Part 21

His round black head shone in the moonlight, glistening because of his habit of plunging it, by way of making his toilet, into the barrel of water where he tempered his steel. He crossed his huge folded bare arms over his breast, and leaned back against the door on two legs of the rickety chair.

"Naw, sir," another chimed in. "He mought hev knowed he'd jes hev ter go ter quarryin' agin."

"They air always a-crackin' up them folks in the Bible ez sech powerful wise men," said another, whose untrained mind evidently held the germs of advanced thinking. "'Pears ter me ez some of 'em conducted tharselves ez foolish ez enny folks I know--this hyar very Moses one o' 'em. Throwin' down them rocks 'minds me o' old man Pinner's tantrums. Sher'ff kem ter his house 'bout a jedgmint debt, an' levied on his craps. An' arter he war gone old man tuk a axe an' gashed bodaciously inter the loom an' hacked it up. Ez ef that war goin' ter do enny good! His wife war the mos' outed woman I ever see. They 'ain't got nare nother loom nuther, an' hain't hearn no advices from the Lord."

The violinist paused in his playing. "They 'lowed Moses war a meek man too," he said. "He killed a man with a brick-badge an' buried him in the sand. Mighty meek ways"--with a satirical grimace.

The others, divining that this was urged in justification and precedent for devious modern ways that were not meek, did not pursue this branch of the subject.

"S'prised me some," remarked the advanced thinker, "ter hear ez them tables o' stone war up on the bald o' the mounting thar. I hed drawed the idee ez 'twar in some other kentry somewhar--I dunno--" He stopped blankly. He could not formulate his geographical ignorance. "An' I never knowed," he resumed, presently, "ez thar war enough gold in Tennessee ter make a gold calf; they fund gold hyar, but 'twar mighty leetle."

"Mebbe 'twar a mighty leetle calf," suggested the blacksmith.

"Mebbe so," assented the other.

"Mebbe 'twar a silver one," speculated a third; "plenty o' silver they 'low thar air in the mountings."

The violinist spoke up suddenly. "Git one o' them Injuns over yander ter Quallatown right seasonable drunk, an' he'll tell ye a power o' places whar the old folks said thar war silver." He bowed his chin once more upon the instrument, and again the slow drawling conversation proceeded to soft music.

"Ef ye'll b'lieve me," said the advanced thinker, "I never war so conflusticated in my life ez I war when he stood up in meetin' an' told 'bout'n the tables o' the law bein' on the bald! I 'lowed 'twar somewhar 'mongst some sort'n people named 'Gyptians."

"Mebbe some o' them Injuns air named 'Gyptians," suggested Spears, the blacksmith.

"Naw, sir," spoke up the fiddler, who had been to Quallatown, and was the ethnographic authority of the meeting. "Tennessee Injuns be named Cher'kee, an' Chick'saw, an' Creeks."

There was a silence. The moonlight sifted through the dark little shanty of a shop; the fretting and foaming of a mountain stream arose from far down the steep slope, where there was a series of cascades, a fine water-power, utilized by a mill. The sudden raucous note of a night-hawk jarred upon the air, and a shadow on silent wings sped past. The road was dusty in front of the shop, and for a space there was no shade. Into the full radiance of the moonlight a rabbit bounded along, rising erect with a most human look of affright in its great shining eyes as it tremulously gazed at the motionless figures. It too was motionless for a moment. The young musician made a lunge at it with his bow; it sprang away with a violent start--its elongated grotesque shadow bounding kangaroo-like beside it--into the soft gloom of the bushes. There was no other traveller along the road, and the talk was renewed without further interruption. "Waal, sir, ef 'twarn't fur the testimony o' the words he reads ez air graven on them rocks, I couldn't git my cornsent ter b'lieve ez Moses ever war in Tennessee," said the advanced thinker. "I ain't ondertakin' ter say what State he settled in, but I 'lowed 'twarn't hyar. It mus' hev been, though, 'count o' the scripture on them broken tables."

"I never knowed a meetin' woke ter sech a pint o' holiness. The saints jes rampaged around till it fairly sounded like the cavortin's o' the ungodly," a retrospective voice chimed in.

"I raised thirty-two hyme chunes," said the musician, who had a great gift in quiring, and was the famed possessor of a robust tenor voice. "A leetle mo' gloryin' aroun' an' I'd hev kem ter the eend o' my row, an' hev hed ter begin over agin." He spoke with acrimony, reviewing the jeopardy in which his _repertoire_ had been placed.

"Waal," said the blacksmith, passing his hand over his black head, as sleek and shining as a beaver's, "I'm a-goin' up ter the bald o' the mounting some day soon, ef so be I kin make out ter shoe that mare o' mine"--for the blacksmith's mount was always barefoot--"I'm afeard ter trest her unshod on them slippery slopes; I want ter read some o' them sayin's on the stone tables myself. I likes ter git a tex' or the eend o' a hyme set a-goin' in my head--seems somehow ter teach itself ter the anvil, an' then it jes says it back an' forth all day. Yestiddy I never seen its beat--'Christ--war--born--in--Bethlehem.' The anvil jes rang with that ez ef the actial metal hed the gift o' prayer an' praise."

"Waal, sir," exclaimed Job Grinnell, who had been having frequent colloquies aside with the companionable jug, "ye mought jes ez well save yer shoes an' let yer mare go barefoot. Thar ain't nare sign o' a word writ on them rocks."

They all sat staring at him. Even the singing, long-drawn vibrations of the violin were still.

"By Hokey!" exclaimed the young musician, "I'll take Purdee's word ez soon ez yourn."

The whiskey which Grinnell had drunk had rendered him more plastic still to jealousy. The day was not so long past when Purdee's oath would have been esteemed a poor dependence against the word of so zealous a brother as he--a pillar in the church, a shining light of the congregation. He noted the significant fact that it behooved him to justify himself; it irked him that this was exacted as a tribute to Purdee's newly acquired sanctity.

"Purdee's jes a-lyin' an' a-foolin' ye," he declared. "Ever been up on the bald?"

They had lived in its shadow all their lives. Even by the circuitous mountain ways it was not more than five miles from where they sat. But none had chanced to have a call to go, and it was to them as a foreign land to be explored.

"Waal, I hev, time an' agin," said Grinnell. "I dunno who gin them rocks the name of Moses' tables o' the Law. Moses must hev hed a powerful block an' tackle ter lift sech tremenjious rocks. I hev known 'em named sech fur many a year. But I seen 'em not three weeks ago, an' thar ain't nare word writ on 'em. Thar's the mounting; thar's the rocks; ye kin go an' stare-gaze 'em an' sati'fy yerse'fs."

Whether it were by reason of the cumulative influences of the continual references to the jug, or of that sense of reviviscence, that more alert energy, which the cool Southern nights always impart after the sultry summer days, the suggestion that they should go now and solve the mystery, and meet the dawn upon the summit of the bald, found instant acceptance, which it might not have secured in the stolid daylight.

The moon, splendid, a lustrous white encircled by a great halo of translucent green, swung high above the duskily purple mountains. Below in the valleys its progress was followed by an opalescent gossamer presence that was like the overflowing fulness, the surplusage, of light rather than mist. The shadows of the great trees were interlaced with dazzling silver gleams. The night was almost as bright as the day, but cool and dank, full of sylvan fragrance and restful silence and a romantic liberty.

The blacksmith carried his rifle, for wolves were often abroad in the wilderness. Two or three others were similarly armed; the advanced thinker had a hunting-knife, Job Grinnell a pistol that went by the name of "shootin'-iron." The musician carried no weapon. "I ain't 'feared o' no wolf," he said; "I'll play 'em a chune." He went on in the vanguard, his tousled yellow hair idealized with many a shimmer in the moonlight as it hung curling down on his blue jeans coat, his cheek laid softly on the violin, the bow glancing back and forth as if strung with moonbeams as he played. The men woke the solemn silences with their loud mirthful voices; they startled precipitate echoes; they fell into disputes and wrangled loudly, and would have turned back if sure of the way home, but Job Grinnell led steadily on, and they were fain to follow. They lagged to look at a spot where some man, unheeded even by tradition, had dug his heart's grave in a vain search for precious metal. A deep excavation in the midst of the wilderness told the story; how long ago it was might be guessed from the age of a stalwart oak that had sunk roots into its depths; the shadows were heavy about it; a sense of despair brooded in the loneliness. And so up and up the endless ascent; sometimes great chasms were at one side, stretching further and further, and crowding the narrow path--the herder's trail--against the sheer ascent, till it seemed that the treacherous mountains were yawning to engulf them. The air was growing colder, but was exquisitely clear and exhilarating; the great dewy ferns flung silvery fronds athwart the way; vines in stupendous lengths swung from the tops of gigantic trees to the roots. Hark! among them birds chirp; a matutinal impulse seems astir in the woods; the moon is undimmed; the stars faint only because of her splendors; but one can feel that the earth has roused itself to a sense of a new day. And there, with such feathery flashes of white foam, such brilliant straight lengths of translucent water, such a leaping grace of impetuous motion, the currents of the mountain stream, like the arrows of Diana, shoot down the slopes. And now a vague mist is among the trees, and when it clears away they seem shrunken, as under a spell, to half their size. They grow smaller and smaller still, oak and chestnut and beech, but dwarfed and gnarled like some old orchard. And suddenly they cease, and the vast grassy dome uprises against the sky, in which the moon is paling into a dull similitude of itself; no longer wondrous, transcendent, but like some lily of opaque whiteness, fair and fading. Beneath is a purple, deeply serious, and sombre earth, to which mists minister, silent and solemn; myriads of mountains loom on every hand; the half-seen mysteries of the river, which, charged with the red clay of its banks, is of a tawny color, gleams as it winds in and out among the white vapors that reach in fantastic forms from heaven above to the valley below. There is a certain relief in the mist--it veils the infinities of the scene, on which the mind can lay but a trembling hold.

"Folks tell all sort'n cur'ous tales 'bout'n this hyar spot," said Job Grinnell, his square face, his red hair hanging about his ears, and his ragged red beard visible in the dull light of the coming day. "I hev hearn folks 'low ez a pa'tridge up hyar will look ez big ez a Dominicky rooster. An' ef ye listens ye kin hear words from somewhar. An' sometimes in the cattle-herdin' season the beastises will kem an' crowd tergether, an' stan' on the bald in the moonlight all night."

"I dunno," said the advanced thinker, "ez I be s'prised enny ef Purdee, ez be huntin' up hyar so constant, hev got sorter teched in the head, ter take up sech a cur'ous notion 'bout'n them rocks."

He glanced along the slope at the spot, visible now, where Moses flung the stone tables and they broke in twain. And there, standing beside them, was a man of great height, dressed in blue jeans, his broad-brimmed hat pushed from his brow, and his meditative dark eyes fixed upon the rocks; a deer, all gray and antlered, lay dead at his feet, and his rifle rested on the ground as he leaned on the muzzle.

A glance was interchanged between the others. Their intention, the promptings of curiosity, had flagged during the long tramp and the gradual waning of the influence of the jug. The coincidence of meeting Purdee here revived their interest. Grinnell, remembering the ancient feud, held back, being unlikely to elicit Purdee's views in the face of their contradiction. The blacksmith and the young fiddler took their way down toward him.

He looked up with a start, seeing them at some little distance. His full, contemplative eyes rested upon them for a moment almost devoid of questioning. It was not the face of a man who finds himself confronted with the discovery of his duplicity and his hypocrisy. There was a strange doubt stirring in the blacksmith's heart. As he approached he looked upon the storied rocks with a sort of solemn awe, as if they had indeed been given by the hand of the Lord to his servant, who broke them here in his wrath. He knew that the step of the musician slackened as he followed. What holy mysteries were they not rushing in upon? He spoke in a bated voice.

"Roger," he said, "we'uns hearn ye tell 'bout the scriptures graven on these hyar tables ez Moses flung down, an' we'uns 'lowed we'uns would kem an' read some fur ourselves."

Purdee did not speak nor hesitate; he moved aside that the blacksmith might stand where he had been--as it were at the foot of the page.

But what transcendent glories thronged the heavens--what august splendors of dawn! Had the sun ever before risen like this, with the sky an emblazonment of red, of gold, of darting gleams of light; with the mountains most royally purple or most radiantly blue; with the prismatic mists in flight; with the slow climax of the dazzling sphere ascending to dominate it all?

The blacksmith knelt down to read. The musician, his silent violin under his chin, leaned over his comrade's shoulder. The hunter stood still, expectant.

Alas! the corrugations of time, the fissile results of the frost; the wavering line of ripple-marks of seas that shall ebb no more; growth of lichen; an army of ants in full march; a passion-flower trailing from a crevice, its purple blooms lying upon the gray stone near where it is stamped with the fossil imprint of a sea-weed, faded long ago and forgotten. Or is it, alas! for the eyes that can see only this?

The blacksmith looked up with a twinkling leer; the violinist recovered his full height, and drew the bow dashingly across the strings; then let his arm fall.

"Roger," the blacksmith said, "dad-burned ef I kin read ennything hyar."

The young musician looked over his brawny shoulder in silence.

"Whar d'ye make out enny letters, Roger?" persisted Spears.

Purdee leaned over and eagerly pointed with his ramrod to a curious corrugation of the surface of the rock. Again the blacksmith bent down; the musician craned forward, his yellow hair hanging about his bronzed face.

"I hev been toler'ble well acquainted with the alphabit," said Spears, "fur goin' on thirty year an' better, an' I'll swar ter Heaven thar ain't nare sign of a letter thar."

Purdee stared at him in wild-eyed amazement for a moment. Then he flung himself upon his knees beside the great rock, and guiding his ramrod over the surface, he exclaimed, "Hyar, Spears; right hyar!"

The blacksmith was all incredulous as he lent himself to a new posture, and leaned forward to look with the languid indulgence of one who will not again entertain doubt.

"Nare A, nor B, nor C, nor none o' the fambly," he declared. "These hyar rocks ain't no Moses' tables sure enough; Moses never war in Tennessee. They be jes like enny other rock, an' thar ain't a word o' writin' on 'em."

He looked up with a curious questioning at Purdee's face--a strange face for a man detected in a falsehood, a trick. The deep-set eyes were wide as if straining for perception denied them. Despite the chill, rare air, great drops had started on his brow, and were falling upon his beard, and upon his hands. These strong hands were quivering; they hovered above the signs on the rocks. The mystic letters, the inspired words, where were they? Grope as he might, he could not find them. Alas! doubt and denial had climbed the mountain--the awful limitations of the more finite human creature--and his inspiration and the finer enthusiasms of the truth were dead.

Dead with a throe that was almost like a literal death. This--on this he had lived; the ether of ecstasy was the breath of his life. He clutched at the stained red handkerchief knotted about his throat as if he were suffocating; he tore it open as he swayed backward on his knees. He did not hear--or he did not heed--the laugh among the little crowd on the bald--satirical, rallying, zestful. He was deaf to the strains of the violin, jeeringly and jerkingly playing a foolish tune. It was growing fainter, for they had all turned about to betake themselves once more to the world below. He could have seen, had he cared to see, their bearded grinning faces peering through the stunted trees, as descending they came near the spot where he had lavished the spiritual graces of his feeling, his enthusiasm, his devotion, his earnest reaching for something higher, for something holy, which had refreshed his famished soul; had given to its dumbness words; had erased the values of the years, of the nations; had made him friends with Moses on the "bald"; had revealed to him the finger of the Lord on the stone.

He took no heed of his gestures, of which, indeed, he was unconscious. They were fine dramatically, and of great power, as he alternately rose to his full height, beating his breast in despair, and again sank upon his knees, with a pondering brow and a searching eye, and a hovering, trembling hand, striving to find the clew he had lost. They might have impressed a more appreciative audience, but not one more entertained than the cluster of men who looked and paused and leered in amusement at one another, and thrust out satirical tongues. Long after they had disappeared, the strains of the violin could be heard, filling the solemn, stricken, strangely stunted woods with a grotesquely merry presence, hilarious and jeering.

* * * * *

Purdee found it possible to survive the destruction of illusions. Most of us do. It wrought in him, however, the saturnine changes natural upon the relinquishment of a dear and dead fantasy. This ethereal entity is a more essential component of happiness than one might imagine from the extreme tenuity of the conditions of its existence. Purdee's fantasy may have been a poor thing, but, although he could calmly enough close its eyes, and straighten its limbs, and bury it decently from out the offended view of fact, he felt that he should mourn it in his heart as long as he should live. And he was bereaved.

There is a certain stage in every sorrow when it rejects sympathy. Purdee, always taciturn, grave, uncommunicative, was invested with an austere aloofness, and was hardly to be approached as he sat, silent and absent, brooding over the fire at his own home. When roused by some circumstance of the domestic routine, and it became apparent that his mood was not sullenness or anger, but simple and complete introversion, it added a dignity and suggested a remoteness that were yet less reassuring. His son, who stood in awe of him--not because of paternal severity, but because no boy could refrain from a worshipping respect for so miraculous a shot, a woodsman so subtly equipped with all elusive sylvan instincts and knowledge--forbore to break upon his meditations by the delivery of Grinnell's message. Nevertheless the consciousness of withholding it weighed heavily upon him. He only pretermitted it for a time, until a more receptive state of mind should warrant it. Day by day, however, he looked with eagerness when he came into the cabin in the evening to ascertain if his father were still seated in the chimney-corner silently smoking his pipe. Purdee had seldom remained at home so long at a time, and the boy had a daily fear that the gun on the primitive rack of deer antlers would be missing, and word left in the family that he had taken the trail up the mountain, and would return "'cordin' ter luck with the varmints." And thus Job Grinnell's enigmatical message, that had the ring of defiance, might remain indefinitely postponed.

Abner had not realized how long a time it had been delayed, until one evening at the wood-pile, in tossing off a great stick to hew into lengths for the chimney-place, he noticed that thin ice had formed in the moss and the dank cool shadows of the interstices. "I tell ye now, winter air a-comin'," he observed. He stood leaning on his axe-handle and looking down upon the scene so far below; for Purdee's house was perched half-way up on the mountain-side, and he could see over the world how it fared as the sun went down. Far away upon the levels of the valley of East Tennessee a golden haze glittered resplendent, lying close upon an irradiated earth, and ever brightening toward the horizon, and it seemed as if the sun in sinking might hope to fall in fairer spheres than the skies he had left, for they were of a dun-color and an opaque consistency. Only one horizontal rift gave glimpses of a dazzling ochreous tint of indescribable brilliancy, from the focus of which the divergent light was shed upon the western limits of the land. Chilhowee, near at hand, was dark enough--a purplish garnet hue; but the scarlet of the sour-wood gleamed in the cove; the hickory still flared gallantly yellow; the receding ranges to the north and south were blue and more faintly azure. The little log cabin stood with small fields about it, for Purdee barely subsisted on the fruits of the soil, and did not seek to profit. It had only one room, with a loft above; the barn was a makeshift of poles, badly chinked, and showing through the crevices what scanty store there was of corn and pumpkins. A black-and-white work-ox, that had evidently no deficiency of ribs, stood outside of the fence and gazed, a forlorn Tantalus, at these unattainable dainties; now and then a muttered low escaped his lips. Nobody noticed him or sympathized with him, except perhaps the little girl, who had come out in her sun-bonnet to help her brother bring in the fuel. He gruffly accepted her company, a little ashamed of her because she was a girl; since, however, there was no other boy by to laugh, he permitted her the delusion that she was of assistance.

As he paused to rest he reiterated, "Winter air a-comin', I tell ye."

"D'ye reckon, Ab," she asked, in her high, thin little voice, her hands full of chips and the basket at her feet, "ez Grinnell's baby knows Chris'mus air a-comin'?"

He glowered at her as he leaned on the axe. "I reckon Grinnell's old baby dunno B from Bull-foot," he declared, gruffly.

The recollection of the message came over him. He had a pang of regret, remembering all the old grudges against the Grinnells. They were re-enforced by this irrepressible yearning after their baby, this admission that they had aught which was not essentially despicable. Nevertheless, he suddenly saw a reason for the Grinnell baby's existence; he loaded up both arms with the sticks of wood, and, followed by the peripatetic sun-bonnet, conscientiously weighed down with one billet, he strode into the house, and let his burden fall with a mighty clatter in the corner of the chimney. The sun-bonnet staggered up and threw her stick on the top of the pile of wood.