Part 2

“I reckon Jake Baintree mus’ be innercent,” observed Bowles, with the mild eye and voice of the temporizer. “He war twenty when it happened, an’ he be twenty-five now—a year older ’n Teck. It tuk all that time ter jail an’ try him.”

“Waal, the law is slow,—the law is slow.” The important constable deported himself with a sort of clumsy pride in the lingering exploits of the law.

“Yes, sir; ’minds me of a slow mule-race all the time, the law does,” said Bowles.

Strobe looked at him, surlily suspicious of a satiric intent, but the mild Bowles had evidently spoken in all good faith.

“Sech talk ez Teck’s air the reason they hed ter hev a change o’ venue,” said Strobe, presently. “Stiddier tryin’ Baintree in Colb’ry, his county town, they hed ter take him ter Glaston, ’kase folks in this county war all so set agin him the court ’lowed he couldn’t git a fair trial hyar.”

“I reckon his folks hev been powerful put ter it ter live along all this time,” remarked Bowles.

“I know they never planted none the fust year,” rejoined Strobe.

“Waal, at fust they ’lowed it would be soon over, an’ they jes’ stirred thar stumps ter do everything fur the trial, an’ they thunk o’ nuthin’ else. Then nex’ year they hed ter pay suthin’ ter them lawyers, whether they sp’ilt thar case or no.”

“Jake war a-tellin’ me the t’ other day,” said Strobe, “how thankful he war ter some o’ thar neighbors, ez hed holped ’em along in thar troubles. Ye know he air so meek-spoken, an’ perlite, an’ sech now; an’ he jes’ makes hisse’f ez small ez he sets by the fire, an’ he grins afore ye kin speak ter him, an’—I dunno.” He relinquished suddenly the descriptive effort. “An’ I jes’ spoke up, an’ I say, ‘I’d be obleeged ter ye, Jake, now that the law hev let ye off, ef ye wouldn’t _look_ so durned guilty.’”

“What’d he say?” demanded Bowles.

“Waal, the critter changed suddint. An’ he say, ‘I know folks ’low I be guilty, an’ it makes me look guilty till I plumb _feel_ guilty.’”

The constable’s portly form had a burly shadow behind it, as he rose from his seat on the rock, for the moon was well up now, glistening through the needles of the pines, and casting a broad refulgent sheen upon the empty road; the blades of Indian corn gleamed, as they stirred in the breeze. Bowles had unhooked his arms from the fence rail, and the two men took their way together to the little cabin in the notch. The conformation of the great slopes above it was such as to show a neighboring peak standing definite and dark against the evening sky. Adown the wooded steeps the shadows gloomed. The ground fell away from the door in an abrupt descent, and through the uninclosed passage between the two rooms, which constituted the house, could be seen a far-reaching defile of crags and sombre purple ranges in the elusive blue distances. The little cabin, its ridge-pole in a slant against the sky, with its forlorn shanty of a barn, its few bee-gums awry along the rickety rail fence, its scanty scaffolds of tobacco and drying fruit, seemed all the more meagre for the splendid affluence of the scene spread out before it on every side. “I kin see fifty mile an’ furder in three States,” Bowles, its owner, some-timer boasted.

“I’d ruther see fewer bushes an’ mo’ cornfield,” his wife as often retorted.

It was with none of the complacence of ownership that she contemplated her share in his possessions. She often satirically commented upon them, with a singular absence of any sense of responsibility for them. Although she maintained absolute sway in the household, she deported herself like an alien.

The interior was alight with a dull red glow, for the cooking of supper was in progress; and while she waited for the baking of the johnny-cake she sat upon the step of the rickety little porch and looked about her with an idle, casual glance, devoid of any consanguinity with the objects upon which it rested. She was some twenty years of age, perhaps. She had a clear olive complexion, and dark brown hair smoothly drawn away from a broad low forehead. Her eyes were small, dark, and bead-like, and held a laughing twinkle in them. She had a blunt nose, and flexible lips that showed two rows of teeth, large, strong, and white. She was accounted good-looking, and had the neat and orderly appearance common to people of that repute. Her compact and well-rounded figure was tidily bestowed in a blue and white checked cotton dress, and from the “tuckin’-comb” at the back of her head no loose ends of hair escaped. Her husband had esteemed himself singularly fortunate to win such a prize, handicapped as he was in the matrimonial race. He felt himself elderly at thirty-five; he was a widower, poorer than his fellows, and burdened with three children. It was rumored in the Cove that she had married Benjamin Bowles to spite another lover, with whom she had quarreled. It is to be hoped that this unique revenge smote with due force its intended victim, but Mrs. Bowles had times of great depression of spirit, and it may be feared that her chosen retribution had given her a backhanded blow in its recoil.

It was with much urbanity that she received the constable, who was her cousin, and who had chanced to be called up into the mountain on official business, and had stopped to spend the night at his relative’s house. She evidently entertained some anxiety that a flattering report of the match she had made, and her content therewith, should go down to the Cove, and for this she exerted her tact. She was smiling and brisk as she served the supper, which was savory enough, for she was a good housewife, bland and kind to her step-children, decorous and deferential to her husband; but her manner to his brother was singularly null, which indication Eli Strobe did not fail to notice. There was antagonism here, and each was strong in a way. “Fight dog, fight bar,” said Eli Strobe, chuckling to himself.

It titillated his sense of humor to remember how anxious she had been that Jepson should join his cattle and sheep and household gear to her husband’s stock, when his mother had died, and his home in the valley was thus broken up. It had been a provident and profitable arrangement on her part.

“Ef she jes’ could hev got the vally o’ the stock ’thout the bother an’ contrariousness o’ hevin’ Teck in the house, wouldn’t she hev been happy!” Strobe silently jeered.

They sat around the open door, after the meal was concluded. The high air was chill; the influence of the stern wilds, with the lonely moon upon them, with the silent mists vagrant in the valleys, was vaguely drear, but the red flare of the smouldering fire within was genial to see, and harmonized with the sense of home. A’minty sat upon the doorstep, with the yellow cat in her arms; it was wakeful, eying the moonlight, and now and then the flickering gossamer wing of a cicada’s short flight in a few hop vines at one side of the porch. The old dog lay at length and drowsed; but a puppy found an absorbing interest in a toad hopping along the road, and now sat and gazed at him with knitted brows and an intent attitude, and now smote him with a festive paw and treated him to a high callow yap. How the leaves of the oak accorded with the moonlight; how they lent their glossy surface to the sheen! The shadows flecked the road with dusky intervals and interfulgent glitter, and the great crag that jutted out a little way down the slope was half in the gloom and half in the light. Mrs. Bowles’s needles clicked, as she knitted, and gleamed in the red glow of the fire.

“Miss me enny in the Cove, cousin Eli?” she demanded, flashing her bead-like eyes upon him.

Strobe thrust his hands deep in his pockets, swayed himself far back in his chair, and surveyed her with a sort of burly jocosity.

“Waal, _I_ ain’t missed ye none,” he averred. He looked steadily at her, as if to watch the effect of this statement, and she, apprehending a jest, returned his gaze expectantly. “I ’lowed ez Peter Bryce war competent ter miss ye about all the missin’ ez ye war entitled ter. Ho! ho! I reckon he ’lows ez Bowles air ez lucky ez a wishbone.”

And Benjamin Bowles, feeling somehow thrust out of the conversation at his own fireside, so that he could think of nothing to say, made haste to glibly laugh too, to show his triumph in his prize; for Peter Bryce was the rejected suitor.

Mrs. Bowles looked quickly at her husband, as if to supervise the due exhibition of gratulation; then laughed coquettishly, with a great show of teeth. “Oh, nobody expec’s _ye_ ter take ter jokin’! Ye air so sober-sided, cousin Eli.”

She dropped a stitch, and bent forward to catch the light of the flames upon it. She drew back with a sharp cry.

“Who put that thar stick o’ ellum wood on the fire ter burn? Who’s burnin’ ellum?” she exclaimed, pointing at it.

“’Tain’t ellum, air it?” Her husband bent over in quick anxiety to see.

“Ellum!” said cousin Eli laconically. “I seen it ez soon ez I kem in.”

“It air a sign o’ bad luck!” she protested, at once flustered and angry.

“Ellum,” said cousin Eli Strobe ruminatively. He leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, and gazed into the fire with his heavy-lidded eyes. “Ellum,” he repeated, his pipe between his set teeth. “They makes coffins out’n ellum, an’ that’s why they ’low that burnin’ it air a sign o’ death.”

Mrs. Bowles looked at her husband for a moment, aghast.

“Sim mus’ hev put it on,” said Bowles, weakly seeking to shield himself.

Sim was a small carrot-headed boy, whose sullen, watchful eyes and manner, at once cowed and resentful, intimated some harsh dealings of Fate.

“It don’t make no diff’ence ef Sim did,” said Teck Jepson.

Mrs. Bowles looked at him angrily, apprehending the defiance, but silently; he returned the gaze with steadfast intentness, and she flung petulantly away.

“Sim air a bad aig,” she remarked. “I dunno what ailed that ’oman”—thus she always referred to her predecessor—“ter raise her chil’n ter be so mean an’ spiteful. She war a fool, sure!”

“Waal, waal,” said the husband and father uneasily, “I reckon she done the bes’ she could.”

It was all he dared say in defense of the dead, but urgent conscience constrained this. He often thought of her,—far more often, doubtless, than if his second marriage had been a smoother fate,—and of the terrible winter that she died, when the mountain was sheathed in ice and impassable; no man could come up or go down, and he was isolated in his sorrow. A ghastly gray day it was when he hollowed out with his own hands a shallow grave in the frozen ground, and laid her in it, with only the three babbling children to stand by. It was in some sort as an offering to her memory that he occasionally admitted to himself that his second marriage was a mistake. Sometimes he tried to look upon it as a sacrifice: the children would have frozen stiff, would have starved, would have run wild, with no woman to look after them, he said to himself. And in this half-hearted matrimonial bargain there was a set-off for Mrs. Bowles’s spited lover.

The influence of the burning elm was very perceptible in Mrs. Bowles’s manner after that; for a time she was silent and preoccupied, and roused herself only to rebuke the children, unmindful of the story that would go down to the Cove. Sim and A’minty were quick to note the change of mood, and deported themselves with a dodging expectation; but Bob, a boy of four, sat before the fire, now broadly smiling, and now nodding and dozing in his chair. He was plump and ruddy, his big eyes were hazel and bright, and his hair, cropped in a unique manner by perverse shears, heightened the grotesque callowness of his aspect. The dogs walked casually over him; the cats climbed upon him, and made him convenient to reach the bowl of milk on the table; the chickens did not scruple to perch upon the arms of his chair, or even on his knee, or his hand, or his head. The world was not easy to small Bob Bowles, but his was the temperament to make it easier. A good-tempered, docile creature he was, for he had no sensitive sentiments to assuage when the smart to his flesh had ceased.

The talk fell among the men, and presently Teck was recounting his garbled version of the preaching he had heard at the camp-meeting in the Cove. The speed that Jehu made, as he so gallantly drove into Jezreel, had impressed him deeply. “I wisht I knowed edzac’ly how fas’ he traveled, an’ sech time ez he made,” he said wistfully. “Pa’son never read that.”

The seeming barbarity of the old chronicles, the poetic justice meted out with so unfaltering a hand, had no morbid effect upon his sensibilities. It was but the fit rounding of the heroic tale. The ghastly details, however, were an aggravation to Mrs. Bowles’s darkened mood. “Air _that_ in the Bible?” she would cry in dismay. “Waal, sir! I’m glad them folks air gone! I’ll be bound they made a heap o’ trouble. They hed ter bar up the door, in them days, _I know_. Wuss’n the boys in the Cove.”

She tried to change the theme. She rallied her amiability. She flashed her bead-like eyes at cousin Eli with her old-time coquetry, and her renewed desire that only triumphant accounts might go down to the Cove was manifest in her eager anxiety to put the small household belongings before him in their best light. She seemed nearer akin to her household effects as she sought to gloss over any imperfection. Her recognition of their deficiencies had hitherto been couched in the form of sneers, to acquaint her husband with the damage “that ’oman” had done to them.

“I dunno what ails that cheer ez ye air settin’ in ter creak so, cousin Eli,” she observed. “It’s plumb strong. ’Tain’t goin’ ter let ye down.” Her reassuring smile showed her strong white teeth. Its suavity was gone before its distention relaxed, as she turned suddenly to her husband. “Did ennybody ever put one e-end o’ a coffin inter it?” she asked breathlessly.

Bowles started, with a wild glance about the room, as if to identify the chair that had borne so ghastly a burden. “Laws-a-massy, naw, M’ria! _That_ cheer air in the roof-room. What ails ye ter ax sech?”

“Waal,” she said hastily, in much perturbation, “the old folks ’low ez sech a cheer will groan an’ creak ever arter.”

“’Tain’t disturbin’ me noways, cousin M’ria,” said cousin Eli. “I’ll die when my time comes.” He seemed to make an admission in saying this in a deep bass voice.

“I dunno what ailed me ter take up sech a notion,” she observed, with a forced laugh, as she resumed her knitting. After this she succeeded in so steering the conversation as to exclude Jepson and further reminiscences of Jezreel; and she was not sorry when, after sitting for a time in brooding silence, he rose, put his pipe into his pocket, and strolled out upon the porch, then down the path in the light of the midsummer moon.

Somehow it seemed to share the lush splendors of the August, the climax of ripening growths, of fair fruitions, of rank and riotous blossoming. Never before, he thought, had it worn so rich and radiant a guise as it hung above the purple mountains; a gilded bloom rested upon its disk; this fine and delicate efflorescence softened yet did not dim its lustre. Far, far, he followed it amidst the great trees, draped from their stupendous heights to the ground with the luxuriant cables of the grapevines, the fragrance of the fruit perfuming the air. The laurel was done with blooming, but the dew lurked in its bosky tangles, and sent out a scintillating glimmer. How few the stars were!—few and faint, for the night was the moon’s. He paused in a rocky rift in a great gorge, that he might look up to see one afar off, with a dim glitter; and the tracings of a coil that he knew, but not as Scorpio; and in a gap in a Carolina Mountain a planet that was rising. How long ago they were kindled,—these stars! How many eyes had turned to them! The prophets saw them. And as he tended sheep and lay on the hillsides with his flocks, David himself had known these lucent splendors. And Moses, familiar of the high mountains, in whose fastnesses he spoke with the Lord as man with man,—they surely shone upon that hidden place where the great lawgiver lay.

“A powerful strange buryin’,” he meditated, “the Lord himself chief mourner.”

He paused, pondering, with a sort of solemn pride that poor humanity should ever have been thus cherished.

The thought of death in the gaunt gorge, with the looming cliffs on either side and many a black chasm below; with only the starveling shrubs to grow, and the moon to light the stark spaces as of a desert world; with the white mists to hide the familiar valley, and a dark mountain to gloom afar, while the lonely sky bent above, induced a strangely isolated feeling, and the recollection of a certain forlorn fate came ghastly and drear into his mind. It was a long time ago, he said to himself, and men die daily; why should he think, with a numb chill upon him, of Samuel Keale? He glanced upward among the black shadows of the jagged rock, sharply outlined in the moon’s light upon the gray sandstone. Suddenly a moving shadow was among them: a wolf, black and grisly, with a lowered tail and a keen muzzle, stood upon the summit, and looked curiously, with doubtful glittering eyes and a quivering snuffing nostril, at the motionless figure below. The cowardly animal sprang back affrighted, when Jepson stirred. He had drawn a broad-bladed knife, and passed his hand quickly along its keen edge. But until his stentorian halloo roused the sleeping echoes with a thousand weird shouts, the animal showed sign of flight. It crouched like a frightened dog; then turned, and ran cowering and silent along the summit, pausing only once to cast a swift glance backward, and so out of sight.

“Ef ye hed been hongry, Mister Wolf, ye’d hev kem down hyar ter see what I be made out’n. Too many good sheep an’ yearlin’ cattle pastured round them thar mountings fur ye ter git fightin’ hongry till winter-time.”

He put up his knife, but his mind was tenacious of its impressions. The wolf had added another grim suggestion to the idea of death alone among the mountains, in the depths of the unexplored, inaccessible cave.

“’Tain’t fur from hyarabouts, I hearn tell,” he said. Then he took himself to task. “I hev got ter quit this hyar way o’ lopin’ in the woods like I war bereft. I’ll git teched in the head, ef I don’t mind. Folks are beginnin’ ter laff at me, ennyhows, ’bout talkin’ so much ’bout them in the Bible. Las’ time I war at the Settlemint, them boys thar at the store axed me, ‘How’s Solomon, an’ Mrs. Solomon?’ Durn ’em! I’d hate, though, fur Moses an’ David an’ them ter kem back, ef they could, an’ find me so beset an’ tuk up ’bout them an’ thar doin’s. I’ll be bound they wouldn’t take ez much notice o’ me.”

As he sought to assume his place on this basis of mutual indifference, he noted a rock lying before a niche in the cliffs. It had been cleft by some freeze of the past winter perhaps; the fragment had fallen down the chasm at some distance, and he could dimly see the black interior of the fissure. Once again, the idea of death recurred to his persistent mind. This was like the burial caves of the Bible, with a stone rolled to the door of the crypt. He sat down near at hand; he was trembling with the intensity of his interest. He gazed at the place with an excited fascination. He wondered if any one could have been buried here. But no,—he would have heard of it. Besides, he was surprised now that he could have thought it,—the place was too contracted; a full-grown man could not have been entombed in this niche.

His interest flagged upon the prosaic summons of fact. He rose to turn homeward. Then he stopped suddenly and looked back. In shifting his position he saw the moon full on the place now, on the broken stone that had been rolled to the niche; shining through the rift, blanching the sandstone, and showing distinctly, too, some dark object within.

He did not understand his motive afterward. He fell upon the rock in a sudden fury; it yielded to his strength, and rolled crashing down the gorge, rousing a wild clamor in the silent mountains. He did not hear. He did not heed.

The niche was smaller even than he had thought. There were no ghastly relics, no bones, no hair; only a man’s hat and coat, quite fresh and well preserved,—the usual jeans coat, the white wool hat common in the mountains; but as he unrolled them, there was some vague air about them that was familiar, and he knew them for the missing man’s. When were they hidden here? His quick imagination could answer, could paint the scene in every minute detail. He saw the skulking, guilty creature coming down the gorge laden with these garments, warm then from the form chilling fast, perhaps, in some icy subterranean current. The niche was a ready hiding-place, the great rock close at hand. And here they had lain concealed till the essential moment when the freeze cleft the rock and rendered up the evidence,—the new evidence, so long buried where the criminal had hidden it. And as Jepson held the garments aloft a recollection of his experience in the courts came to him. “A man shall not be placed twice in jeopardy of his life for the same offense,” said the lawyer.

II.

The undying grandeur of the mountains, their solemn fixity, the mystery that hangs about them, and their sombre silences impose upon the mind a sense of immutability, and in their midst human life seems a fluctuating, trivial thing, and men come and go with the transitory ineffectiveness of a shifting vapor.

Something of this was in Teck Jepson’s thoughts, as he stood on the river bank at the baptizing in the valley, and looked about him at the close-circling purple heights. He remembered many who had known them, and whom they would know no more; and he fancied that others—half fact, half figment of his ignorant imagination—had made their homes here, who had never trod these rugged ways. And he took note, too, of the vanishing presence of the Indian and those dim traditional pygmy dwellers in Tennessee, far back in the fabulous perspectives of time, still vaguely known in rural regions as the “little people.”

A dusky bloom was upon the vast slopes, for a black cloud overspread their summits and portended rain. All the landscape was in the sullen shadow, and wore this dull purple, or a deep, indefinite gray and brown, save that upon one of the minor ridges about the base of the Great Smoky the sun’s rays fell diverging from a rift in the clouds,—a yellow fibrous slant on the illuminated emerald tint of the foliage below, indescribably brilliant in the sudden contrast. The stream, closely begirt on one side by frowning crags and lower rock-bound banks on the other, was black and swift and sinister, with here and there a white flash of foam. It might have suggested Styx rather than Jordan, but for the congregation standing on the pebbly margin where the county road came down in a cleft in the rocks to a doubtful ford,—the landing being effected on the opposite side, so far up stream that it was barely visible,—and but for the weird baptismal hymns and the echoing psalmody of the heathen rocks.

The assemblage had a melancholy guise: the elder men grizzled and grim, with broad-brimmed hats and clad in jeans, and the women with pallid, ascetic faces, barely glimpsed under their long tunnel-like sun-bonnets, and wearing straight-skirted homespun dresses. Only in the rear of the crowd some of the languid young mountaineers showed signs of latent but fitful levity. There were always voices enough to carry on the sonorous hymn, though under its cover remarks in an undertone were often exchanged. Above on the slope were hitched the ox-wagons and saddle-horses that had conveyed the company hither, but in the defile between the crags were two horsemen, still mounted, gravely watching the rite administered.