Part 7

More than once they flagged, these sluggish mountaineers, who had passed the day in unwonted excitement, and had earned their night's rest. But the penalties of refusing to aid the officers of the law spurred them on.

Even old Hoodendin--not so old as to be exempt from this duty, for the sheriff had summoned every available man at the Settlement to his assistance--hobbled from stone to stone, from one rotting log to another, where he sat down to recuperate from his exertions.

The search degenerated into a mere form, an aimless beating about in the brush, before Micajah Green could be induced to relinquish the hope of capture, and blow the horn as a signal for reassembling.

The bands of fagged-out men, straggling back to the Settlement toward dawn, found reciprocal satisfaction in expressing the opinion that 'Cajah Green had 'keerlessly let Rick git away, an' warn't a-goin' ter mend the matter by incitin' the mounting ter bust 'round the woods like a lot o' crazy deer all night, ter find a man ez warn't nowhar.'

They wore surly enough faces as they gathered about the door of the store, or lounged on the stumps and the few chairs, waiting for a mounted party that had been ordered to extend the search down in the adjacent coves and along the spurs.

The agile Jer'miah scudded about, furnishing such consolation as can be contained in a jug. Had the quest resulted differently, they would have laughed and joked and caroused till daybreak. As it was, their talk was fragmentary; slight and innuendo were in every word.

The sheriff had supplemented his own negligence by a grievous disregard of their comfort, and the sense of defeat, so bitter to an American citizen, completed the aesthetic misery of the situation.

The waggons still stood about in the clearing; here and there the burly dark steers lay ruminant and half asleep among the stumps. Among them, too, were the cattle of the place; the cows, milked late the evening before, had not yet roamed away.

Against a dark background of blackberry bushes a white bull stood in the moonlight, motionless, the lustre gilding his horns and touching his great sullen eyes with a spark of amber light. In his imperious stillness he looked like a statue of a masquerading Jupiter.

A sound.

'Hist!' said the sheriff.

The moon, low in the west, was drawing a seine of fine-spun gold across the dark depths of the valley. In that enchanted enmeshment were tangled all the fancies of the night; the vague magic of dreams; vagrant romances, dumb but for the pulses; the gleams of a poetry too delicately pellucid to be focused by a pen. The mountains maintained a majesty of silence. All the world beneath was still. The wind was laid.

Far, far away, once again, a sound.

So indistinct, so undistinguishable--they hardly knew if they had heard aright. There was a sudden scuffle near at hand. Over one of the rail fences, gleaming wet with dew, and rich with the loan of a silver beam, there climbed a long, lean old hound; with an anxious aspect he ran to the verge of the crag. Once more that sound, alien alike to the mountain solitudes and the lonely sky; then the deep-mouthed baying broke forth, waking all the echoes, and rousing all the dogs in the cove as well as the canine visitors and residents at the Settlement.

'Dod-rot that critter!' exclaimed the sheriff angrily. 'We can't hear nuthin' now but his long jaw.'

'Jes' say "Silence in court!"' suggested Amos James from where he lay at length in the grass.

The sheriff nimbly kicked the dog instead, and the night was filled with wild shrieks of pain and anger. When his barking was renewed, it was punctuated with sharp, reminiscent yelps, as the injustice of his treatment ever and anon recurred to his mind.

The sound of human voices grew very distinct when it could be heard at all, and the tramp of approaching horses shook the ground.

Every eye was turned toward the point at which the road came into the Settlement, between the densities of the forest and the gleaming array of shining, curved blades and tossing plumes, where the corn-field spread its martial suggestions. When an equestrian shadow suddenly appeared, the sheriff saluted it in a tremor of excitement.

'Hello!' he shouted. 'Did ye ketch him?'

The foremost of the party rode slowly forward: the horse was jaded; the rider slouched in the saddle with an aspect of surly exhaustion.

'Ketch him!' thundered out Gid Fletcher's gruff voice. 'Ketch the devil!'

The bold-faced deputy was brazening it out. He rode up with as dapper a style as a man may well maintain who has been in the saddle ten hours without food, sustained only by the strength of a 'tickler' in his pocket, whose prospects are jeopardized and whose official prestige is ruined. The demeanour of the other riders expressed varying degrees of injured disaffection as they threw themselves from their horses.

The blacksmith dismounted in front of the cumbersome doors of his shop, on which still hung the sheriff's padlock, and with the stiff gait of one who has ridden long and hard he strode across the clearing, and stopped before the group in front of the store.

He looked infuriated. It might have been a matter of wonder that so tired a man could nourish so strong and active a passion.

'Look a-hyar, 'Cajah Green!' he exclaimed, with an oath, 'folks 'low ter me ez I ain't got no right ter my reward fur ketchin' that thar greased peeg,--ez ye hed ter leave go of--kase he warn't landed in jail or bailed. That air the law, they tells me.'

'That's the law,' replied the sheriff. His chair was tilted back against the wall of the store, his hat drawn over his brow. He spoke with the calmness of desperation.

'Then 'pears like ter me ez I hev hed all my trouble fur nuthin', an' all the resk I hev tuk,' said the blacksmith, coming close, and mechanically rolling up the sleeve of his hammer-arm.

'Edzac'ly.'

The blacksmith turned on him a look like that of a wounded bear. 'An' ye sit thar ez peaceful ez skim-milk, an' 'low ez ye hev let my two hundred dollars slip away?' he demanded. 'Dad burn yer greasy soul!'

'I hopes it air all I hev let slip,' said the sheriff quietly. There was so much besides which he had cause to fear that it did not occur to him to be afraid of the blacksmith.

Perhaps it was the subacute perception that he shared the officer's attention with more engrossing subjects which had the effect of tempering Gid Fletcher's anger.

The rim of the moon was slipping behind the purple heights of Chilhowee. Day was suddenly upon them, though the sun had not yet risen--when did the darkness flee?--the day, cool, with a freshness as of a new creation, and with an atmosphere so clear that one might know the ash from the oak in the deep green depths of the wooded valley.

The hour had not yet done with witchery: the rose-red cloud was in the east, and the wild red rose had burst its bud; a mocking-bird sprang from its nest in a dogwood-tree, with a scintillating wing and a soaring song, and a ray of sunlight like a magic wand fell athwart the landscape.

Gid Fletcher sat vaguely staring. Presently he lifted his hand with a sudden gesture demanding attention.

'Ye ain't goin' ter be 'lected, air ye, 'Cajah Green?'

The sheriff stirred uneasily. His ambition, a little and a selfish thing, was the index to his soul. Without it he himself would not be able to find the page whereon was writ all that there was of the spiritual within him. He writhed to forego it.

'Naw,' he said desperately. 'I s'pose I ain't.' He pushed his hat back nervously.

He heard, without marking, the sudden rattling of one of the waggons that had left some time ago: it was crossing a rickety bridge near the foot of the mountain; the hollow reverberations rose and fell, echoed and died away. One of the cabin doors opened, and a man came out upon the porch. He washed his face in a tin pan which stood on a bench for the public toilet, treated his head to a refreshing souse, and then, with the water dripping from his long locks upon the shoulders of his shirt, the bold-faced deputy, much refreshed by a snack and his ablutions, came lounging across the clearing to join them.

Suddenly Micajah Green noted that the blacksmith was looking at him with a significant gleam in his black eyes and a flush on his swarthy face.

'Who said ye warn't goin' ter be 'lected?'

'Why, this hyar prophet o' yourn on the Big Smoky.'

'Why did he 'low ez that warn't comin' ter pass?'

'He wouldn't gin no reason.'

'He lef' ye ter find that out. An' ye fund it out?'

The sheriff said nothing. He was breathlessly intent.

'An' he met me in the woods, an' lowed ez Rick Tyler oughtn't ter be tuk, an' hed done no wrong; an' he called the gov'nor's reward blood-money, an' worked hisself nigh up ter the shoutin' p'int; an' called me "Judas" fur takin' the boy, sence me an' him hed been frien'ly, an' lowed ez them thar thirty pieces o' silver warn't out o' circulation yit.'

'An' then,' the bold-faced deputy struck in, 'he rode up yestiddy, a-raisin' a great wondermint over a gaynder-pullin', ez if thar'd never been one before; purtendin' 'twar wicked, like he'd never killed an' eat a fowel, an' drawin' pistols, an' raisin' a great commotion an' excitin' an' _de_stractin' the Settlemint, so a man handcuffed, an' with a rope twisted round his arms an' legs, gits out of a house right under thar nose, an' runs away. Rick Tyler couldn't hev done it 'thout them ropes war cut, an' he war gin a chance ter sneak out. Now, I ain't a prophet by natur'e but I kin say who cut them ropes, an' who raised a disturbamint outside ter gin him a chance ter mosey.'

'Whar's he now?' demanded the sheriff, rising from his chair and glancing about.

'He was a-huntin' with the posse, las' night,' said the deputy. 'He never lef' till 'bout an hour ago. He never wanted nobody ter 'spicion nuthin', I reckon. Mebbe that's him now.'

He pointed to a road in the valley, a tawny streak elusively appearing upon a hilltop or skirting a rocky spur, soon lost in a sea of foliage. Beside a harvested wheat-field it was again visible, and a tiny moving object might be discerned by eyes trained to the long stretches of mountain landscape. The sun was higher, the dew exhaled in warm and languishing perfume, the mocking-bird filled the air with ecstasy. The men stood among their elongated shadows on the crag, staring at the moving object until it reached the dense woods, and so passed out of sight.

VII.

Down a precipitous path, hardly more civilized of aspect than if it were trodden by the deer, filled with interlacing roots, barricaded by long briery tangles, overhung by brush and overshadowed by trees--down this sylvan way Dorinda, followed by Jacob and one or two of the companionable old hounds, was wont to go to the spring under the crag.

The spot had its fascinations. The great beetling cliff towered far above, the jagged line of its summit serrating the zenith. Its rugged face was seamed with many a fissure, and here and there were clumps of ferns, a swaying vine, a huckleberry bush that fed the birds of the air. Below surged the tops of the trees. There was a shelving descent from the base of the crag, and Jacob must needs have heed of the rocky depths beneath in treading the narrow ledge that led to a great cavernous niche in the face of the rock.

Here in a deep cleft welled the never-failing spring. It always reminded Dorinda of that rock which Moses smote; although, of course, when she thought of it, she said she knew that Mount Horeb was in Jefferson County, because a man who had married her brother's wife's cousin had an aunt who lived there. And when she had abandoned that unconscious effort to bring the great things near, she would sit upon the rock and look with a sigh of pleasure at that pure, outgushing limpidity, unfailing and unchanging, and say it reminded her of the well-springs of pity.

One day, as she sat there, her dreaming head thrown back upon her hands clasped behind it, there sounded a sudden step close by. The old hounds, lying without the cavernous recess, could see along the upward vista of the path, and their low growl was rather in surly recognition than in active defiance. Dorinda and Jacob, within the great niche, beheld naught but the distant mountain landscape framed in the rugged arch above their heads. The step did not at once advance; it hesitated, and then Amos James came slowly into view. Dorinda looked up dubiously at him, and it occurred to him that this was the accepted moment to examine the lock of his gun.

'Howdy,' he ventured, as he turned the rifle about.

She had assumed a more constrained attitude, and had unclasped her hands from behind her head. The seat was a low one, and the dark blue folds of her homespun dress fell about her with simple amplitude. Her pink calico sun-bonnet lay on the rock under her elbow. The figure of the pudgy Jacob in the foreground had a callow grotesqueness. He, too, undertook the demeanour he had learned to discriminate as 'manners.' Outside, the old dog snapped at the flies.

Amos James seemed to think an account of himself appropriate.

'I hev been a-huntin',' he said, his grave black eyes on the rifle and his face in the shadow of his big white hat. 'I happened ter pass by the house, an' yer granny said ez ye hed started down hyar arter a pail o' water, an' I 'lowed ez I'd kem an' fetch it fur ye.'

Dorinda murmured that she was 'much obleeged,' and relapsed into silent propriety.

Extraordinary gun! It really seemed as if Amos James would be compelled to take it to pieces then and there, so persistently did it require his attention.

Jacob, whose hearing was unimpaired, but whose education in the specious ways of those of a larger growth was as yet incomplete, got up briskly. Since Amos had come to fetch the pail he saw no reason in nature why the pail should not be fetched, and he imagined that the return was in order. He paused for a moment in surprise; then seeing that no one else moved, he sat down abruptly. But for her manners Dorinda could have laughed. Amos James's cheek flushed darkly as he still worked at the gun.

'I s'pose ez you-uns hev hearn the news?' he remarked presently. As he asked the question he quickly lifted his eyes.

Ah, what laughing lights in hers--what radiant joys! She did not look at him. Her gaze was turned far away to the soft horizon. Her delicate lips had such dainty curves. Her pale cheek flushed tumultuously. She leaned her head back against the rock, the tendrils of her dark hair spreading over the unyielding grey stone, which, weather-shielded, was almost white. In its dead, dumb finality--the memorial of seas ebbed long ago, of forms of life extinct--she bore it a buoyant contrast. She looked immortal!

'I hev hearn the news,' she said, her long lashes falling, and with quiet circumspection at variance with the triumph in her face.

He looked at her gravely, breathlessly. A new idea had taken possession of him. The rescue--it was a strange thing! Who in the Great Smoky Mountains had an adequate temptation to risk the penalty of ten years in the state-prison for rescuing Rick Tyler from the officers of the law? His brothers?--they were step-brothers. His father was dead. Affection could not be accounted a factor. Venom might do more. Some reckless enemy of the sheriff's might thus have craftily compassed his ruin. Then there suddenly came upon Amos James a recollection of the Cayces' grudge against Micajah Green, and of the fact that they had already actively bestirred themselves to electioneer against him. Once, before it all happened, Rick Tyler had hung persistently about Dorinda, and perhaps the 'men-folks' approved him. Amos remembered too that a story was current at the gander-pulling that the reason the Cayces had absented themselves and were lying low was because a party of revenue raiders had been heard of on the Big Smoky. Who had heard of them, and when did they come, and where did they go? It seemed a fabrication, a cloak. And Dorinda--she was the impersonation of delighted triumph.

'Agged the men-folks on, I reckon,' he thought--'agged 'em on, fur the sake o' Rick Tyler!'

A sense of despair, quiet, numbing, was creeping over him.

''Tain't no reg'lar ail, I know,' he said to himself; 'but I b'lieve it'll kill me.'

Conversation in the mountains is a leisurely procedure, time being of little value. The ensuing pause, however, was of abnormal duration, and at last Amos was fain to break it, albeit irrelevantly.

'This hyar weather is gittin' mighty hot,' he observed, taking off his hat and fanning himself with it. 'I feel like I hed been dragged bodaciously through the hopper.'

From the shaded coolness of the grotto the girl admitted that it was 'middlin' warm.'

Despite the slumberous sunshine here, all the world was not so quiet. Over the valley a cloud was hovering, densely black, but with a grey, nebulous margin; now and then it was rent by a flash of lightning in swift zigzag lines, yet the mountains beyond were a tender blue in the golden glow of a sunshine yet more tender.

''Pears like they air gittin' a shower over yander, at the furder eend o' the cove,' Dorinda remarked encouragingly. 'Ef it war ter storm right smart, mebbe the thunder would cool the air some.'

'Mebbe so,' he assented.

Then he marked again the new beauty abloom in her face, and his heart sank within him. His pride was touched, too. He was a man well-to-do for the 'mountings,' with his own grist-mill, and a widowed mother whose plaint it was, night and day, that Amos was 'sech a slowly boy ter git married, an' the Lord knows thar oughter be somebody roun' the house spry'r 'n a pore old woman mighty nigh fifty year old--yes, sir! a-going on fifty. An' I want ter live down ter Emmert's Cove along o' Malviny, my married darter,' she would insist, 'whar thar air chillen, an' babies ter look arter, an' not sech a everlastin' gang o' men, a-lopin' 'round the mill. But I dunno _what_ Amos would do ef I lef' him.'

Evidently it was a field for a daughter-in-law. Amos felt in his secret soul that this was not the only attraction. He was well favoured and tall and straight, and had a good name in the county, despite his pranks, which were leniently regarded. He honestly thought that Dorinda might do worse. Whether it was tact or whether it was delicacy, he did not allude to the worldly contrast with the fugitive from justice.

'I s'pose they won't ketch Rick agin,' he hazarded.

'I reckon not,' she said demurely, her long black lashes again falling.

He leaned uneasily on his gun, looked down at his great boots drawn over his brown jeans trousers to his knees, adjusted his leathern belt, and pulled his hat a trifle farther over his eyes.

'D'rindy,' he said suddenly, 'ye set a heap o' store on Rick Tyler?'

Then he was doubtful, and feared he had offended her.

Her sapphire eyes, with their leaping blue lights and dark clear depths, all blended and commingled in the softest brilliancy, shone upon him. The bliss of the event was supreme.

'Mebbe I do,' she said.

He turned and looked away at the storm, seeming ineffective as it surged in the distance. The trees in the cove were tossed by a wind that raged on a lower level, as if it issued from AEolian caverns in the depths of the range. It was a wild, aerial panorama--the black clouds, and the rain, and the mist rolling through the deep gorge, veined with lightnings and vocal with thunder, and the thunderous echoes among the rocks.

Not a leaf stirred on the mountain's brow, and the great 'bald' lifted its majestic crest in a sunshine all unpaled, and against the upper regions of the air, splendidly blue. There was an analogy in the scene with his mood and hers.

A moment ago he had been saying to himself that he did not want to be 'turned off' in favour of a man who was hunted like a wild animal through the woods; who, if his luck and his friends should hold out, and he could evade capture, might look forward to naught but uncertainty and a fearful life, like others in the Big Smoky, who dared not open their own doors to a summons from without, skulking in their homes like beasts in their den.

The dangers, misfortunes, and indignities suffered by his preferred rival were an added slur upon him, who had all the backing of propitious circumstance. Since there was nothing to gain, why humble himself in vain?

This was his logic--sound, just, approved by his judgment; and as it arranged itself in his mind with all the lucidity of pure reason, he spoke from the complex foolish dictates of his unreasoning heart.

'I hev hoped ter marry ye, D'rindy, like I hev hoped fur salvation,' he said abruptly.

He looked at her now, straight and earnestly, with his shaded, serious black eyes. Her rebuking glance slanted beyond him from under her half-lifted lashes.

'I thought ye war a good church member,' she said unexpectedly.

'I am. But that don't make me a liar ez I knows on. I'd ruther hear ye a-singin' 'roun' the house in Eskaqua Cove, an' a-callin' the chickens, an' sech, 'n ter hear all the angels in heaven a-quirin' tergether.'

'That ain't religion, Amos Jeemes,' she said, with cool disapproval.

'Waal,' he rejoined with low-spirited obstinacy, 'mebbe 'tain't.'

There was a delicate odour of ferns on the air; the cool, outgushing water tinkled on the stones like a chime of silver bells; his shadow fell athwart the portal as he leaned on his rifle, and his wandering glance mechanically swept the landscape.

The sudden storm had passed, the verge of the cloud hovering so near that they could hear the last heavy raindrops pattering on the tops of the trees in Eskaqua Cove. Vapours were rising from the ravine: the sun shone upon them, throwing a golden aureola about the opposite mountains, and all the wreathing mists that the wind whirled down the valley had elusive, opalescent effects. The thunder muttered in the distance; the sharp-bladed lightnings were sheathed; a rainbow girdled the world, that had sprung into a magic beauty as if cinctured by the zone of Venus. The arch spanned the blue sky, and on the dark mountains extended the polychromatic reflection. The freshened wind came rushing up the gorge, and the tree-tops bent.

'Look-a-hyar, D'rindy,' said Amos James sturdily; 'I want ye ter promise me one thing.'

Dorinda had risen in embarrassment. She looked down at Jacob.

'It air about time for we-uns ter be a-goin' ter the house, I reckon,' she said.

But Jacob sat still. He was apt in 'takin' l'arnin',' and he had begun to perceive that his elders did not always mean what they said. He was cool and comfortable, and content to remain.

'I want ye ter promise me that ef ever ye find ez ye hev thunk too well o' Rick Tyler, an' hev sot him up too high in yer mind over other folks, ye'll let me know.'

Her cheek dimpled; her rare laughter fell on the air; a fervid faith glowed in her deep, bright eyes.

'I promise ye!'

'Ye think Rick Tyler air mighty safe in that promise,' he rejoined, crestfallen.

But Dorinda would say no more.

VIII.