Steve; ye air all right, an' hev done the bes' ye could, cornsiderin' all."

"I reckon so! I hope so!" said Yates, with something very like a sob.

They all sat around the fire late that night, after their supper of venison broiled on the coals, and corn-bread baked in the ashes, and washed down with a plentiful allowance of innocent-looking moonshine whiskey, colorless and clear as spring-water. The stars seemed very near, looking in at the wide portals of the niche; the tops of the gigantic trees swaying without were barely glimpsed above the verge. The shadows of the men lengthened over the floor, or fluctuated on the wall as the flames rose or fell. Now and again the fire-light was strong enough to show the horses at their improvised manger in those recesses where the darkness promised further chambers of the cavern. One steed lay upon the ground, the others stood, some still and drowsing, but more than once the sharp pawing of an iron-shod hoof challenged the abrupt echoes.

Outside, so sweet, so pure was the summer night; the buds of the elder-bush were riven into blooms, the mocking-bird piped for the rising moon, the katydids twanged a vibrant note, and the river sang the self-same song it had learned in the prehistoric days of the pygmies. Even so still, so calmly pensive was the time that the far-away murmur of the water-fall came to Yates's ears, or it may be to his memory only, which transmitted the fancy transmuted in sound to his sense. He lounged, half pillowed upon his saddle, in the circle about the fire, and strove to drink and laugh and talk with the rest. Many a merry jest had those walls echoed, seeming almost sentient in emulation of the boisterous joy. To-night, somehow, they had forgotten their jovial wiles. More than once the echo of laughter quavered off into strange sounds that the ear shrank to hear, and one after another of the brawny fellows looked furtively over his shoulder.

A sudden jar--only a screech-owl shrilling in a tree on the river-bank below--but one of the men was on his feet, all a-tremble, crying out, "What's that?" And this was the bold Cheever.

"Put up yor pistol, ye darned idjit!" exclaimed Derridge, the disciple of reason. "Don't ye know a squeech-owel whenst ye hear one? Ye must be plumb sodden in Pettingill whiskey."

Cheever, with a half-articulate oath, sank back upon the saddle upon which he half lay and half sat, and presently evolved an excuse for his nervousness. He had something too in his face that implied a doubt, a need of support, a wish for counsel.

"That gal at Yates's, I mean Litt Pettingill, sorter purtended ez she b'lieved ez I knowed o' Steve's wharabouts. Now Steve's welcome to shelter with we-uns. But I'd hate it powerful ef jes' 'kase he fell in with we-uns that night ez he war a-goin' fur the doctor ter patch Len Rhodes's head, 'twar ter be the means o' draggin' the law down on we-uns, an' gittin' it onto our trail."

"Ye mus' hev said suthin'. _She_ couldn't jes' hev drawed the idee out'n _nuthin'_," reasoned the deep bass voice of Derridge, who wore a severe and reprehensive frown. "Ye air a smart man, Buck, an' I ain't denyin' it none, but whenst a man talks ez much ez you-uns he _can't_ gin keerful heed ter _all_ his words, an' ye mus' hev said suthin' ez gin her a hint. Folks kin talk too much, specially whenst they set up ter be _smart_." He was a silent man himself, and was accounted slow.

Cheever sneered. "Ye air powerful brigaty ter-night. I reckon I be ekal ter keepin' a secret from enny gal folks. Leastwise I hev knowed a power o' secrets an' cornsider'ble gal folks. An' they never got tergether ez I ever hearn tell on."

This was logic, and it silenced his interlocutor. They all sat musing for a time, while the smoke mounted into the lofty dome of the niche, and the fire leaped fitfully, casting its flicker on all their faces, and the whole interior, a dull red and a dusky brown, seemed a discordant contrast to the white, lucent light of the unseen moon, stretching across the shadowy landscape. Dew there was on the trees without; it scintillated now and then, and far away rose soft and noiseless mists. More than once the night sighed audibly in sheer pensiveness.

"Boys," said Bob Millroy, suddenly, "I be a believer in signs."

There was a motionless interest in every face turned toward him. A contagion of credulity was in the very word.

"Hyar we-uns hev been," he went on, "a-goin' tergether fur many a day in secret, an' sech ez our workin's air they ain't 'cordin' ter law nor the 'pinion o' the cove. An' I ain't felt 'feard nowise--though some mought say the hemp air growed an' spun, an' the rope air twisted--till this evenin', whenst Buck Cheever seen an' extry man 'mongst we-uns, ez turned away his face. Sence then the fire's cold!"

He spread out his hands toward it, shaking his head in token of the futility of its swift combustion, with its flashes and sparkle and smoke, as he chafed them together.

"Lord A'mighty, ye durned cowardly fool!" cried the leader of the party, beside himself with anxiety and many a premonition. "Didn't I tell ye agin 'twar jes' Steve, ez I never looked ter view, bein' ez he ain't reg'lar 'mongst we-uns?"

"Ye 'lowed he turned his face away," said the believer in signs.

"Waal, hev Steve got enny crick in his neck that disables him from a-turnin' of _his_ face away?" demanded Cheever.

"He war in the shadder; ye never seen Steve," said Derridge, slowly shaking his logical head.

"He turned his face away so ez ye mought not view it," said Millroy, with a credulity that coerced responsive conviction.

Cheever was shaken. He suddenly desisted from argument. "Who air ye a-'lowin' 'twar?" he demanded from the opposite side of the fire.

The ligaments of his neck were elongated as he thrust his head forward. The fire-light showed only a glassy glitter where it struck upon the eyeballs beneath his half-closed lids. Bereft of the expression of his eyes, it was wonderful how much of suspense, of petrified expectation, of the presage of calamity, the hard lines of his face conveyed.

"'Twar him we met up with on the road that night," said Millroy, who from the affluence of his resources of conjecture could afford to dispense with mere proof and fact.

Cheever was conscious that the others were watching him with the urgent anxiety of those who have a personal interest at stake. The sense of emergency was substituted for courage.

"I wish 'twar," he said, coolly. "_He_ ain't dead--a mighty pity! I'd give the bes' horse I ever see"--he nodded his head toward the gallant roan--"ef I could view _his_ harnt."

There was an evident revulsion in the plastic minds of his followers. They had no sense of consistency to sustain adherence to any dogma. Millroy was in the minority when he said, still mysteriously shaking his head, "I'll bet the minit ye seen him 'mongst we-uns an' he turned his head away war the minit o' his takin' off."

"Ye air always skeered o' yer shadder, Bob," said Cheever; "an' I never knowed a feller so rich in signs ez kem ter nuthin'. That man would be powerful welcome hyar in the sperit. I be a heap more pestered 'kase we let him git off soul an' body tergether. I know he war shot. I dun'no' who fired it"--he mechanically closed his right hand as upon the handle of a pistol, his first finger extended and crooked upon the imaginary trigger, while the observant Bob Millroy scanned with unspoken deductions the unconscious, involuntary gesture. "I never thunk he war much hurt, though ez he went scourin' off he war bowed ter the saddle-bow, but that war ter escape the bullets ez kem arter him. He'll live ter lead a posse an' the sher'ff ter the spot, mos' likely; _I'm_ 'feared o' that. I'd _de_light ter see his harnt."

"Bob oughter hev a muzzle," said the reasonable Derridge, irritably--"ter keep him from spittin' out signs hyar, whilst we-uns oughter be cornsiderin' how the law mought be takin' us, red-handed, with all our plunder ter convict us"--he cast a glance at certain saddle-bags that lay close to Cheever's side. "He jes' sets up an' gins us a sign fur this, an' a warnin' fur that, till we air plumb wore out with his foolishness."

"This place be safe enough, I'm a-thinkin'; no use a-worryin' an' a-fussin'," said the unctuous voice of Pete Beckett, always full of a hopeful content, and like oil upon the troubled waters.

The others listened with clearing countenances, but Cheever shook his head. "Revenuers know it; they raided a still hyar wunst." The red fire-light on the circle of faces showed their alarm at the recollection, the prophetic suggestion. "Old man Peake run it."

"Ye 'low ef they war ter s'picion ennybody roundabouts, they mought s'arch hyar," said Derridge, drawing the logical conclusion.

"Edzac'ly," said Cheever, impatient of the waste of words by so patent a deduction.

"They do say," remarked Millroy, sepulchrally, "that arter Zeb Tait went deranged, he hid hyar whenst they wanted ter jail him ez a crazy."

"Too crazy ter want ter go ter jail," exclaimed Derridge, satirically.

"An'," pursued Millroy, lugubriously, "he starved hisself ter death in this place; leastwise they fund his corpse hyar, though he mought hev died from his ailment. But I dun'no' _ef_ folks _do_ die from jes' bein' crazy an' bereft."

"Naw, they don't," said Cheever, suddenly, "else ye'd hev been dead long ago, ez crazy a loon ez ever went a-gibberin' o' foolishness around."

Somehow his magnetic quality was at fault. The others failed to fall in with his humor. They all sat silent, staring at the red coals; the image of the distraught, solitary creature, who had in the secret stronghold of the mountains wrought out his terrible doom, was in the mind of each.

Millroy spoke rather to their thought than to the words of Cheever, when he said, "The buzzards an' the eagles flyin' an' flusterin' round the body led the sher'ff ter the spot."

The prosaic word, full of worldly omen, broke the breathless spell.