Part 15

Should some chemical process obliterate for a time a leopard's spots, consider the satisfaction of the creature to find himself once more restored to his natural polka-dots; and such was the complacence of the constable, with his artificial conscience evaporated and his heart mottled with its native instincts of good and evil. He was glad to be back in the enjoyment of the affluent hospitalities of the moonshiner's jug.

He was a big, portly fellow, hardly more symmetrical than the barrel upon which he was seated. He had an inexhaustible fund of good humour, and was not even angry when Pete, in sheer contrariety, told him the reason for his enticement to the still.

He said he would be glad enough if Rick Tyler could swear out anything that would benefit the parson, and declared that he believed only Micajah Green's malice could have compassed his incarceration.

''Cajah inquired o' me whar this place war, Pete,' he said, 'a-purtendin' like he hed been hyar wunst. But I jes' tole him 'twar ez safe ez a unhatched deedie in a aig--an' I batted my eye, jes' so, an' he shet up purty quick.'

The gleam from the furnace door showed Pete's own light grey eyes intently staring at the visitor, but he said nothing and the matter passed.

When the constable's heart was warmed by the brush whisky he understood the sensation as happiness, and he translated happiness as a religious excitement.

He seemed maudlin as he talked about the parson, who, he declared, had led him to grace, and he recited some wonderful stories of religious experience, tending to illustrate his present righteousness and the depths of iniquity from which he had been redeemed.

Pete's perversity operated to curtail these.

'That's a fac'!' he would heartily assent; 'ye useter be one o' the meanes' men on these hyar mountings!' Or 'Grace hed a mighty wrastle with Satan in yer soul. I dunno whether he air cast out _yit_!'

The constable--his big owlish head askew--was embarrassed by these manoeuvres, and presently the talk drifted to the subject of the parson's spiritual defection. This he considered a mental aberration.

'Hi Kelsey,' he said, 'war always more or less teched in the head. I hev noticed--an' ye may sot it down ez a true word--ez ev'y man es air much smarter'n other men in some ways, in other ways air foolisher. He mought prophesy one day, an' the nex' ye wouldn't trest him ter lead a blind goose ter water. He air smarter'n enny man I ever see--Pa'son Kelsey air. Thar's Brother Jake Tobin ain't got haffen his sense; an' yit nobody can't say ez Brother Jake ain't sensible.'

The philosopher upon the barrel, as he made this nice distinction, gazed meditatively into the bed of live coals that flung its red glare on his broad flushed countenance and wide blinking eyes.

It revealed the others, too: the old man's hard, lined, wrinkled visage and his stalwart supple frame; Pete, with his long tangled hair, his pipe between his great exposed teeth; Ab, filling the furnace with wood, his ragged beard moved by the hot breath of the fire; the big-boned, callow Sol, with his petulant, important face; and Ben, in the dim background tossing the sticks over to Ab from the gigantic wood pile.

They fell with a sharp sound, and the cave was full of their multiplied echoes. The men as they talked elevated their voices so as to be heard.

Ab was rising from his kneeling posture. He closed the furnace door, and as it clashed he thought for an instant he was dreaming. In that instant he saw Pete start up suddenly with wild, distended eyes, and with a levelled pistol in his hand.

The next moment Ab knew what it meant. A sharp report--and a jet of red light, projected from the muzzle of the weapon, revealed a group of skulking, unfamiliar figures stealthily advancing upon them.

The return fire was almost instantaneous, and was followed by multitudinous echoes and a thunderous crash that thrilled every nerve. The darkness was filled with the clamours of pandemonium, for the concussion had dislodged from the roof a huge fragment of rock, weighing doubtless many tons.

The revenue raiders lagged for a moment, confused by the overwhelming sound, the clouds of stifling dust, and the eerie aspect of the place. They distinguished a sharp voice presently, crying out some imperative command, and after that there was no more resistance from the moonshiners. They had disappeared as if the earth had swallowed them.

The intruders were at a loss. They could not pursue and capture the men in the dark. If the furnace door were opened they would be targets in the glare for the lurking moonshiners in the glooms beyond. It did not occur to them that the cave had another outlet, until, as the echoes of the fallen fragment grew faint, they heard far away a voice crying out, 'Don't leave me!' and the mocking rocks repeating it with their tireless mimicry.

It was the constable. He never forgot that agonized retreat down those unknown black depths. He was hardly able to keep pace with his swifter fellows, falling sometimes, and being clutched to his feet rudely enough, as they pressed on in a close squad; feeling now and then the sudden wing of a bat against his face and interpreting it as the touch of a human pursuer; sometimes despairing, as they scrambled through a long, low, narrow passage, scarcely wide enough for the constable's comfortable fatness. Then it was that fear descended upon him with redoubled force, and he would exclaim in pity of his plight, 'An' me a off'cer o' the law!'

He impeded their flight incalculably, but to their credit be it said the lighter weights had never a thought of deserting their unfortunate guest despite the danger of capture and the distress of mind induced by the loss of their little 'all.' The poor constable fitted some of the tube-like passages like the pith in the bark, and as he was at last drawn, pallid, struggling, his garments in shreds, from an aperture of the cave in a dense untrodden jungle of the laurel, he again piteously exclaimed, 'An' me a off'cer o' the law!'

There was little leisure, however, to meditate upon his degraded dignity. He followed the example of the moonshiners, and ran off through the laurel as fleetly as a fat man well could.

The raiders showed excellent judgment. They offered no pursuit down those dark and devious underground corridors. Acquiring a sense of security from the echoes growing ever fainter and indicative of lengthening distances, they presently opened the furnace door, and by the aid of the flare cut the tubs and still to pieces, destroyed the worm, demolished the furnace, and captured in triumph sundry kegs and jugs of the illicit whisky. There was a perfunctory search for the distillers at the log cabin on the mountain slope. But the officers made haste to be off, for the possibility of rally and recapture is not without parallel facts in the annals of moonshining.

Perhaps the mountain wilds had never sheltered a fiercer spirit than old Groundhog Cayce when he ventured back into his den and stood over the ruins of his scanty fortunes--the remnants of the still; the furnace, a pile of smoking stones and ashes and embers; the worm in spiral sections; the tubs half burnt, riven in pieces, lying about the ground. The smoke was still dense overhead and the hot stones were sending up clouds of steam. It was as well, perhaps, since the place would never again be free from inspection, that it could not be used as it once was. The great fragment of rock, fallen from the roof, lay in the course of the subterranean stream, and the water, thus dammed, was overflowing its channel and widely spreading a shallow flood all along the familiar ground. It was rising. He made haste to secure the few articles overlooked by the raiders: a rifle, a powder-horn on one of the ledges that served as shelf, a bag of corn, the jovial jug. And for the last time he crept through the narrow portal and left the cavern to the dense darkness, to the floating smoke, to the hissing embers, and the slow rising of the subterranean springs.

For days he nursed his wrath as he sat upon the cabin porch beneath the yellow gourds and the purple blooms of the Jack-bean, and gazed with unseeing eyes at the wide landscape before him. The sky was blue in unparalleled intensity. The great 'balds' towered against it in sharp outlines, in definite symmetry, in awful height. The forests were aflame with scarlet boughs. The balsams shed upon the air their perfumes, so pervasive, so tonic, that the lungs breathed health and all the benignities of nature. The horizon seemed to expand, and the exquisite lucidity of the atmosphere revealed vague lines of far-away mountains unknown to the limitations of less favoured days.

In the woods the acorns were dropping, dropping, all the long hours. The yellow sunshine was like a genial enthusiasm, quickening the pulses and firing the blood. The hickory trees seemed dyed in its golden suffusions, and were a lustrous contrast to the sombre pine, or the dappled maple, or the vivid crimson of the black-gum. But the future of the year was a narrowing space; the prospects it had brought were dwarfed in the fulfilment, or were like an empty clutch at the empty air. And winter was afoot; ah, yes, the tenderest things were already dead--the flowers and the hopes--and the splendid season cherished in its crimson heart a woeful premonition. And thus the winds, blowing where they listed, sounded with a melancholy cadence; and the burnished yellow sheen was an evanescent light; and the purple haze, vaguely dropping down, had its conclusive intimations in despite that it loitered.

Dorinda, with her hands folded too, sat much of the time in dreary abstraction on the step of the porch, looking down at the yellowed corn-field which she and Rick ploughed on that ecstatic June morning. How long ago it seemed! Sometimes above it, among the brown tassels, there hovered in the air a cluster of quivering points of light against the blue mountain opposite, as some colony of gossamer-winged insects disported themselves in the sunshine. And the crickets were shrilling yet in the grass. She saw nothing, and it would be hard to say what she thought. In the brilliancy of her youthful beauty--a matter of linear accuracy and delicate chiselling and harmonious colouring, for Nature had been generous to her--it might seem difficult to descry a likeness to the wrinkled and weather-beaten features of her father's lowering face, as he sat in his chair helplessly brooding upon his destroyed opportunities. But there was a suggestion of inflexibility in both: she had firm lines about her mouth that were hard in his; the unflinching clearness of her eyes was a reflection of the unflinching boldness of his. Her expression in these days was so set, so stern, so hopeless, that one might have said she looked like him. He beheld his ruined fortunes; she, her bereft heart.

Amos James, one day, as he stood on the porch, saw this look on her face. She was leaning on her folded arms in the window hard by. She had spoken to him as absently and with as mechanical courtesy as the old moonshiner at the other end of the porch. He came up close to her. It was a wonderful contrast to the face she had worn when they talked, that day at the spring, of Rick Tyler's escape. With the quickened intuition of a lover's heart he divined the connection.

'Ye hain't kep' yer promise, D'rindy,' he said in a low tone.

'What promise?' she demanded, rousing herself and knitting her brows as she looked at him.

'Ye 'lowed ye'd let me know ef ever ye kem ter think less o' Rick Tyler.'

Her eyes, definitely angry, flashed upon him.

'Ye shan't profit by it,' she declared.

And so he left her, still leaning in the vine-framed window, the lilac blossoms of the Jack-bean drooping until they touched her black hair.

Rick Tyler was dismayed by the result of his jealousy and the strange 'lesson' that Dorinda had learned. He found her inflexible. She reminded him sternly of the conditions of her promise and that he had failed. And when he protested that he was jealous because he loved her so, she said she valued no love that for her sake grudged a word, not in generosity, but in simple justice, to liberate an innocent man in the rigours of a terrible doom. And when at this man's very name he was seized with his accustomed impetuous anger, she looked at him with a cool aloof scrutiny that might have expressed a sheer curiosity. It bewildered and tamed him. He had never heard of a Spartan. He only thought of her as immovable, and as infinitely remote from his plane as the great dome of the mountain. He remembered that she had always softened to his misfortunes, and he talked of how he had suffered. But she said that was all over now, and he had been 'mighty lucky.' He sought to appeal to her in her own behalf, and reminded her how she had loved him through it all, how she would have married him, despite the fierce pursuit of the law. She had loved him; he would not forget that.

'No,' she said drearily. 'I never loved ye. I loved what I thunk ye war. But ye warn't that--nuthin' like it! Ye war suthin' else. I war jes' in love with my own foolishness.'

Poor Dorinda! Alas, for the fair ideals! these things are transient.

He went away at last, indignant and amazed. Once he thought of offering to make the affidavit, not cognizant of its fatal defect, and then the conviction took hold upon him that this melancholy was her deep disappointment because she loved the man she sought to aid. And sometimes he could not believe he had lost her heart. And yet when he would go back, her dull indifference to his presence would convince him alike that he was naught to her now and that he had been supplanted.

His contradictions of feeling began to crystallize into a persistent perversity. He took pleasure in denying the story she had told of his escape, and many people hardly knew which version to believe. He congratulated Brother Jake Tobin one evening at the cabin on having turned Hi Kelsey out of the church, and called him a wolf in sheep's clothing.

And then for his pains he was obliged to listen to her defence of the absent man; she declared the parson was like one of the prophets--like some man in the Bible. As to that confession he had made in the church, 'twar plain he war out'n his head.'

Meantime Brother Jake Tobin discreetly bent his attention upon the honey and fried chicken on the supper table, and Rick Tyler fumed in silence.

After the news of the nolle prosequi, Rick went about the mountain with his former large liberty. His step-brothers were desirous of obliterating his recollection of their avoidance, and made him a present of several head of cattle and some hogs. He lived at home among them, and began to have prospects for the future.

He was planning with the younger Cayces to start a new still, for a region is particularly safe for that enterprise immediately after a visit from the revenue officers, their early return being improbable. And he talked about a house-raising while the weather held fine, and before snow.

'I'm a-thinkin' 'bout gittin' married, Pete, ter a gal over yander ter the Settlemint,' he said, looking for the effect on Dorinda.

She was as silent, as stern, as listless as ever. And but for the sheer futility of it, he might have fallen to upbraiding her and protesting and complaining as of yore, and repudiated the mythical 'gal at the Settlemint.'

All the leaves were falling. Crisp and sere they carpeted the earth and fled before the wind. They seemed in some wise to illumine the slopes as they lay in long yellow vistas under the overhanging black boughs. Many a nest was revealed--empty, swinging on the bare limb.

The mountains near at hand were sad and sombre, the stark denuded forests showing the brown ground among the trees, and great jutting crags, and sterile stretches of out-cropping rocks, and fearful abysmal depths of chasms--and streams, too, madly plunging. All the scene was stripped of the garb of foliage, and the illusion of colour, and the poetry of the song birds and the flowers.

More distant ranges were of a neutral vagueness, and farther still they seemed a nebulous grey under a grey sky. When the sun shone they were blue--a faint, unreal blue, a summer souvenir clinging to the wintry landscape like some youthful trait continued in a joyless age.

For it was November, and the days were drear.

About this time an excited rumour suddenly prevailed that Parson Kelsey had returned to the Great Smoky Mountains.

It was widely discredited at first, but proved to be authorized by Gid Fletcher, who was himself just back from Shaftesville, where he had been to testify in the trial for the rescue of Rick Tyler. A story of discomfiture he retailed, and he seemed ill at ease and prone to lay much blame on Rick, whose perverse circulation of diverse accounts of the escape had greatly unnerved him before his journey, and prevented the prosecution from summoning Rick as a witness, if indeed he would have permitted himself to be served with the subpoena.

The judge was testy during the trial, and charged the jury in favour of the prisoner; after the verdict of acquittal, he stated indignantly that there had been practically no evidence against the defendant, and that it was a marked instance of the indifference or ignorance of the committing magistrate and the grand jury that such a case of flagrant malice could get beyond them and into the jurisdiction of the court.

Gid Fletcher solaced himself by telling how Green played the fool on the stand when the judge snarled at him, and contradicted himself and cut a 'mighty pore figger.'

'Though ez ter that, the pa'son riz up an' reviled both me an' 'Cajah in open court,' said Fletcher. ''Pears like he hed read the Bible so constant jes' ter l'arn ev'y creepy soundin' curse ez could be called down on the heads o' men. An' somebody said ter the jedge arterward ez he oughter fine pa'son fur contempt o' court. An' the jedge 'lowed he warn't a statute; he hed some human natur in him, an' he wanted me an' 'Cajah ter hear the truth spoke one time.'

The blacksmith declared, too, that he was 'fairly afeard o' pa'son' and his fierce threats of revenge, and was glad enough that they were not obliged to make the journey together, for he, having a horse, had ridden, while the parson had been constrained to walk.

'I reckon he's hyar by this time,' Fletcher said to Nathan Hoodendin, 'but I ain't a-hankerin' ter meet up with him agin. He's more like a wild beastis 'na man; ter see him cut his blazin' eye aroun' at ye, ye'd 'low ez he'd never hearn o' grace!'

The snow came with Kelsey.

One day, when the dull dawn broke, the white flakes were softly falling--silent, mysterious, ghostly invasion of the wild wintry air and the woods. All adown chasms and ravines, unexplored and unknown, the weird palpitating motion animated the wide and desert spaces. The ground was deeply covered; the drifts filled the hollows; they burdened the crests of the jutting crags and found a lodgment in all the fissures of their dark and rugged faces. The white lines on the bare black boughs served to discriminate their sylvan symmetry. Vague solemnities pervaded the silent marshalling of these forces of Nature.

The wind held its breath. An austere hush lay upon the chilled world. The perspective had its close limitations and the liberties of vision were annulled. Only the wild things were abroad; but the footprints of the rabbit or the deer were freshly filled, and the falling snow seemed to possess the world. When it ceased at last, it lay long on the ground, for the cold continued. And the wilderness was sheeted and still.

There were presently visible occasional ruts winding in and out among the trees, marking the course of the road and the progress of some adventurous waggon and ox-team--sometimes, too, the hoof-prints of a saddle-horse. One might easily judge how few of the mountaineers had ventured out since the beginning of the 'cold snap.' These marks were most numerous in front of the log-house where Hiram Kelsey and his uncle and the two old men sat around the fire. There was a prevalent curiosity as to how the parson had endured the double humiliation of imprisonment and being cast out of the church. They were hardly prepared for the tempestuous fury which animated him upon the mention of the prosecution and the witnesses' names. But when hesitating inquiries were propounded by those of his visitors disposed to controversy--seeking to handle his heresies and gauge his infidelity--he would fall from the ecstasies of rage to a dull despondency.

'I dunno,' he would say, looking into the heart of the red fire. 'I can't sati'fy my mind. Some things in the Bible air surely set contrariwise. I can't argyfy on 'em. But thar's one thing I kin _feel_--Christ the Lord liveth. An' sometimes that seems doctrine enough. An' mebbe some day I'll find Him.'

A thaw came on, checked by a sudden freeze. He thought it as cold as ever one afternoon about sunset as he trudged along the road. He saw a tiny owl, perched in a cedar-tree hard by the rail-fence. The creature's feathers were ruffled, and it looked chill. The atmosphere was of a crystalline clearness. The mountains in the east had dropped the snow from the darkling pines, but above, the towering balds rose in unbroken whiteness, imposed in onyx-like distinctness upon the azure sky. There were vague suggestions of blue and violet and rose on the undulations of the steep, snow-covered slopes close at hand. The crags were begirt with icicles, reaching down many feet and brilliant with elusive prismatic glimmers. He heard a sudden crash: a huge scintillating pendant had fallen by its own weight. Chilhowee stood massive and richly purple beyond the snowy valley; above was a long stretch of saffron sky, and in its midst the red sun was going down. He stood to watch its fiery disc slip behind the mountains, and then he turned and pursued his way through the neutral-tinted twilight of the wintry evening.

Old Cayce's log-cabin rose up presently, dark and drear against the high and snowy slopes behind it. The drifts still lay thatch-like on the roof; the eaves were fringed with icicles. The overhanging trees were cased in glittering icy mail. The blackened corn-stalks, left standing in the field as is the habit until next spring's ploughing should begin, were writhen and bent, and bore gaunt witness to the devastation of the winter wind. The smoke was curling briskly from the chimney, and as the door opened to his knock, the great fire of hickory and ash, sending up yellow and blue flames all tipped with vivid scarlet, cast a genial flare upon the snowy landscape, slowly darkening without. He experienced a sudden surprise as his eye fell upon old man Cayce, the central figure of the group, having heard stories of the moonshiner's deep depression, consequent upon the disastrous raid, and of the apathy into which he had fallen. They hardly seemed true. He sat erect in his chair, his supple frame alert, his eye intent, every fibre charged with energy, his face deeply flushed. He looked expectant, eager. His stalwart sons sat with him in a semicircle about the wide, warm hearth. All their pipes were freshly alight, for the evening meal was just concluded. They, too, wore an aspect of repressed excitement.

Kelsey detected it in their abstraction during the formal greetings, and when he was seated among them, ever and anon they shifted uneasily in their chairs, which grated harshly on the puncheon floor. Sometimes there sounded a faint jingling of spurs when they moved their feet on the ill-adjusted stones of the hearth. They had their pistols in their belts and perchance their lives in their hands. His admission was in some sort a confidence, but although he marvelled, he said nothing.