Judith of the Cumberlands
by Alice MacGowan · English · Gutenberg #26527 · 448,493 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Judith of the Cumberlands
Author: Alice MacGowan
Release date: September 4, 2008 [eBook #26527]
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Language: English
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JUDITH OF THE CUMBERLANDS
by
ALICE MACGOWAN
Author of
"The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage,"
"The Last Word," "Huldah," "Return," Etc.
With Illustrations in Colour by George Wright
[Illustration: "The moonlight flickered on the blade in his hand
as he reeled backward over the bluff" (page 145).]
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers, New York
Copyright, 1908
by
Alice MacGowan
This edition is issued under arrangement with the publishers,
G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London
DEDICATION
To my mountain friends, dwellers in lonely cabins, on winding horseback
trails and steep, precarious roads; or in the tiny settlements that
nestle in the high-hung inner valleys; lean brown hunters on remote paths
in the green shadowed depths of the free forest, light-stepping,
keen-eyed, humorous-lipped, hitting the point as aptly with an instance
as with the old squirrel gun they carry; wielders of the axe by many a
chip pile, where the swinging blade rests readily to answer query or
offer advice; tanned, lithely moving lads following the plough, turning
over the shoulder a countenance of dark beauty; grave, shy girls, pail in
hand, at the milking-bars in dawn or dusk; young mothers in the doorway,
looking out, babe on hip; big-eyed, bare-footed mountain children
clinging hand in hand by the roadside, or clustered like startled little
partridges in the shelter of the dooryard; knitters in the sun and
grandams by the hearth; tellers and treasurers all of tales and legends
couched in racy old Elizabethan English; I dedicate this--their book and
mine.
FOREWORD
I have been so frequently asked how I, a woman, came by my intimate
acquaintance with life in the more remote districts of the southern
Appalachians, particularly in the matter of illicit distilling, that I
think it not amiss to here set down a few words as to my sources of
knowledge.
I have always lived in a small city in the heart of the Cumberlands, and
a portion of each year was spent in the mountains themselves. The speech
of Judith and her friends and kin has been familiar to me from childhood;
their point of view, their customs and possessions as well known to me as
my own. Then when I began to write, I was one summer at Roan Mountain, on
the North Carolina-Tennessee line, probably less than two hundred miles
from Chattanooga by the railway, and Gen. John T. Wilder, who had
campaigned all through the fastnesses of that inaccessible region,
suggested to me that I buy a mountain-bred saddle horse, and ride such a
route as he would give me, bringing up, after about a thousand miles of
it, at my home. To follow the itinerary that the old soldier marked out
on the map for me was to leave railroads and modern civilisation as we
know it, penetrate the wild heart of the region, and, depending on the
wayside dwellers for hospitality and lodging from night to night, be
forcibly thrust into an intimate comprehension of a phase of American
life which is perhaps the most primitive our country affords.
I was more than eight weeks making this trip, carrying with me all
necessary baggage on my capacious, cowgirl saddle with its long and
numerous buckskin tie-strings. At first I shrank very much from riding up
to a cabin--a young woman, alone, with garments and outfit that must
challenge the attention and curiosity of these people--in the dusk of
evening or in a heavy rain-storm, and asking in set terms for lodging.
But it took only a few days for me to find that here I was never to be
stared at, wondered at, nor questioned; and that, proffering my request
under such conditions, I was met by instant hospitality, and a grave,
uninquiring courtesy unsurpassed and not always equalled in the best
society, and I seemed to evoke a swift tenderness that was almost
compassion.
During this journey I became acquainted with some features of mountain
life which I might never have known otherwise. My best friends in the
mountains in the neighbourhood of my own home had always been a little
shy of discussing moonshine whiskey and moonshiners; but here I earned a
dividend upon my misfortunes, being more than once taken for a revenue
spy; and in the apologetic amenities of those who had misjudged me, which
followed my explanations and proofs of innocence, I have been shown in a
spirit of atonement, illicit still and "hideout." I have heard old
Jephthah Turrentine make his protest against the government's attitude
toward the mountain man and his "blockaded still." I have foregathered
with the revenuers in the settlements at the foot of the circling purple
ranges, and been shown the specially made axes and hooks they carry with
them for breaking up and destroying the simple appurtenances of the
illicit manufacture. Knowing that Blatch Turrentine's still must have
cost him three hundred dollars, I cannot wonder that a mountain man, a
thrifty fellow like Blatch, should have lingered, even in great danger,
over the project of carrying it with him.
These dwellers in the southern mountain region, the purest American
strain left to us, hold the interest and appeal of a changing, vanishing
type. The tide of enlightenment and commercial prosperity must presently
sweep in and absorb them. And so I might hope that a faithful picture of
the life and manners I have sought to represent in _Judith of the
Cumberlands_ would be the better worth while.
A. Mac G.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Spring 1
II. At "The Edge" 20
III. Suitors 47
IV. Building 64
V. The Red Rose and the Briar 83
VI. The Play-Party 99
VII. Kisses 112
VIII. On the Doorstone 124
IX. Foeman's Bluff 135
X. A Spy 152
XI. The Warning 161
XII. In the Lion's Den 181
XIII. In the Night 199
XIV. The Raid 207
XV. Council of War 221
XVI. A Message 235
XVII. The Old Cherokee Trail 244
XVIII. Bitter Parting 261
XIX. Cast Out 273
XX. A Conversion 282
XXI. The Baptising 302
XXII. Ebb-Tide 315
XXIII. The Dumb Supper 326
XXIV. A Case of Walking Typhoid 340
XXV. A Perilous Passage 360
XXVI. His Own Trap 371
XXVII. Love's Guerdon 382
XXVIII. A Prophecy 393
Judith of the Cumberlands
Chapter I
Spring
"Won't you be jest dressed to kill an' cripple when you get that on!
Don't it set her off, Jeffy Ann?"
The village milliner fell back, hands on hips, thin lips screwed up, and
regarded the possible purchaser through narrowed eyes of simulated
ecstasy.
"I don't know," debated the brown beauty, surveying herself in a
looking-glass by means of an awkwardly held hand-mirror. "'Pears to me
this one's too little. Hit makes me look like I was sent for and couldn't
come. But I do love red. I think the red on here is mightly sightly."
Instantly the woman of the shop had the hat off the dark young head and
in her own hands.
"This is a powerful pretty red bow," she assented promptly. "I can take
it out just as easy as not, and tack it onto that big hat you like. I
believe you're right; and red certainly does go with yo' hair and eyes."
Again she gazed with languishing admiration at her customer.
And Judith Barrier was well worth it, tall, justly proportioned,
deep-bosomed, long-limbed, with the fine hands and feet of the true
mountaineer. The thick dusk hair rose up around her brow in a massive,
sculptural line; her dark eyes--the large, heavily fringed eyes of a
dryad--glowed with the fires of youth, and with a certain lambent shining
which was all their own; the stain on her cheeks was deep, answering to
the ripe red of the full lips.
In point of fact Mrs. Rhody Staggart the milliner considered her a big,
coarse country girl, and thought that a pair of stout corsets well pulled
in would improve her crude figure; but she dealt out compliments without
ceasing as she exchanged the red bow for the blue, and laboriously pinned
the headgear upon the bronze-brown coils, admonishing gravely, "Far over
to one side, honey--jest the way they're a-wearin' them in New York this
minute."
The buyer once more studied her mirror, and its dumb honesty told her
that she was beautiful. Then she looked about for some human eyes to make
the same communication.
"What's a-goin' on over yon at the Co't House?" she inquired with languid
interest, looking across the open square.
"They's a political speakin'," explained the other. "Creed Bonbright he
wants to be elected jestice of the peace and go back to the Turkey Tracks
and set up a office. Fool boy! You know mighty well an' good they'll run
him out o' thar--or kill him, one."
Although the girl had herself ridden down from Turkey Track Mountain that
morning, and the old Bonbright farm adjoined her own, the news held no
interest for her. She wished the gathering might have been something more
to her purpose; but she solemnly paid for the hat, and with the cheap
finery on her stately young head, which had been more appropriately
crowned with a chaplet of vine leaves, moved to the door. She hoped that
standing there, waiting for the boys to bring her horse, she might
attract some attention by her recently acquired splendour.
She looked up at the Court House steps. The building was humbly in the
Greek manner, as are so many of the public structures in the South.
Between its great white pillars, flaking paint and half-heartedly
confessing their woodland genesis, stood a tall young man, bareheaded.
The doubtful sunlight of a March day glinted on his uncovered yellow
hair. He was speaking rapidly in a fervid fashion that seemed beyond the
occasion; in his blue eyes shone something of the fanatic's passion; his
bearing was that of a man who conceives himself to have a mission and a
message.
Judith looked at him. She heard no word of what he was saying--but him
she heard. She heard the high, vibrant voice, saw the fair hair on the
upflung head, the rapt look in the blue eyes with their quick-expanding
pupils. Suddenly her world turned over. In a smother of strange,
uncomprehended emotions, she was gropingly glad she had the new hat--glad
she had it on now, and that Mrs. Staggart herself had adjusted it. On
blind impulse she edged around into plainer view, pushing freely in
amongst the fringe of men and boys, an unheard-of thing for a well taught
mountain girl to do, but Judith was for the moment absolutely unconscious
of their humanity.
"You never go a-nigh my people," cried Bonbright in that clear thrilling
tenor that is like a trumpet call, "you never go a-nigh them with the
statute--with government--except when the United States marshal takes a
posse up and raids the stills and brings down his prisoners. That's all
the valley knows of the mountain folks. The law's never carried to
anybody up there except the offenders and criminals. The Turkey Track
neighbourhoods, Big and Little, have got a mighty bad name with you-all.
But you ought to understand that violence must come when every man is
obliged to take the law into his own hands. I admit that it's an eye for
an eye and a tooth for a tooth with us now--what else could it be? And
yet we are as faithful to each other, as virtuous, and as God-fearing a
race as those in the valley. I am a mountain man, born and bred in the
Turkey Tracks; and I ask you to send me back to my neighbours with the
law, that they may learn to be good citizens, as they are already good
men and women."
Upon the word, there broke out at the farthest corner of the square an
abrupt splatter of sound, oaths, cries, punctuated by the swift staccato
of running feet. The ringing voice came to a sudden halt. Out of a little
side street which descended from the mountain, a young fellow burst into
view, running in long leaping bounds, his hands up. Behind him lumbered
Dan Haley the United States marshal, a somewhat heavy-set man, puffing
and panting, yelling, "Halt! halt! halt!" and finally turning loose a
fusillade of shots aimed high over the fleeing lad's head. There was a
drawing back and a scattering in every direction.
"Hey, Bonbright!" vociferated a man leaping up from the last step where
he had been sitting, pointing to where the marshal's deputy followed
behind herding five or six prisoners from the mountains, "Hey, Bonbright!
There's some of your constituency--some God-fearing Turkey-Trackers--now,
but I reckon you won't own 'em."
"I will!" shouted Bonbright, whirling upon him, and one got suddenly the
blue fire of his hawk-like eye with the slant brow above. "They _are_ my
people, and the way they're treated is what I've been trying to talk to
you-all about."
"Well, you better go and take them fellers some law right now," jeered
his interlocutor. "Looks like to me they need it mighty bad."
"That's just what I'm about," answered Bonbright. "God knows they'll get
no justice unless I do. That's my job," and without another word or a
look behind him he made his way bareheaded through the group on the steps
and down the street.
Meantime the pursued had turned desperately and dodged into the millinery
store whence Judith Barrier had emerged a little earlier. Instantly there
came out to the listeners the noise of falling articles and breaking
glass, and the squeals and scufflings of the women. The red-faced marshal
dived in after his quarry, and emerged a moment later holding him by one
elbow, swearing angrily. Creed Bonbright came up at the instant, and
Haley, needing some one to whom he could express himself, explained in
voluble anger:
"The damned little shoat! Said if I'd let him walk a-loose he'd give me
information. You can't trust none of them."
Bonbright laid a reassuring touch on the fugitive's shoulder as Haley
fumbled after the handcuffs.
"I ain't been into no stillin', Creed!" panted the squirming boy.
"Well, don't run then," admonished Bonbright. "You've got no call to.
I'll see that you get justice."
While he spoke there wheeled into the square, from a nearby waggon-yard,
two young mountaineers on mules, one leading by the bridle-rein a sorrel
horse with a side-saddle on it. At sight of the marshal and those with
him, an almost imperceptible tremor went through the pair. There was a
flicker of nostril, a rounding of eye, as their glance ran swiftly from
one to another of Haley's prisoners. They were like wild game that winds
the hunter.
"St! You Pony Card, is that them?" whispered Haley, sharply nudging the
prisoner he held. "Turn him a-loose, Bonbright; I've got him handcuffed
now."
The boy--he was not more than sixteen--choked, reddened, held down his
head, studying the marshal's face anxiously from beneath lowered
flax-coloured brows.
"Yes, them's Andy and Jeff Turrentine," Bonbright heard the husky,
reluctant whisper. "Now cain't I go?"
The newcomers were beyond earshot, but the by-play was ominous to them.
The lean young bodies stiffened in their saddles, the reins came up in
their hands. For a moment it seemed as if they would turn and run for it.
But it was too late. Without making any reply Haley shoved his prisoner
into the hands of the deputy and with prompt action intercepted the two
and placed them under arrest. Bonbright observed one of the boys beckon
across the heads of the gathering crowd before he dismounted, and noted
that some one approached from the direction of the Court House steps and
received the three riding animals. In the confusion he did not see who
this was. Haley spoke to his deputy, and then drew their party sharply
off toward the jail, which could be used temporarily for the detention of
United States prisoners. To the last the young Turrentines muttered
together and sent baleful glances toward Bonbright, whom they plainly
conceived to be the author of their troubles. Poor Pony Card plodded with
bent head mutely behind them, a furtive hand travelling now and again to
his eyes.
Such crowd as the little village had collected was following, Bonbright
with the rest, when he encountered the girl who had come from the
milliner's shop. She stood now alone by the sorrel horse with the
side-saddle on it, holding the bridle-reins of the two mules, and there
was a bewildered look in her dark eyes as the noisy throng swept past her
which brought him--led in the hand of destiny--instantly to her side.
"What's the matter?" he asked her. "Can I help you?" And Judith who, in
her perturbation, had not seen him before, started violently at the words
and tone.
"They've tuck the boys," she hesitated, in a rich, broken contralto, that
voice which beyond all others moves the hearts of hearers, "I--I don't
know how I'm a-goin' to get these here mules home. Pete he won't lead so
very well."
"Oh, were you with the men Haley arrested?" ejaculated Bonbright.
"Yes, they're my cousins. I don't know what he tuck 'em for," the young,
high-couraged head turned jailward; the dark eyes flashed a resentful
look after the retiring posse.
"It looks like to me, from what Haley said, that there's nothing against
them," Bonbright reassured her. "But they're likely to be held as
witnesses--that's the worst about this business.
"I was going over there right now to see what can be done about it--being
a sort of lawyer. But let me help you first. I'm Creed Bonbright--reckon
you know the name--born and raised on Big Turkey Track."
Judith's heart beat to suffocation, the while she answered in commonplace
phrase, "I shorely do. My name is Judith Barrier; I live with Uncle
Jephthah Turrentine, on my farm. Hit's right next to the old Bonbright
place. We've been livin' thar more'n four years. I hate to go back and
tell Uncle Jep of the boys bein' tuck; and that big mule, Pete, I don't
know how I'm a-goin' to git him out o' the settlement, he's that mean and
feisty about town streets."
"I reckon I can manage him," Bonbright suggested, looking about. "Oh,
Givens!" he called to a man hurrying past. "When you get over there ask
Haley not to take any definite action--I reckon he wouldn't anyhow. I'm
going to represent the prisoners, and I'll be there inside of half an
hour. Now let me put you on your horse, Miss Judith, and I'll lead the
mules up the road a piece for you."
And so it came about that Judith sprang to the back of the sorrel nag
from Creed Bonbright's hand. Creed, still bareheaded, and wholly
unconscious of the fact, walked beside her leading the mules. They passed
slowly up the street towards the mountainward edge of Hepzibah, talking
as they went in the soft, low, desultory fashion of their people.
The noises of the village, aroused from its usual dozing calm, died away
behind them. Beyond the last cabin they entered a sylvan world all their
own. While he talked, questioning and replying gravely and at leisure,
the man was revolving in his mind just what action would be best for the
prisoners whose cause he had espoused. As for Judith, she had forgotten
that such persons existed, that such trivial mischance as their arrest
had just been; she was concerned wholly with the immediate necessity to
charm, to subjugate the man.
[Illustration: "Creed walked beside her leading the mules."]
A rustic belle and beauty, used to success in such enterprises, in the
limited time at her command she brought out for Creed's subduing her
little store of primitive arts. She would know, Pete suggesting the
topic, if he didn't despise a mule, adding encouragingly that she did.
The ash, it seemed, was the tree of her preference; didn't he think it
mighty sightly now when it was just coming into bloom? His favourite
season of the year, his favoured colour, of such points she made inquiry,
giving him, in an elusive feminine fashion, ample opportunity to relate
himself to her. And always he answered. When all was spoken, and at the
first sharp rise she drew rein for the inevitable separation, she could
not have said that she had failed; but she knew that she had not
succeeded.
"Ye can jest turn Pete a-loose now," she told him gently. "He'll foller
from here on."
Bonbright, on his part, was not quite aware why he paused here, yet it
seemed cold and unfriendly to say good-bye at once, Again he assured her
that he would go immediately to the jail and find what could be done for
her cousins. There was no more to be said now--yet they lingered.
It was a blowy, showery March day, its lips puckered for weeping or
laughter at any moment, the air full of the dainty pungencies of new
life. Winged ants, enjoying their little hour of glory, swarmed from
their holes and turned stone or stump to a flickering, moving grey. About
them where they stood was the awakening world of nature. Great, pale blue
bird-foot violets were blooming on favoured slopes, and in protected
hollows patches of eyebright made fairy forests on the moss, while under
tatters of dead leaves by the brookside arbutus blushed. Above their
heads the tracery of branches was a lace-work overlaid with fanlike
budding green leaves, except where the maples showed scarlet tassels, or
the Judas tree flaunted its bold, lying, purple-pink promise of fruitage
never to be fulfilled.
Could two young creatures be wiser than nature's self? It was the new
time; all the gauzy-winged ephemerae in the moist March woods were
throbbing with it, buzzing or flashing about seeking mates and nectar.
The earth had wakened from her winter sleep and set her face toward her
ancient, ardent lover, the sun. In the soul of Judith Barrier--Judith the
nature woman--all this surged strongly. As for the man, he had sent forth
his spirit in so general a fashion, he conceived himself to have a
mission so impersonal, that he scarce remembered what should or should
not please or attract Creed Bonbright.
Judith dreaded lest he make his farewells before she had from him some
earnest of a future meeting. He could not say good-bye and let her leave
him so! It seemed to her that if he did she should die before she reached
the mountain-top. Dark, rich, earth-born, earth-fast, material, she
looked down at Creed where he stood beside her, his hand on the sorrel's
neck, his calm blue eyes raised to hers. Her gaze lingered on the fair
hair flying in the March breeze, above a face selfless as that of some
young prophet. Her eager, undisciplined nature found here what it craved.
Coquetry had not availed her; it had fallen off him unrecognised--this
man who answered it absently, and thought his own thoughts. And with the
divine pertinacity of life itself she delved in the ancient wisdom of her
sex for a lure to make him rise and follow her. It was not bright eyes
nor red lips that could move or please him? But she had seen him moved,
aroused. The hint was plain. Instantly abandoning her personal siege, she
espoused the cause of her bodiless rival.
"I--I heard you a-speakin' back there," she said with a little catch in
her breath.
Bonbright's eyes returned from the far distances to which they had
travelled after giving her--Judith Barrier, so worthy of a blue-eyed
youth's respectful attention--a passing glance. She replied to his gaze
with one full of a meaning to him at that time indecipherable;
nevertheless it was an ardent, compelling look which he must needs answer
with some confession of himself.
"You wouldn't understand what I was trying to tell about," he began
gently. "Since I've been living in the valley, where folks get rich and
see a heap of what they call pleasure, I've had many a hard thought about
the lives of our people up yonder in the mountains. I want to go back to
my people with--I want to tell them--"
The girl leaned forward in her saddle, burning eyes fixed on his intent
face, red lips apart.
"Yes--what?" she breathed. "What is it you want to say to the folks back
home? You ort to come and say it. We need it bad."
"Do you think so?" asked Bonbright doubtfully. "Do you reckon they would
listen to me? I don't know. Sometimes I allow maybe I'd better stay here
where the Judge wants me to till I'm an older man and more experienced."
He studied the beautiful, down-bent face greedily now, but it was not the
eye of a man looking at a maid. His thoughts were with the work he hoped
to do. Judith's heart contracted with fear, and then set off beating
heavily. Wait till he was an old man? Would love wait? Somebody else
would claim him--some town girl would find the way to charm him. In sheer
terror she put down her hand and laid it upon his.
"Don't you never think it," she protested. "You're needed right now.
After a while will be too late. Why, I come a-past your old home in the
rain last Wednesday, and I could 'a' cried to see the winders dark, and
the grass all grown up to the front door. You come back whar you
belong--" she had almost said "honey"--"and you'll find there is need
a-plenty for folks like you."
"Well, they all allow that I'll be elected next Thursday," Creed
assented, busying himself over the lengthening of Beck's bridle, that she
might lead the mule the more handily. "And if I am I'll be in the Turkey
Tracks along in April and find me a place to set up an office. If I'm
elected----"
"Elected! An' ef yo'r not?" she cried, filled with scorn of such a paltry
condition. What difference could it make whether or not he were elected?
Wouldn't his hair be just as yellow, his eyes as blue? Would his voice be
any less the call to love?
He smiled at her tolerantly, handing up the lengthened strap.
"Well, I don't just rightly know what I will do, then," he debated.
"But you're a-comin' up to the Turkey Tracks anyhow, to--to see yo'
folks," persisted Judith with a rising triumph in her tone.
"Yes," acquiesced Bonbright, "I'll come up in April anyhow."
And with this assurance the girl rode slowly away, leading Beck, the now
resigned Pete following behind. All the sounds from the valley were
gathered as in a vast bowl and flung upward, refined by distance. A
moment she halted listening, then breasted the first rise and entered
that deep silence which waits the mountain dweller. The great forest
closed about her.
Creed Bonbright stood for a moment in the open road looking after her.
Something she had conveyed to him, some call sent forth, which had not
quite reached the ear of his spirit, and yet which troubled his calm. He
lifted his gaze toward the bulk of the big mountain looming above him. He
passed his hand absently through his fair hair, then tossed his head back
with a characteristic motion. It was good to know he was needed up there.
It was good to know he would be welcomed. So far the girl had made her
point. After this the mountains and Judith Barrier would mean one thing
in the young man's mind. As the shortest way to them both, he turned and
walked swiftly down toward the settlement and to the undertaking which
there awaited him.
Chapter II
At "The Edge"
The girl on the sorrel nag and the two riderless animals toiled patiently
up the broad, timbered flank of Big Turkey Track, following the raw red
gash in the greenery that was the road.
She gazed with wondering eyes at the familiar landmarks of the trail. All
was just as it had been when she rode down it at dawn that morning, Andy
and Jeff ahead on their mules whistling, singing, skylarking like two
playful bear cubs. It was herself that was changed. She pushed the cheap
hat off her hot forehead and tried to win to some coherence of thought
and--so far had she already come on a new, strange path--looked back with
wondering uncomprehension, as upon the beliefs and preferences of a crude
primitive ancestress, to the girl who had cared that this hat cost a
dollar and a half instead of a dollar and a quarter--only a few hours
since when she bought it at the store. She went over the bits of talk
that had been between her and Creed Bonbright. What had he said his
favourite colour was? Memory brought back his rapt young face when she
put the question to him. She trembled with delight at the recollection.
His eyes were fixed upon the sky, and he had answered her absently,
"blue."
Blue! What a fool--what a common thickheaded fool she had been all her
days! She let the sorrel take his own gait, hooked his bridle-rein and
Beck's upon the saddle-horn, and lifting her arms withdrew the hatpins
and took off the unworthy headgear. For a moment she regarded savagely
the cheap red ribbon which had appeared so beautiful to her; then with
strong brown fingers tore it loose and flung it in the dust of the road,
where Pete shied at it, and the stolid Beck coming on with flapping ears
set hoof upon it.
What vast world forces move with our movements, pluck us uncomprehending
from the station we had struggled for, and make our sorrowful meat of our
attained desires! The stars in their courses pivot and swing on these
subtle attractions, ancient as themselves. Judith Barrier, tearing the
gaudy ribbon from her hat and casting it upon the road under her horse's
feet, stood to learn what the priests of Isis knew thousands of years
ago, that red is the symbol of pleasure and of mere animal comfort, while
blue is the colour of pure reason.
Halfway up the trail they rode into a cloud that rested trembling on the
mountain-side, passed through it and emerged upon fitful sunlight. Near
the top there came a sudden shower which descended with the souse of an
overturned bucket. It won small attention from Judith, but Pete and Beck
resented it in mule fashion, with a laying back of ears and lashing out
of heels. These amenities were exchanged for the most part across the
intervening sorrel nag and his rider, and Selim replied promptly and in
kind, almost unseating Judith.
"You Selim!" she cried jerking the rein. "You feisty Pete! You no-account
Beck! What ails you-all? Cain't you behave?" and once more she lapsed
into dreaming. It was Selim who, wise and old, stopped at Aunt Nancy
Card's gate and gave Judith an opportunity to descend if such were her
preference.
On the porch of the cabin sat a tall, lean, black-eyed old man smoking
his pipe, Jephthah Turrentine himself. Nancy Card, a dry, brown little
sparrow of a woman, occupied a chair opposite him, and negotiated a pipe
quite as elderly and evil-smelling as his own.
The kerchief folded about her neck was notably white; her clean
check-apron rustled with starch; but the half-grey hair crinkling
rebelliously from its loose coil was never confined by anything more
rigorous than a tucking comb. In moments of stress this always slipped
down, and had to be vigorously replaced, so that stray strands were apt
to be tossing about her eyes--fearless, direct blue eyes, that looked out
of her square, wrinkled, weather-beaten little face with the sincere gaze
of an urchin. Back of her chair lay a bundle of white-oak splits for use
in her by-trade of basket-weaver; above them hung bundles of drying
herbs, for Nancy was a sick-nurse and a bit of an herb-doctor. She had
made a hard and a more or less losing fight against poverty--the men folk
of these hardy, valiant little women seem predestined to be shiftless.
It came back to Judith dimly as she looked at them--she was in a mood to
remember such things--that her uncle had courted Nancy Card when these
two were young people, that they had quarrelled, both had married, reared
families, and been widowed; and they were quarrelling still! Acrimonious
debate with Nancy was evidently such sweet pain that old Jephthah sought
every opportunity for it, and the sudden shower in the vicinity of her
cabin had offered him an excuse to-day.
Nancy did not confine her practice to what she would have called humans,
but doctored a horse or a cow with equal success. One cold spring a
little chicken had its feet frozen in the wet barnyard so badly that it
lost one of them, and Nancy, who had taken the poor mite into the house
and nursed it till she loved it, constructed for it a wooden leg
consisting of a small, light peg strapped to the stump. And thereafter
Nicodemus, a rooster who must now belie the name since he could not cling
to a perch with his single foot, became an institution in the Card
household.
Jephthah Turrentine was a natural bone-setter, and was sent for far and
near to reduce a dislocation or bandage a broken limb. In the pursuit of
this which came to be almost a profession, he acquired a good knowledge
of tending upon the sick, and the bitterness of rival practitioners was
added to the score between him and Nancy. The case of Nicodemus furnished
the man with a chance to call the woman a chicken doctor, and the name
appealing to the humorous side of mountain character stuck to her,
greatly to her disgust.
Aunt Nancy's dooryard was famous for its flowers, being a riot of pied
bloom from March till December. Even now fire-in-the-bush and bridal
wreath made gay the borders.
"Good land, Jude Barrier!" called Nancy herself. "You're as wet as a
drownded rat. 'Light and come in."
Old Turrentine permitted his niece to clamber from Selim, and secure him
and both mules.
"Whar's the boys?" he inquired in a great, sonorous bass, the deep,
true-pitched voice promised by the contours of strong bony arches under
heavy brows and the strong nose-bridge.
"In jail," responded Judith laconically, turning to enter the gate. Then,
as she walked up the hard-trodden clay path between the tossing, dripping
heads of daffodils, "Uncle Jep, did you know Creed Bonbright's daddy?"
"In jail!" echoed Nancy Card, making a pretence of trying to suppress a
titter, and thereby rendering it more offensive. "Ain't they beginnin'
ruther young?"
Tall old Jephthah got to his feet, knocked the ashes from his pipe and
put it in his pocket.
"Who tuck 'em?" he inquired briefly, but with a fierce undernote in his
tones. "What was they tuck fer?"
"I never noticed," said Judith, standing on the step before them,
wringing the wet from her black calico riding skirt. "Nobody named it to
me what they was tuck fer. I was talkin' to Creed Bonbright, and he
'lowed to find out. He said that was his business."
"Creed Bonbright," echoed her uncle; "what's he got to do with it? He's
been livin' down in Hepzibah studyin' to be a lawyer--did he have Jeff
and Andy jailed?"
Judith shook her head. "He didn't have nothing to do with it," she
answered. "He 'lowed they would be held for witnesses against some men
Haley had arrested. But he's goin' to come back and live on Turkey
Track," she added, as though that were the only thing of importance in
the world. "He says we-all need law in the mountings, and he's a-goin' to
bring it to us."
"Well, he'd better let my boys alone if he don't want trouble," growled
old Jephthah but half appeased.
"I reckon a little touch of law now an' agin won't hurt yo' boys," put in
Nancy Card smoothly. "My chaps always tuck to law like a duck to water. I
reckon I ain't got the right sympathy fer them that has lawless young
'uns."
"Yo' Pony was arrested afore Andy and Jeff," Judith remarked suddenly,
without any apparent malice. "He was the first one I seen comin' down the
road, and Dan Haley behind him a-shootin' at him."
Jephthah Turrentine forebore to laugh. But he deliberately drew out his
old pipe again, filled it and stepped inside for a coal with which to
light it.
"Mebbe yo' sympathies will be more tenderer for me in my afflictions of
lawless sons after this, Nancy," he called derisively over his shoulder.
"Hit's bound to be a mistake 'bout Pony," declared the little old woman
in a bewildered tone. "Pone ain't but risin' sixteen, and he's the
peacefullest child----"
"Jest what I would have said about my twin lambs," interrupted old
Jephthah with twinkling eye, as he appeared in the doorway drawing
mightily upon the newly lighted pipe, tossing his great beard from side
to side of his mighty chest. "My chaps is all as peaceful as kittens; but
some old woman gits to talkin' and gives 'em a bad name, and it goes from
lip to lip that the Turrentine boys is lawless. Hit's a sad thing when a
woman's tongue is too long and limber, and hung in the middle so it works
at both ends; the reppytations hit can destroy is a sight."
"But a body's own child--they' son! They' bound to stan' up for him,
whether he's in the right or the wrong," maintained Nancy stoutly.
"Huh," grunted Jephthah, "offspring is cur'ous. Sometimes hit 'pears like
you air kin to them, and they ain't kin to you. That Pony boy of your'n
is son to a full mealsack; he's plumb filial and devoted thataway to a
dollar, if so be he thinks you've got one in yo' pocket. The facts in the
business air, Nancy, that you've done sp'iled him tell he's plumb rotten,
and a few of the jailings that you so kindly ricommend for my pair won't
do him no harm."
Nancy tossed up her head to reply; but at the moment a small boy,
followed by a smaller girl, coming around the corner of the house,
created a diversion. The girl, a little dancing imp with a frazzle of
flying red hair and red-brown eyes, catching sight of Judith ran to her
and flung herself head foremost in the visitor's lap, where Judith cooed
over her and cuddled her, rumpling the bright hair, rubbing her crimson
cheek against the child's peachy bloom.
"Little Buck and Beezy," said Nancy Card, addressing them both, "Yo' unc'
Pony's in jail. What you-all goin' to do about it?"
The small brown man of six stopped, his feet planted wide on the sward,
his freckled face grave and stern as became his sex.
"Ef the boys goes down for to git him out, I'm goin' along," Little Buck
announced seriously. "Is they goin', granny?"
"I'll set my old rooster on the jail man, an' hit'll claw 'im," announced
Beezy, reckless of distance and likelihood. "My old rooster can claw dest
awful, ef he ain't got but one leg."
Nancy chuckled. These grandchildren were the delight of her heart.
The rain had ceased for the moment; the old man moved to the porch edge,
sighting at the sky.
"I don't know whar Blatch is a-keepin' hisself," he observed. "Mebbe I
better be a-steppin'."
But even as he spoke a tall young mountaineer swung into view down the
road, dripping from the recent rain, and with that resentful air the best
of us get from aggressions of the weather. Blatchley Turrentine, old
Jephthah's nephew, was as brown as an Indian, and his narrow, glinting,
steel-grey eyes looked out oddly cold and alien from under level black
brows, and a fell of stiff black hair.
When the orphaned Judith, living in her Uncle Jephthah's family, was
fourteen, the household had removed from the old Turrentine place--which
was rented to Blatchley Turrentine--to her better farm, whose tenant had
proved unsatisfactory. Well hidden in a gulch on the Turrentine acres
there was an illicit still, what the mountain people call a blockade
still; and it had been in pretty constant operation in earlier years.
When Jephthah abandoned those stony fields for Judith's more productive
acres, he definitely turned his own back upon this feature, but Blatch
Turrentine revived the illegal activities and enlisted the old man's boys
in them. Jeff and Andy had a tobacco patch in one corner where the ground
suited, and in another field Jim Cal raised a little corn. Aside from
these small ventures, the place was given over entirely to the secret
still. The father held scornfully aloof; his attitude was
characteristic.
"Ef I pay no tax I'll make no whiskey," he declared. "You-all boys will
find yourselves behind bars many a time when you'd ruther be out
squirrel-huntin'. Ef you make blockade whiskey every fool that gits mad
at you has got a stick to hold over you. You are good-Lord-good-devil to
everybody, for fear they'll lead to yo' still; or else you mix up with
folks about the business and kill somebody an' git a bad name. These here
blockaded stills calls every worthless feller in the district; most o'
the foolishness in this country goes on around 'em when the boys gits
filled up. I let every man choose his callin', but I don't choose to be
no moonshiner, and ef you boys is wise you'll say the same."
As Blatchley came up now and caught sight of the animals tethered at the
fence he began irritably:
"What in the name of common sense did Andy and Jeff leave they' mules
here for? I can't haul any corn till I get the team and the waggon
together."
"Looks like you've hauled too many loads of corn that nobody knows the
use of," broke out the irrepressible Nancy. "Andy and Jeff's in jail, and
some fool has tuck my little Pone along with the others."
Blatch flung a swift look at his uncle; but whatever his private
conviction, to dishonour a member of his tribe in the face of the enemy,
on the heels of defeat, was not what Jephthah Turrentine would do.
"The boys is likely held for witnesses, Jude allows," the elder explained
briefly. "You take one mule and I'll ride 'tother," he added. "I'll he'p
ye with the corn."
This was a great concession, and as such Blatchley accepted it.
"All right," he returned. "Much obliged."
Then he glanced unconcernedly at Judith, and, instead of making that
haste toward the corn-hauling activities which his manner had suggested,
moved loungingly up the steps. Beezy, from her sanctuary in Judith's lap,
viewed him with contemptuous disfavour. Her brother, not so safely
situated, made to pass the intruder, going wide like a shying colt.
With a sudden movement Blatchley caught the child by the shoulders. There
was a pantherlike quickness in the pounce that was somehow daunting from
an individual of this man's size and impassivity.
"Hold on thar, young feller," the newcomer remarked. "Whar you a-goin'
to, all in sech haste?"
"You turn me a-loose," panted the child. "I'm a-goin' over to my Jude."
"Oh, she's yo' Jude, is she? Well they's some other folks around here
thinks she's their Jude--what you goin' to do about it?"
All this time he held the small, dignified atom of humanity in a
merciless grip that made Little Buck ridiculous before his beloved, and
fired his childish soul to a very ecstasy of helpless rage.
"I'll--kill--you when I git to be a man!" the child gasped, between tears
and terror. "I'll thest kill you--and I'll wed Jude. You turn me
a-loose--that's what you do."
Blatch laughed tauntingly and raised the little fellow high in air.
"Ef I was to turn you a-loose now hit'd bust ye," he drawled.
"I don't keer. I----"
Around the corner of the cabin drifted Nicodemus, the wooden-legged
rooster, stumping gravely with his dot-and-carry-one gait.
"Lord, Nancy, thar comes the one patient ye ever cured!" chuckled old
Jephthah. "I don't wonder yo're proud enough of him to roof him and
affectionate him for the balance of his life."
"I reckon you'd do the same, ef so be ye should ever cure one," snapped
Nancy, rising instantly to the bait, and turning her back on the others.
"As 't is, ef they hilt the buryin' from the house of the feller that
killed the patient I reckon Jude wouldn't have nothin' to do but git up
funeral dinners."
Little Buck, despairing of granny's interference, began to cry. At the
sound Judith came suddenly out of a revery to spring up and catch him
away from the hateful restraining hands.
"I don't know what the Lord's a-thinkin' about to let sech men as you
live, Blatch Turrentine!" she said almost mechanically. "Ef I was
a-tendin' to matters I'd 'a' had you dead long ago. Ef you're good for
anything on this earth I don't know what it is."
"Oh, yes you do," Blatchley returned as the old man started down the
steps. "I'd make the best husband for you of any feller in the two Turkey
Tracks--and you'll find it out one of these days."
The girl answered only with a contemptuous glance.
"Come again--when you ain't got so long to stay," Nancy sped them sourly.
"Jude, you'd better set awhile and get your skirts dry." She looked after
Blatch as he moved up the road, then at little Buck, so ashamed of his
trembling lip. Her face darkened angrily. She turned slowly to Judith.
"What you gwine to do with that feller, Jude?" she queried
significantly.
"Do? Why, nothin'. He ain't nothin' to me," responded the girl
indifferently.
"He ain't, hey? Well, he's bound to marry ye, honey," said the older
woman.
"Huh, he ain't the first--and won't be the last, I reckon," assented
Judith easily.
"Ye'd better watch out fer that man, Jude," persisted Nancy, after a
moment's silence. "He'll git ye, yet. I know his kind. He ain't a-keerin'
fer yo' ruthers--whether you want him or no. He jest aims to have
_you_."
"Well, I reckon he'll about have to aim over agin," observed the unmoved
Judith.
"An' Elder Drane? Air ye gwine to take him?--I know he's done axed ye,"
pursued Nancy hesitantly.
"'Bout 'leven times," agreed Judith with perfect seriousness. "No--I
wouldn't have the man, not ef he's made of pure gold." She added with a
sudden little smile and a catch of the breath: "Them's awful nice chaps
o' his; I'd most take him to git them. The baby now--hit's the sweetest
thing!" And she tumbled Beezy tumultuously in her lap, then suddenly
inquired, apparently without any volition of her own, "Aunt Nancy, did
you know Creed Bonbright's folks?"
"Good Lord, yes!" returned old Nancy. "But come on inside and set, Jude.
This sun ain't a-goin' to dry yo' skirt. Come in to the fire. Don't take
that thar cheer, the behime legs is broke, an' it's apt to lay you
sprawling. I've knowed Creed Bonbright sence he wasn't knee-high to a
turkey, and I knowed his daddy afore him, and his grand-daddy, for the
matter of that."
Avoiding the treacherous piece of furniture against which she had been
warned, Judith slipped out of her wet riding-skirt and arranged it in
front of the fire to dry, turning then and seating herself on the broad
hearth at Nancy's knee, where she prompted feverishly,
"And is all the Bonbrights moved out of the neighbourhood?"
The old woman drew a few meditative whiffs on her pipe.
"All gone," she nodded; "some of 'em killed up in the big feud, and some
moved away--mostly to Texas." Presently she added:
"That there Bonbright tribe is a curious nation of folks. They're always
after great things, and barkin' their shins against rocks in the way.
Creed's mammy--she was Judge Gillenwaters's sister, down in
Hepzibah--died when he was no bigger'n Little Buck, and his pappy never
wedded again. We used to name him and Creed Big 'Fraid and Little 'Fraid;
they was always round together, like a man and his shadder. Then the
feuds broke out mighty bad, and the Blackshearses got Esher Bonbright one
night in a mistake for some of my kin--or so it was thort. Anyhow, the
man was dead, and Creed lived with me fer a spell till his uncle down in
Hepzibah wanted him to come and learn to be a lawyer."
"Lived right here--in this house?" inquired Judith, looking around her,
as she rose and turned the riding-skirt.
"Lord, yes--why not? You would a-knowed all about it, only your folks
never moved in from the Fur Cove neighbourhood till the year Creed went
down to the settlement."
The girl sank back on the hearth, but continued to gaze about her, and
the tell-tale expression in her eyes seemed to afford Nancy Card much
quiet amusement.
"Do you reckon he'll live with you again when he comes back into the
mountains?" she inquired finally.
"I reckon he'll be weddin' one of them thar town gals and fetchin' a wife
home to his own farm over by yo' house," suggested the inveterate tease.
Judith went suddenly white, and then red. "You don't know of anybody--you
hain't heard he was promised, have you?" she hesitated.
"I ain't hearn that he was, and I ain't hearn that he wasn't," returned
Nancy serenely. "The gal that gits Creed Bonbright'll be doin' mighty
well; but also she may not find hit right easy for to trap him. I'll
promise ef he does come up hyer again I'll speak a good word for you,
Jude. The Lord knows I don't see how you make out to live with that thar
old man. You'll deserve a crown and a harp o' gold sot with diamonds ef
you stan' it much longer."
Judith put on the now thoroughly dried riding-skirt, and the two women
went outside together.
"Well, good-bye, Aunt Nancy," she said, as she led the sorrel nag to the
edge of the porch and made ready to mount. "I'll be over and bring the
pieces for you to start me out on that Risin' Sun quilt a-Wednesday."
It was late afternoon as she took her homeward way across the level of
the broad mountain-top to the Turrentine place. She left the
main-travelled road and struck directly into a forest short-cut. After
the rain earth and sky were newly washed; the clear, sweetened air was
full of the scent of damp loam and new-ploughed fields; the colours about
her were freshened and glad, and each distant bird-note rang clear and
vivid. To Mrs. Rhody Staggart and her likes at Hepzibah she might be a
crude, awkward country girl; here she was a princess in her own domain;
and it was a noble realm through which she moved as she went forward
under the great trees that rose straight and tall from a black soil,
making pillared aisles away from her on every side. The fern was thick
under foot--it would brush her saddle-girth, come midsummer. Down the
long vistas under the greening trees, where the moist air hung thick, her
bemused eyes caught the occasional roseflash of azalea through the pearly
mist, her nostril was greeted by their wandering, intensely sweet
perfume, with its curious undernote of earth smell.
She smiled vaguely at the first butterfly she had seen, and again as she
noted the earliest lizard basking in the sun-warmed hollow of a big rock.
Absently her gaze sought for cinnamon fern in low woods, sweet fern in
the thickets, and exquisite maidenhair just beginning to uncurl from the
black leaf mould of dripping brakes.
Like a woman in a dream she made her progress, riding through the
wonderful stillness of the vast wild land, an ocean on which each
littlest sound was afloat, so that each was given its true value almost
like a musical tone. An awful, beautiful silence this, brooding back of
every sound; nothing in such a place gives forth mere senseless noise;
the ripple of frogs in marsh and spring branch fall upon the sense as
sweet as bird-songs. The clamour of little falls, the solemn suggestion
of wind in the pines, the sweet broken jangle of cow-bells, a catbird in
a tree--a continuous yet zigzag sort of warble, silver and sibilant notes
alternating,--the rare wild turkey's call along a deeply embowered
creek--one by one all these came to Judith's dreaming ears, clear,
perfect, individual, on the majestic sea of silence about her.
She turned Selim's head at a little intersecting trail, and rode
considerably out of her way to pass the old Bonbright place and brood
upon its darkened windows and grass-besieged doorstone. Some day all that
would be changed. Still in her waking dream she unsaddled Selim at the
log barn, and turned him loose in his open pasture. She laid off her town
attire, put on her cotton working-dress, kindled afresh the fire on the
broad hearthstone and got supper. Her Uncle Jephthah and Blatch
Turrentine came in late, weary from their work of hauling corn to that
destination which old Nancy had announced as disreputably indefinite. The
second son of the family, Wade, a man of perhaps twenty-four, was with
them, and had already been told of the mishap to Andy and Jeff.
Old Jephthah sat at the head of the board, his black beard falling to his
lap, his finely domed brow relieved against a background of shadows.
Judith needed the small brass lamp at the hearthstone, and a tallow
candle rather inadequately lit the supper-table. The corners of the room
were in darkness; only the cloth and dishes, the faces and hands of those
about the table showed forth in sudden light or motion.
Hung on the rough walls, and glimpsed in occasional flickers only, were
Judith's big maple bread-bowl, the churn-dash, spurtle, sedge-broom, and
a round glass bottle for rolling piecrust; cheek by jowl with old
Jephthah's bullet moulds and the pot-hooks he had forged for Judith.
There were strings of dried pumpkin, too, and of shining red peppers. On
a low shelf, scarce visible at all in the dense shadow, stood a keg of
sorghum, and one beside it of vinegar, flanked by the butter-keeler and
the salt piggin with its cedar staves and hickory hoops. And there, too,
was the broken coffee-pot in which garden seeds were hoarded.
"What's all this I hear about Andy and Jeff bein' took?" inquired a
plaintive voice from the darkened doorway whose door, with its heavy,
home-made latch, swung back against the wall on its great, rude, wooden
hinges, as abruptly out of the shadow appeared a man who set a plump hand
on either jamb and stared into the room with a round, white, anxiously
inquiring face. It was Jim Cal, eldest of the sons of Jephthah
Turrentine, married, and living in a cabin a short distance up the slope.
"Who give the information?" he asked as soon as he had peered all about
the room and found no outsider present.
"Well, we hearn that _you_ did, podner," jeered Blatch.
"Come in and set," invited the head of the household, with the
mountaineer's unforgetting hospitality. "Draw up--draw up. Reach and take
off."
"Well--I--I might," faltered the fleshy one, sidling toward the table and
getting himself into a seat. Without further word his father passed the
great dish of fried potatoes, then the platter of bacon. Judith brought
hot coffee and corn pone for him. She did not sit down with the men,
having quite enough to do to get the meal served.
Unheedingly she heard the matter discussed at the table; only when Creed
Bonbright's name came up was she moved to listen and put in her word.
Something in her manner of describing the assistance Bonbright offered
seemed to go against Blatch's grain.
"Got to look out for these here folks that's so free with their offers o'
he'p," he grunted. "Man'll slap ye on the back and tell ye what a fine
feller ye air whilst he's feelin' for your pocket-book--that's town
ways."
The girl was like one hearkening for a finer voice amid all this
distracting noise; she could hear neither. She made feverish haste to
clear away and wash her dishes, that she might creep to her own room
under the eaves. Through her open casement came up to her the sounds of
the April night: a heightened chorus of little frogs in a rain-fed
branch; nearer in the dooryard a half-dozen tree-toads trilling
plaintively as many different minors; with these, scents of growing,
sharpened and sweetened by the dark. And all night the cedar tree which
stood close to the porch edge below moved in the wind of spring, and,
chafing against the shingles, spoke through the miniature music in its
deep, muffled legato, a soft baritone note like a man's voice--a lover's
voice--calling to her beneath her window.
It roused her from fitful slumbers to happy waking, when she lay and
stared into the dark, and painted for herself on its sombre background
Creed Bonbright's figure, the yellow uncovered head close to her knee as
he stood and talked at the foot of the mountain trail. And the voice of
the tree in the eager spring airs said to her waiting heart--whispered it
softly, shouted and tossed it abroad so that all might have heard it had
they been awake and known the shibboleth, murmured it in tones of
tenderness that penetrated her with bliss--that Creed was
coming--coming--coming to her, through the April woods.
Chapter III
Suitors
April was in the mountains. All the vast timbered slopes and tablelands
of the Cumberlands were one golden dapple, as yet differentiated by
darker greens and heavier shadows only where some group of pine or cedar
stood. April in the Cumberlands is the May or early June of New England.
Here March has the days of shine and shower; while to February belongs
the gusty turbulence usually attributed to March. Now sounded the calls
of the first whippoorwills in the dusk of evening; now the first
mocking-bird sang long before day, very sweetly and softly, and again
before moonrise; hours of sun he filled with bolder rejoicings,
condescending in his more antic humour to mimic the hens that began to
cackle around the barn. Every thicket by the water-courses blushed with
azaleas; all the banks were gay with wild violets.
Throughout March's changeful emotional season, night after night in those
restless vehement impassioned airs, the cedar tree talked ardently to
Judith. Through April's softer nights she wakened often to listen to it.
It went fondly over its first assurances. And the time of Creed
Bonbright's advent was near at hand now. Thought of it made light her
step as she went about her work.
"Don't you never marry a lazy man, Jude."
The wife of Jim Cal Turrentine halted on the doorstep, a coarse white cup
containing the coffee she had come to borrow poised in her hand as she
turned to harangue the girl in the kitchen.
"I ain't aimin' to wed no man. Huh, I say marry! I'm not studyin' about
marryin'," promptly responded Judith in the mountain girl's unfailing
formula; but she coloured high, and bent, pot-hooks in hand, to the great
hearth to shift the clumsy Dutch oven that contained her bread.
"That's what gals allers says," commented Iley Turrentine discontentedly.
"Huldy's forever singin' that tune. But let a good-lookin' feller come in
reach and I 'low any of you will change the note. Huldy's took her foot
in her hand and put out--left me with the whole wash to do, and Jim Cal
in the bed declarin' he's got a misery in his back. Don't you never wed a
lazy man."
"Whar's Huldy gone?" inquired Judith, sauntering to the door and looking
out on the glad beauty of the April morning with fond brooding eyes. The
grotesque bow-legged pot-hooks dangled idly in her fingers.
"Over to Nancy Cyard's to git her littlest spinnin' wheel--so she _said_.
I took notice that she had a need for that wheel as soon as ever she
hearn tell that Creed Bonbright was up from Hepzibah stayin' at the
Cyards's."
Had not Iley been so engrossed with her own grievances, the sudden heat
of the look Judith turned upon her must have enlightened her.
"Huldy knowed him right well when she was waitin' on table at Miz.
Huffaker's boarding-house down at Hepzibah," the woman went on. "I ain't
got no use for these here fellers that's around tendin' to the whole
world's business--they' own chil'en is mighty apt to go hongry. But thar,
what does a gal think of that by the side o' curly hair and soft-spoken
ways?"
For Judith Barrier at once all the light was gone out of the spring
morning. The bird in the Rose of Sharon bush that she had taken for a
thrush--why, the thing cawed like a crow. She could have struck her
visitor. And then, with an uncertain impulse of gratitude, she was glad
to be told anything about Creed, to be informed that others knew his hair
was yellow and curly.
"Gone?" sounded old Jephthah's deep tones from within, as Mrs. Jim Cal
made her reluctant way back to a sick husband and a house full of work
and babies. "Lord, to think of a woman havin' the keen tongue that Iley's
got, and her husband keepin' fat on it!"
"Uncle Jep," inquired Judith abruptly, "did you know Creed Bonbright was
at Nancy Card's--stayin' there, I mean?"
"No," returned the old man, seeing in this a chance to call at the cabin,
where, beneath the reception that might have been offered an interloper,
even a duller wit than his might have divined a secret cordial welcome.
"I reckon I better find time to step over that way an' ax is there
anything I can do to he'p 'em out."
"I wish 't you would," assented Judith so heartily that he turned and
regarded her with surprise. "An' ef you see Huldy over yon tell her she's
needed at home. Jim Cal's sick, and Iley can't no-way git along without
her."
"I reckon James Calhoun Turrentine ain't got nothin' worse 'n the old
complaint that sends a feller fishin' when the days gits warm," opined
Jim Cal's father. "I named that boy after the finest man that ever walked
God's green earth--an' then the fool had to go and git fat on me! To
think of me with a _fat_ son! I allers did hold that a fat woman was bad
enough, but a fat man ort p'intedly to be led out an' killed."
"Jude, whar's my knife," came the call from the window in a masculine
voice. "Pitch it out here, can't you?"
Judith took the pocket-knife from the mantel, and going to the window
tossed it to her cousin Wade Turrentine, who was shaping an axe helve at
the chip pile.
"Do you know whar Huldy's gone?" she inquired, setting her elbows on the
sill and staring down at the young fellow accusingly.
"Nope--an' don't care neither," said Wade, contentedly returning to his
whittling. He was expecting to marry Huldah Spiller, Iley's younger
sister, within a few months, and the reply was thus conventional.
"Well, you'd better care," urged Judith. "You better make her stay home
and behave herself. She's gone over to Nancy Card's taggin' after Creed
Bonbright. I wouldn't stand it ef I was you."
"I ain't standin'--I'm settin'," retorted Wade with rather feeble wit;
but the girl noted with satisfaction the quick, fierce spark of anger
that leaped to life in his clear hazel eyes, the instant stiffening of
his relaxed figure. Like a child playing with fire, she was ready to set
alight any materials that came within reach of her reckless fingers, so
only that she fancied her own ends might be served. Now she went uneasily
back to the hearthstone. Her uncle, noting that she appeared engrossed in
her baking, gave a surreptitious glance into the small ancient mirror
standing on the high mantel, made a half-furtive exchange of coats, and
prepared to depart.
Up at the crib Blatch Turrentine was loading corn, and Jim Cal came
creeping across from his own cabin whence Iley had ejected him. He stood
for a while, humped, hands in pockets, watching the other's strong body
spring lithely to its task. Finally he began in his plaintive,
ineffectual voice.
"Blatch, I take notice that you seem to be settin' up to Jude. Do ye
think hit's wise?"
The other grunted over a particularly heavy sack, swung it to the waggon
bed, straightened himself suddenly, and faced his questioner with a look
of dark anger.
"I'd like to see the feller that can git her away from me!" he growled.
"I wasn't a-meanin' that," said Jim Cal, patiently but uneasily shifting
from the right foot to the left. "I'll admit--an' I reckon everybody on
the place will say the same--that she's always give you mo' reason than
another to believe she'd have ye. Not but what that's Jude's way, an'
she's hilt out sech hopes to a-many. What pesters me is how you two would
make out, once you was wed. Jude's mighty pretty, but then again she's
got a tongue."
"Her farm hain't," chuckled Blatch, pulling a sack into place; "and I
'low Jude wouldn't have after her and me had been wed a short while."
"I don't know, Blatch," maintained the fleshy one, timid yet persisting.
"You're a great somebody for havin' yo' own way, an' Jude's mighty high
sperrity--why, you two would shorely fuss."
"Not more than once, we wouldn't," returned Blatch with a meaning laugh.
"The way to do with a woman like Jude is to give her a civil beatin' to
start out with and show her who's boss--wouldn't be no trouble after
that. Jude Barrier has got a good farm. She's the best worker of any gal
that I know, and I aim for to have her--an' this farm."
Within the house now Judith, her cheeks glowing crimson as she bent above
the heaped coals, was going with waxing resentment over the catalogue of
Huldah Spiller's personal characteristics. Her hair, huh! she was mighty
particular to call it "aurbu'n," but a body might as well say red when
they were namin' it, because red was what it was. If a man admired a
turkey egg he would be likely to see beauty in Huldah's complexion--some
folks might wear a sunbonnet to bed, and freckle they would! A vision of
the laughing black eyes and white flashing teeth that went with Huldah
Spiller's red ringlets and freckles, and made her little hatchet face
brilliant when she smiled or laughed, suddenly put Judith on foot and
running to the door.
"Uncle Jep," she called after the tall receding form, "_Oh_, Uncle Jep!"
He turned muttering, "I hope to goodness Jude ain't goin' to git the
hollerin' habit. There's Iley never lets Jim Cal git away from the house
without hollerin' after him as much as three times, and the thing he'd
like least to have knowed abroad is the thing she takes up with for the
last holler."
"Uncle Jep," came the clear hail from the doorway, "don't you fail to
find Huldy and send her straight home. Tell her Iley's nigh about give
out, and Jim Cal's down sick in the bed--hear me?"
He nodded and turned disgustedly. What earthly difference did it make
about Jim Cal and Huldah and Iley? Why should Judith suddenly care? And
then, being a philosopher and in his own manner an amateur of life, he
set to work to analyze her motives, and guessed obliquely at them.
The sight of his broad, retreating back evidently spurred Judith to fresh
effort. "Uncle Jep!" she screamed, cupping her hands about her red lips
to make the sound carry. "Ef you see Creed Bonbright tell him--howdy--for
me!"
The sound may not have carried to the old man's ears, but it reached a
younger pair. Blatch Turrentine was just crossing through the grassy yard
toward the "big road," and Broyles's mill over on Clear Fork, where his
load of corn would be ground to meal with which to feed that blockaded
still on the old Turrentine place which sometimes flung a delicate trail
of smoke out over the flank of the slope across the gulch. As he heard
Judith's bantering cry, Blatch pulled up his team with a muttered curse.
He looked down at her through narrowed eyes, jerking his mules savagely
and swearing at them in an undertone. He was a well-made fellow with a
certain slouching grace about him as he sat on his load of corn; but
there were evil promising bumps on either side of his jaws that spoke of
obstinacy, even of ferocity; and there was something menacing in his
surly passivity of attitude. He looked at the girl and his lip lifted
with a peculiar sidelong sneer.
"Holler a little louder an' Bonbright hisself'll hear ye," he commented
as he started up his team and rattled away down the steep, stony road.
Sunday brought its usual train of visitors. The Turrentine place was
within long walking distance of Brush Arbor church, and whenever there
was preaching they could count on a considerable overflow from that
direction. The Sunday after Creed Bonbright put in an appearance at Nancy
Card's, there was preaching at Brush Arbor, but Judith, nourishing what
secret hopes may be conjectured, refused to make any preparation for
attending service.
"An' ye think ye won't go to meeting this fine sunshiny Sabbath mornin',
Sister Barrier?" Elder Drane put the query, standing anxious and
carefully attired in his best before Judith on the doorstep of her home.
She shook her dark head, and looked past the Elder toward the distant
ranges.
"I jest p'intedly cain't git away this morning," she said carelessly.
The Elder combed his sandy whiskers with a thoughtful forefinger. Not
thus had Judith been wont to reply to him. Always before, if there had
been denial, there were too, reasons adduced, shy looks from the corners
of those dark eyes and tender inquiries as to the health of his
children.
"Is they--is they some particular reason that you cain't go this
morning?" the widower inquired cautiously.
There was, and that particular reason lay as far afield as the Edge and
Nancy Card's place, but Judith Barrier did not see fit to name it to this
one of her suitors, who had brought her perhaps more glory than any
other. She was impatient to be rid of him. Like her mother Earth, having
occupied her time for lo! these several years in the building of an ideal
from such unpromising materials as were then at hand, she was ready to
sweep those tentative makings--confessed failures now that she found the
type she really wanted--swiftly, ruthlessly to the limbo of oblivion.
Elihu Drane stood high among his neighbours; he was a man of some
education as well as comfortable means. His attention had been worth
retaining once; now she smiled at him with a vague, impersonal sweetness,
and repeated her statement that she couldn't go to church.
"I've got too much to do," she qualified finally. "Looks like the work in
this house never is finished. And there's chicken and dumplin's to cook
for dinner."
The Elder's pale blue eyes brightened. "Walk down to the gate with me,
won't you?" he said hopefully, "I've got somethin' to talk to you
about."
When they were out of earshot of the house, he began eagerly, "Sister
Barrier you're workin' yourse'f to death here, in the sweet days of your
youth. I did promise the last time that I never would beg you again to
wed me, but looks like I can't stand by and hold my peace. If you was to
trust yourse'f to me things would be different. I never did hold with a
woman killin' herse'f with hard work. My first and second had everything
that they could wish for, and I was good and ready to do more any time
they named what it was. I've got a crank churn. None of these old
back-breaking, up-and-down dashers for me. I hired a woman whenever my
wife said the word. I don't think either of mine ever killed a chicken or
cut a stick of firewood from the time they walked in the front door as a
bride till they was carried out of it in their coffins."
He stared eagerly into the downcast face beside him, but somewhere Judith
found strength to resist even these dazzling propositions.
"I ain't studyin' about gittin' wedded," she told him most untruthfully.
"Looks like I'm a mighty cold-hearted somebody, Elder Drane. I jest can't
fix it no way but to live here with my Uncle Jep and take care of him in
his old days. Oh, would you wait a minute?" as they reached the
horse-block and the Elder began to untie his mount with a discouraged
countenance. "Jest let me run back to the house--I won't keep you a
second. I got some little sugar cookies for Mart and Lucy."
Mart and Lucy were the Elder's children. He stood looking after her as
she ran lithely up the path, and wondered why she could love them so much
and him so little. She came back laughing and a bit out of breath.
"I expect we'll have company to-day," she told him comfortably. "We
always do when there's preaching at the church, and I 'low I'd better
stay home and see to the dinner."
The Elder had scarcely made his chastened adieux when the Lusk girls came
through the grove walking on either side of a young man.
The Lusk girls were Judith's nearest neighbours--if you excepted Huldah
Spiller at Jim Cal's cabin, and at the present Judith certainly was in
the mind to make an exception of her. The sisters were seldom seen apart;
narrow shouldered, short waisted, thin limbed young creatures, they were
even at seventeen bowing to a deprecating stoop. Their little faces were
alike, short-chinned with pink mouths inclined to be tremulous, the eyes
big, blue, and half-frightened in expression, and the drab hair drawn
away from the small foreheads so tightly that it looked almost grey. They
inevitably reminded one of a pair of blue and white night-moths, scarcely
fitted for a daylight world, and continually afraid of it.
"Cousin Lacey's over from the Far Cove," called Pendrilla before they
reached Judith. "Ain't it fine? Ef we-all can git up a play-party he says
he'll shore come ef we let him know in time."
The young fellow with them, their cousin Lacey Rountree, showed
sufficient resemblance to mark the family type, but his light eyes were
lit with reckless fires, and his short chin was carried with a defiant
tilt.
"What you foolin' along o' that old feller for, Judith?" he asked jerking
an irreverent thumb after the departing Elder.
"I wasn't fooling with him," returned Judith, her red lips demure, her
brown eyes laughing above them through their thick fringe of lashes.
"Elder Drane was consulting me about church matters--sech as children
like you have no call to meddle with."
Young Rountree smiled, "I'll bet he was!" picking up a stone and firing
it far into the blue in sheer exuberance of youthful joy. "Did he name
anything about a weddin' in church?"
"Elder Drane is a mighty fine man," asserted Judith, suddenly sober. "Any
gal might be glad to git him. But its my belief and opinion that his
heart is buried with his first--or his second," and she laughed out
suddenly at the unintentional humorous conclusion she had made.
"See here, Jude," the boy put it boldly as the four young people strolled
toward the house, "you're too pretty and sweet to be anybody's thirdly.
Next time old man Drane comes pesterin' round you, you tell him that
you're promised to me--hear?"
Again Judith laughed. It is impossible to talk seriously to a boy with
whom one has played hat-ball and prisoner's base, whose hair one has
pulled, and who has, in retort courteous, rolled one in the dust.
"I'm in earnest if I ever was in my life," asserted Lacey, taking it
quite as a matter of course that Cliantha and Pendrilla should be made
party to his courting.
And the two little old maids of seventeen looked with wondering
admiration at Judith's management of all this masculine attention--her
careless, discounting smile for their swaggering young cousin, her calm
acceptance of imposing Elder Drane's humble and persistent wooing.
Chapter IV
Building
Judith awakened that morning with the song of the first thrush sounding
in her ears. Day was not yet come, but she knew instantly it was near
dawn, so soon as she heard the keen, cool, unmatched thrush voice. Not
elaborate the song like the bobolink, nor passionate like the
nightingale, nor with the bravura of the oriole; but low or loud, its
pure tones are always penetrating, piercing the heart of their hearer
with exquisite sweetness.
The girl lay long in the dark listening, and it seemed to her half
awakened consciousness that this voice in the April dawn was like Creed
Bonbright. These notes, lucid, passionless, that yet always stirred her
heart strangely, and the selfless personality, the high-purposed soul
that spoke in him, they were akin. The crystal tones flowed on; Judith
harkened, the ear of her spirit alert for a message. Yes, Creed was like
that. And her feeling for him too, it partook of the same quality, a
thing to climb toward rather than concede.
And then after all her tremulous hopes, her plannings, the dozen times
she had taken a certain frock from its peg minutely inspecting and
repairing it, that it might be ready for wear on the great occasion, the
first meeting with Creed found Judith unprepared, happening in no wise as
she would have chosen. She was at the milking lot, clad in the usual dull
blue cotton gown in which the mountain woman works. She had filled her
two pails and set them on the high bench by the fence while she turned
the calves into the small pasture reserved for them and let old Red and
Piedy out.
He approached across the fields from the direction of his own house, and
naturally saw her before she observed him. It was early morning. The sky
was blue and wide and high, with great shining piles of white cloud
swimming lazily at the horizon, cutting sharply against its colour.
Around the edges of the cow-lot peach trees were all in blossom and
humming with bees, their rich, amethystine rose flung up against the gay
April sky in a challenge of beauty and joy. The air was full of the
promises of spring, keen, bracing, yet with an undercurrent of languorous
warmth. There was a ragged fleece of bloom, sweet and alive with droning
insects, over a plum thicket near the woods,--half-wild, brambly things,
cousin on the one hand to the cultivated farm, and on the other to the
free forest,--while beyond, through the openings of the timber, dogwood
flamed white in the sun.
Judith came forward and greeted the newcomer, all unaware of the picture
she made, tall and straight and pliant in her simple blue cotton, under
the wonderful blue-and-white sky and the passionate purple pink of the
blossoms, with the scant folds of her frock outlining the rounded young
body, its sleeves rolled up on her fine arms, its neck folded away from
the firm column of her throat, the frolic wind ruffling the dark locks
above her shadowy eyes. There were strange gleams in those dark eyes; her
red lips were tremulous whether she spoke or not. It was as though she
had some urgent message for him which waited always behind her silence or
her speech.
"I thought I'd come over and get acquainted with my neighbours,"
Bonbright began in his impersonal fashion.
"Uncle Jep and the boys has gone across to the far place ploughing
to-day," said Judith. "They's nobody at home but Jim Cal and his
wife--and me." She forebore to add the name of Huldah Spiller, though her
angry eye descried that young woman ostentatiously hanging wash on a line
back of the Jim Cal cabin.
"I won't stop then this morning," said Bonbright. "I'll get along over to
the far place. I wanted to have speech with your uncle. He was at Aunt
Nancy's the other day and we had some talk; he knows more about what I'm
aiming at up here then I do. A man of his age and good sense can be a
sight of help to me."
"Uncle Jep will be proud to do anything he can," said Judith softly.
"Won't you come in and set awhile?"
She dreaded that the invitation might hurry him away, and now made hasty
use of the first diversion that offered. He had broken a blooming switch
from the peach-tree beneath which he stood, and she reproached him
fondly.
"Look at you. Now there won't never be no peaches where them blossoms
was."
He twisted the twig in his fingers and smiled down at her, conscious of a
singular and personal kindness between them, aware too, for the first
time, that she was young, beautiful, and a woman; before, she had been
merely an individual to him.
"My mother used to say that to me when I would break fruit blows," he
said meditatively. "But father always pruned his trees when they were in
blossom--they can't any of them bear a peach for every bloom."
She shook her head as though giving up the argument, since it was after
all a matter of sentiment. Her dark, rich-coloured beauty glowed its
contrast to his cool, northern type.
At present neither spoke more than a few syllables of the spiritual
language of the other, yet so powerful was the attraction between them
that even Creed began to feel it, while Judith, the primitive woman, all
given over to instinct, promptly laid about her for something to hold and
interest him.
"The young folks is a-goin' to get up a play-party at our house sometime
soon," she hazarded. "I reckon you wouldn't come to any such as that,
would you?"
"I'd be proud to come," returned Creed at once. But he spoiled it by
adding, "I've got to get acquainted with people all over again, it's so
long since I lived here; and looks like I'm not a very good mixer."
"Will you sure come?" inquired Judith insistently, as she saw him
preparing to depart.
"I sure will."
"You could stay over night in your own house then--ain't you comin' back,
ever, to live there?"
"Why, yes, I reckon I might stay there over night, but it's too far from
the main road for a justice's office."
"Well, if you're going to try to sleep in the house, it ort to be opened
up and sunned a little; you better let me have the key now," observed
Judith, assuming airs of proprietorship over his inept masculinity.
Smiling, he got the key from his pocket and handed it to her. "Help
yourself to anything you want for the party, or any other time," he said
in mountain fashion.
She looked down at that key with the pride of one to whom had been given
the freedom of a city. Its possession enabled her to bear it with a fair
degree of equanimity when Huldah Spiller, having "jest slung her clothes
anyway onto that line," as Judith phrased it to herself, came panting and
laughing across the slope between the two houses and called a gay
"Howdy!" to the visitor. The lively little red haired flirt professed
greatly to desire news of certain persons in Hepzibah, and as Creed was
departing sauntered unconcernedly beside him as far as the draw-bars,
detaining him in conversation there as long as possible. She had an
instinctive knowledge that Judith, looking on, was deeply disturbed.
Creed set his justice's office about a hundred yards from Nancy Card's
cabin, on the main road that led through the two Turkey Track
neighbourhoods out to Rainy Gap and the Far Cove settlement. The little
shack was built of the raw yellow boards which the new saw-mill was
ripping out of pine trees over on the shoulder of Big Turkey Track above
Garyville. Most of the mountain dwellers still preferred log houses, and
the lumber was sent down the mountain by means of a little gravity
railway, whose car was warped up after each trip by a patient old mule
working in a circular treadmill.
God knows with what high hopes the planks of that humble shanty were put
in place, with what visions sill and window-frame were shaped and joined,
Aunt Nancy going out and in at her household tasks calling good counsel
over to him; Beezy, the irrepressible, adding shaving curls to her red
frazzle; Little Buck, furnished with hammer and tacks, gravely assisting,
pounding his fingers only part of the time. Hens were coming off. Old
Nancy had a great time with notionate mothers hatching out broods under
the floor or in the stable loft, and the plaintive cheep-cheep! of the
"weedies" added its note to the chorus of sounds as the children followed
them about, now and then catching up a ball of fluff to pet it,
undeterred by indignant clucks from the parent.
As Creed whistled over his work, he saw a shadowy train coming down the
road, the people whom he should help, his people, to whose darkness he
should bring light and counsel. They knew so little, and needed so much.
True, his own knowledge was not great; but it was all freely at their
service. His heart swelled with good-will as he prepared to open his
modest campaign of usefulness.
To come into leadership naturally a man should be the logical outgrowth
of his class and time, and this Creed knew he was not. Yet he had
pondered the matter deeply, and put it thus to himself: The peasant of
Europe can only rise through stages of material prosperity to a point of
development at which he craves intellectual attainment, or spiritual
growth. But the mountaineer is always a thinker; he has even in his
poverty a hearty contempt for luxury, for material gain at the expense of
personality. With his disposition to philosophy, fostered by solitude and
isolation, he readily overleaps those gradations, and would step at once
from obscurity to the position of a man of culture were the means at
hand.
"Bonbright," remonstrated Jephthah Turrentine, in the first conversation
the two held upon the subject, "Ye cain't give people what they ain't
ready to take. Ef our folks wanted law and order, don't you reckon they'd
make the move to get it?"
"That's it exactly, Mr. Turrentine," responded Creed quickly. "They need
to be taught what to want."
"Oh, they do, do they?" inquired Jephthah with a humorous twitch of the
lips. "Well, ef you're a-goin' to set up to teach, hadn't you better have
a school-house, place of a jestice's office?"
"Maybe you're right. I reckon you are--exactly right," Creed assented
thoughtfully. "I'd studied about that considerable. I reckon I'm a more
suitable age for a schoolmaster than for a justice; and the children--but
that would take a long time; and I wanted to give the help where it was
worst needed."
"Oh, well, 'tain't a hangin' matter," old Jephthah smiled at the younger
man's solemn earnestness. "Ef this new fangled buildin' o' yours don't
get used for a jestice's office we can turn it into a school-house; we
need one powerful bad."
The desultory, sardonic, deep-voiced, soft-footed, mountain carpenters
who worked leisurely and fitfully with Creed were always mightily amused
by the exactness of the "town feller's" ideas.
"Why lordy! Lookee hyer Creed," remonstrated Doss Provine, over a
question of matching boards and battening joints, "ef you git yo' pen so
almighty tight as that you won't git no fresh air. Man's bound to have
ventilation. Course you can leave the do' open all the time like we-all
do; but when yo're a-holdin' co't and sech-like maybe you'll want to shet
the do' sometimes--and then whar'll ye git breath to breathe?"
"I reckon Creed knows his business," put in the old man who was helping
Doss, "but all these here glass winders is blame foolishness to _me_. Ef
ye need light, open the do'. Ef somebody comes that you don't want in,
you can shet it and put up a bar. But saw the walls full o' holes an' set
in glass winders, an' any feller that's got a mind to can pick ye off
with a rifle ball as easy as not whilst ye set by the fire of a
evenin'."
He shook a reprehending head, hoary with the snows of years, and
containing therefore, presumably, wisdom. He had learned the necessary
points of life in his environment, and as always occurs, the younger
generation seemed to him lavishly reckless.
It was only old Jephthah's criticisms that Creed really minded.
"Uh-huh," allowed Jephthah, settling his hands on his hips and surveying
the yellow pine structure tolerantly; "mighty sightly for them that likes
that kind o' thing. But I hold with a good log house, becaze it's apt to
be square. These here town doin's that looks like a man with a bile on
his ear never did ketch me. Ef ye hew out good oak or pine timber ye
won't be willin' to cut short lengths for to make such foolishness."
Creed would often have explained to his critics that he did not expect to
get into feuds and have neighbours pot-hunting him through his glass
windows, that he needed the light from them to study or read, and that
his little house was as square as any log hut ever constructed; but they
lumped it all together and made an outsider of him--which hurt.
Word went abroad to the farthest confines of the Turkey Track
neighbourhoods, carried by herders who took sheep, hogs, or cows up into
the high-hung inner valleys of Yellow Old Bald, or the natural meadows of
Big Turkey Track to turn them loose for the season, recited where one or
two met out salting cattle, discussed by many a chip pile, where the
willing axe rested on the unsplit block while the wielder heard how Creed
Bonbright had done sot up a jestice's office and made peace between the
Shallidays and the Bushareses.
"But you know in reason hit ain't a-goin' to hold," the old women at the
hearthside would say, withdrawing their cob pipes to shake deprecating
heads. "The Bushareses and Shallidays has been killin' each other up
sence my gran'pap was a little boy. They tell me the Injuns mixed into
that there feud. I say Creed Bonbright! Nothin' but a fool boy. He better
l'arn something before he sets up to teach. He don't know what he's
meddlin' with." All this with a pride in the vendetta as an ancient
neighbourhood institution and monument.
The office of the new justice never became, as he had hoped it would, a
lounging place for his passing neighbours. He had expected them to drop
in to visit with him, when he might sow the good seed in season without
appearing to seek an occasion for so doing. But they were shy of him--he
saw that. They went on past the little yellow pine office, on their
mules, or their sorry nags, or in shackling waggons behind oxen, to
lounge at Nancy Card's gate as of old, or sit upon her porch to swap news
and listen to her caustic comments on neighbourhood happenings. And only
an occasional glance over the shoulder, a backward nod of the head, or
jerk of the thumb, told the young justice that he was present in their
recollection.
But there was one element of the community which showed no disposition to
hold aloof from the newcomer. About this time, by twos and threes--never
one alone--the virgins of the mountain-top sought Nancy Card for flower
seed, soft soap recipes, a charm to take off warts, or to learn exactly
from her at what season a body had better divide the roots of day
lilies.
Old-fashioned roses begin blooming in the Cumberlands about the first of
May, and when this time came round Nancy's garden was a thing to marvel
at. The spring flowers were past or nearly so, and the advent of the
roses marked the floral beginning of summer. In the forest the dogwood
petals now let go and fell silently one by one through the shadowed
green. But over Nancy's fence of weather-beaten, hand-rived palings
tossed a snow of bloom so like that here they were not missed at all; and
the mock orange adds to the dogwood's simple beauty the soul of an
exquisite odour. Small, heavily thorned roses, yellow as the daffodils
they had succeeded, blushing Baltimore Belles, Seven Sisters all over the
ricketty porch--one who loved such things might well have taken a day's
journey for sight of that dooryard in May.
"Well, I vow!" said the old woman one day peering through her window that
gave on the road, "ef here don't come Huldy Spiller and the two Lusks.
Look like to me I have a heap of gal company of late. Creed, you're a
mighty learned somebody, cain't you tell me the whys of it?"
Creed, sitting at a little table deep in some books and papers before
him, heard no word of his friend's teasing speech. It was Doss Provine,
at the big fireplace heating a poker to burn a hole through his
pulley-wheel, who turned toward his mother-in-law and grinned foolishly.
"I reckon I know the answer to that," he observed. "The boys is all a
warnin' me that a widower is mo' run after than a young feller. They tell
me I'll have to watch out."
"I say watch out--_you_!" cried Nancy, wheeling upon him with a comically
disproportionate fury. "Jest you let me ketch you settin' up to any of
the gals--you, a father with two he'pless chaps to look after, and nobody
but an old woman like me, with one foot in the grave, to depend on!"
There was one girl however who, instead of multiplying her visits to the
Card cabin with Creed's advent, abruptly ceased them. Judith Barrier was
an uncertain quantity to her masculine household; unreasonably elated or
depressed, she led them the round of her moods, and they paid for the
fact that Creed Bonbright did not come across the mountain top visiting,
without being at all aware of where their guilt lay. After that interview
at the milking lot one thought, one emotion was with her always. Always
she was waiting for the next meeting with Creed. Through the day she
heard his voice or his footstep in all the little sounds of the woods,
the humble noises of the farm life; and at night there was the cedar
tree.
Now the cedar tree had affairs of its own. When, with the egotism of her
keen, passionate, desirous youth, the girl in the little chamber under
the eves listened to its voice in April, it was talking in the soft air
of the vernal night about the sap which rose in its veins, spicy,
resinous, odoured with spring, carrying its wine of life into the
farthest green tips, till all the little twigs were intoxicated with it,
and beat and flung themselves in joy. And the tree's deep note was a song
of abiding trust. There was a nest building within its heart--so well
hidden in that dense thicket that it was safe from the eye of any
prowler. Hope and faith and a great devotion went to the building. And
the tree, rich and happy in its own life, cherished generously that other
life within its protecting arms. Its song was of the mating birds, the
building birds, the mother joy and father joy that made the nest ready
for the speckled eggs and the birdlings that should follow.
But to the listening girl the cedar tree was a harp that the winds
struck--a voice that spoke in the night of love and Creed.
Finally one morning she saddled Selim and, with something in her pocket
for Little Buck and Beezy, set out for Hepzibah--reckon they's nothin' so
turrible strange in a body goin' to the settlement when they' out o' both
needles _an_' bakin' soda!
As she rode up Nancy herself called to her to 'light and come in, and
finally went out to stand a moment and chat; but the girl smilingly shook
her head.
"I got to be getting along, thank ye," she said. "I can't stop this
mornin'. You-all must come and see us, Aunt Nancy."
"Why, what's Little Buck a-goin' to do, with his own true love a-tearin'
past the house like this and refusin' to stop and visit?" complained
Nancy, secretly applauding the girl's good sense and dignity.
"Where _is_ my beau?" asked Judith. "I fetched him the first June apples
off the tree."
"Judy's brought apples to her beau, and now he's went off fishin' with
Doss and she's got nobody to give 'em to," old Nancy called as Creed
stepped from the door of his office and started across to the cabin.
"Don't you want 'em, Creed?"
The tall, fair young fellow came up laughing.
"Aunt Nancy knows I love apples," he said. "If you give me Little Buck's
share I'm afraid he'll never see 'em."
Judith reached in her pocket and brought out the shiny, small red globes
and put them in his outstretched hand.
"I'll bring Little Buck a play-pretty from the settlement," she said
softly. "He'll keer a sight more for hit than for the apples. I wish I'd
knowed you liked 'em--I'd brought you more. Why don't you come over and
see us and git all you want? We've got two trees of 'em."
Chapter V
The Red Rose and the Briar
ALL through April Judith's project of a play-party languished. She had to
pull steadily against the elders, for not only were the men hard at it
making ready for the putting in of the year's crops, but it was gardening
time as well, when even the women and children are pressed in to help at
the raking up and brush piling. Wood smoke from the clearing fires
haunted all the hollows. Everybody was preparing for the making of the
truck patch. Down on the little groups would drop a cloud and blot out
the bonfire till it became the mere glowing point at the heart of a
shaken opal--for if you are wise you burn brush on a rainy day.
Old Jephthah opposed the plan for the girl's festivity on another ground.
"I've got no objection to a frolic, Jude," he observed quietly, on
hearing the first mention of the matter, "but I wouldn't have no
play-party at this house. Hit's too handy to that cussed still of
Blatch's. A passel of fool boys is mighty apt to go over thar an' fill
theirselves up with corn whiskey, an' the party will just about end up in
a interruption."
He said no more, and Judith made no reply. Though ordinarily she would
have hesitated to go against her uncle's expressed wishes, her heart was
too much set on this enterprise to allow of easy checking. She made no
reply, but her campaign on behalf of the merrymaking went steadily on.
"I wonder you can have the heart to git up play-parties and the like when
Andy and Jeff's a-sufferin' in the jail," Pendrilla Lusk plucked up
spirit to say when the plan was first mooted to her.
Andy and Jeff, the wild young hawks, with the glamour upon them of
lawless, adventurous spirits, and bold, proper lovers, equally fascinated
and terrified the Lusk girls--timid, fluttering pair--and were in their
turn attracted to them by an inevitable law of nature.
"I don't see how it hurts the boys for us to have a dance," rejoined
Judith with asperity. "If we was all to set and cry our eyes out, it
wouldn't fetch 'em back on the mountain any quicker." Then with a teasing
flash, "I'll tell 'em when they git home what you said, though."
"Now, Jude, you're real mean," pleaded Cliantha Lusk sinking to her knees
beside Judith and raising thin little arms to clasp that young woman
around the waist. "You ain't a-goin' to tell them fool boys any sech
truck as that, air ye? Pendrilly jest said it for a sayin'. We'd love to
come to yo' play-party, whenever it is. I _say_ Andy and Jeff! Let 'em
git out of the jail the way they got in."
This is the approved attitude of the mountain virgin; yet Cliantha's
voice shook sadly as she uttered the independent sentiments, and
Pendrilla furtively wiped her eyes in promising to attend the
play-party.
All this was in April. By the time May came in, that dread of a belated
frost which amounts almost to terror in the farmer of the Cumberlands was
ended; the Easter cold and blackberry winter were over, and all the
garden truck was planted. Everybody began whole-heartedly to enjoy the
time of year. The leaves were full size, but still soft; the wind made
hardly any noise among them. In the pasture lot and fence corners near
the house, meadow flowers began to star the green. The frog chorus, so
loud and jubilant in early spring, had subsided now except at night, when
their treble was accompanied by the bass "chug-chug" of the bull-frogs.
The mornings were vocal with the notes of yellow hammer, cuckoos; the
cooing of doves, the squawk of the jay, and the drum of the big
red-headed woodpecker sounded through the summer woods; while always in
the cool of the day came the thrush's song. The early corn was in by mid
April. About the first full moon of May the main crop was planted.
Early in June Judith, walking in the wood, brought home the splendid red
wood lily, and a cluster too of "ratsbane," with its flowers like a
little crown of white wax.
The spring restlessness was over throughout all the wild country; life no
longer stirred and rustled; the leaves hung still in the long sunny
noons. The air was clear, rinsed with frequent showers; the woods were
silent except for birds and cow bells. The crops were laid by. The
huckleberries ripened; the "sarvices" hung thick in the forest. Even the
blackberries were beginning to turn and Andy and Jeff had been back at
home more than a week, when Judith finally succeeded in getting her
forces together and her guests promised. Many of them would have to walk
four or five miles to sing and play for a few hours, tramping back at
midnight to lie down and catch what sleep they could before dawn waked
them to another day of toil. Thursday evening was set for the event. On
Wednesday the Lusk girls coming in to discuss, found Judith with shining
eyes and crimson cheeks, attacking the simple housework of the cabin.
"I wish't you'd sing while I finish my churnin'," the girl said, "I'm so
flustered looks like I can't sca'cely do anything right."
The sisters clasped hands and raised their childish faces. Cliantha had a
thin, high piping soprano like a small flute, and Pendrilla sang
"counter" to it. They were repositories of all the old ballads of the
mountains--ballads from Scotland, from Ireland, from England, and from
Wales, that set the ferocities and the love-making of Elizabeth's time or
earlier most quaintly amidst the localities and nomenclature of the
Cumberlands.
"Sing 'Barb'ry Allen,'" commanded Judith as she swung the dasher with
nervous energy.
The July sunshine filtered through the leaves of the big muscadine vine
that covered and sheltered the tiny side porch. Bees boomed about the
ragged tufts of clover and Bouncing Bet that fringed the side yard. The
old hound at the chip pile blinked lazily and raised his head, then
dropped it and slumbered again. Within, the big room was dim and cool.
The high, thin, quavering voices celebrated the love and woe of cruel
Barbara Allen. Judith's dark eyes grew soft and brooding; the nervous
strokes of her dasher measured themselves more and more to the swing of
the old tune.
"I don't see how anybody can be hardhearted thataway with a person they
love," she said softly as the song descended to its doleful end.
The next morning Judith hurried her work that she might get through and
go over to the Bonbright house, there to put in execution her
long-cherished plan of cleaning it and making it fit for Creed's
occupancy that night. Old Dilsey Rust, their tenant, came in to help at
the Turrentine cabin always on occasions like this, or with the churning
or washing; and penetrated with impatience the girl finally left her
assistant in charge of matters and set forth through the woods and across
the fields, the little key which she had carried ever since that morning
in early April in her pocket like a talisman. At last it was to open her
kingdom to her. Behind the bolt that it controlled lay not only the home
of Creed's childhood, but supposably the home of his children. Judith's
heart beat suffocatingly at the thought.
Halfway across she met Huldah Spiller coming up from the Far spring with
a bucket of sulphur water which was held to be good for Jim Cal's
rheumatism.
"Whar ye goin'?" asked Huldah, looking curiously at the broom over
Judith's shoulder, the roll of cloths and the small gourd of soft soap
she carried.
"I'm a-goin' whar I'm a-goin'," returned Judith aggressively. But the
other only smiled. It did not suit her to be offended at that moment.
Instead, "What are you goin' to wear to-night, Judy?" she inquired
vivaciously. It was one of the advantages of waiting on table at a
boarding house in the settlement--pieced out perhaps by the possession of
red hair--that Huldah had the courage to address Judith Barrier as
"Judy."
The hostess of the evening's festivities was half in the mind to pass on
without reply; then her curiosity as to Huldah's costume got the better
of her, and she compromised, with a laconic,
"My white frock--what are you?"
"Don't you know I went down to Hepzibah after you said you was goin' to
have a play-party?" asked Huldah, tossing her head to get the red curls
out of her eyes. "Well, Iley had give me fifty cents on my wages--"
Huldah worked as a servant in her sister's family, which is not uncommon
in the mountains--"an' I tuck it and bought me ten yard of five-cent
lawn, the prettiest blue you ever put yo' eyes on."
"Blue!" A sudden shock went over Judith. She had forgotten; and here
Huldah Spiller would wear a blue dress, and she--oh, the stupidity, the
bat-like, doltish, blindness of it!--would be in white, because it was
now too late to make a change. Out of the very tragedy of the situation
she managed to pluck forth a smile.
"I was aimin' to wear blue ribbons," she said finally. It had just come
into her head that she could pull the blue bow from her hat--that blue
bow with which she had zealously replaced the despised and outcast
red--and so make shift.
"Blue's my best feller's favourite colour," contributed Huldah, picking
up the bucket which she had set down, and starting on. "He 'lows it goes
fine with aurbu'n hair."
"Wade never said that," muttered Judith to herself as she took her way to
the Bonbright place.
But after all one could not be long out of tune with such a summer day.
The spicy odour of pennyroyal bruised underfoot, came to her nostrils
like incense. Even the sickly sweet of jimson blossoms by the draw-bars
of the milking lot was dear and familiar, while their white trumpets
whispered of childish play-days and flower-ladies she had set walking in
procession under the shadow of some big green leaf. Blue--the soft stars
of spider-wort opening among the rocks reminded her of the hue; blue
curls and dittany tangled at the path edge; but the very air itself was
beginning to wear Creed's colour and put on that wonderful, luminous blue
in which the Cumberlands of midsummer melt cerulean into a sky of lapis
lazuli. Creed's colour--Creed's colour--her dark eyes misted as they
searched the far reaches of the hills and found it everywhere.
Jephthah Turrentine used to say that if a man owned enough mountain land
to set his foot on, he owned the whole of the sky above him; it was a
truer word than this old mountain dweller could have known, since the
mere possessor of a city lot, where other tall roofs cut the horizon
high, must content himself with less of the welkin.
Judith opened the door, went in, closed it behind her, and gazed about.
There lay over everything a fine dust; there was the look of decay which
comes with disuse; and the air bore the musty odour of a shut and long
uninhabited house. The Bonbright home had been a good one for the
mountains, of hewn logs, and with four rooms, and two great stone
chimneys. Inside was the furniture which Mary Gillenwaters brought to it
as a bride when her mountain lover came down to Hepzibah and with the
swift ardour of his tribe--this Bonbright's fires of eloquence were all
kindled upon the altar of his mating romance--charmed the daughter of its
one merchant. These added to the already fairly complete plenishings,
many of which had come over the mountains from Virginia when Sevier
opened up the new State, gave an air of abundance, even of sober elegance
to the room.
Reverently Judith moved among the dumb witnesses and servitors of
Bonbright generations. Here was the spinning-wheel, here the cards, and
out in the little room off the porch stood the loom. She had dreams of
replacing these with a sewing machine. Nobody wove jeans any more--but a
good carpet-loom now, _that_ might be made useful. Unwilling to hang the
bedding on bushes for fear of a chance tear from twig or thorn, she
rigged a line in the back yard, and spread quilt and homespun blanket,
coarse white sheets and pillowcases that were yellowing with age, out for
the glad gay wind to play with, for the sunshine to sweeten.
"What a lot of feather beds!" she murmured as she tallied them over.
"That there ticking is better than you can buy in the stores. My, ain't
these light and nice!"
All the warm, sunny afternoon she toiled at her self-appointed labour of
love. She swept and dusted, she scrubbed and cleaned, with capable
fingers, proud of the strength and skill that made her a good housewife;
then bringing in the fragrant, homely fabrics, made up the beds and
placed all back in due order.
"He's boun' to notice somebody's been here and put things to rights," she
said over and over to herself. "If it looks sightly, and seems like home,
mebbe he'll give out the notion of stayin' at Nancy Card's, and come and
live here." She brooded on the bliss of the idea as she worked.
Under the great mahogany four-poster in the front room was slipped a
trundle-bed that she drew out and looked at with fond eyes. No doubt
Creed's boyish head had lain there once. She wished passionately that she
had known him then, all unaware that we never do know our lovers when
they and we are children. Even those playfellows who are destined to be
mates find, all on a day, that the familiar companion who has grown up
beside each has changed into quite a different person.
She rolled the trundle-bed back into place and turned to lift a pile of
bedding that lay apparently on a chest. When it was raised it revealed
the clumsy old cradle that had rocked three generations of Bonbrights.
She stood looking down at it with quickening pulse, then reached a
fluttering hand and touched its small pillow tenderly. Here had rested
that golden head, so many years ago; beside it his mother had sat and
rocked. At the thought Judith was on her knees, her hands falling
naturally upon the side and rocking the small bed. In a strange conflict
of dreamy emotion, she swayed it back and forth a moment, and then--what
woman could resist it?--began to croon an old mountain cradle song.
Suddenly the westering sun got to the level of a half shrouded window and
sent a beam in across Judith's bent head.
"My land!" she whispered, getting to her feet. "I ain't got no call to
stay foolin' here all day. Dilsey'll jest about burn them cakes I told
her to bake, and I ain't fixed my blue bow for my hair yet."
She swept a glance around the speckless room, gathered up her
paraphernalia of cleaning, passed out, locked the door, and set her face
toward home.
In Mary Bonbright's garden, now given over to weeds as the gardens of
dead women are so apt to be, there had grown a singular, half wild rose.
This flower was of a clear blood red, with a yellow heart which its five
broad petals, flinging wide open, disclosed to view, unlike the crimped
and guarded loveliness of the more evolved sisters of the green-house.
Mowed down spring after spring by the scythe of Strubley, the renter, the
vigorous thing had spread abroad, and as Judith stepped from the door its
exultant beauty caught her eye. Flaming shields of crimson, bearing each
its boss of filagree gold, the hosts of the red rose stood up bravely in
the choking grass to which the insensate scythe blade had so often
levelled them, and shouted to the girl of love and joy, and of youth
which was the time for both. Wide petalled, burning red, their golden
hearts open to sun and bee, they were the blossoms for the earth-woman.
She ran and knelt down beside them.
He had said that his favourite colour was blue--but there are no blue
roses. She did not follow it far enough to guess that the man who was
content with the colour of the sky might not get his gaze down close
enough to earth to care for roses. She bent above them gloating on their
fierce, triumphant splendour. Was there ever such a colour? But the stems
were dreadfully short. A sudden purpose grew in her mind. With hasty,
tremulous fingers she gathered an apronful of the blossoms. Once more she
unlocked the front door, hurried back to that bed which she had so
lovingly spread, and on its white coverlet began arranging a great,
glowing wreath, fashioned by setting a circle of red roses petal to
petal.
As she worked Cliantha Lusk's ballad came into her head, and she sang it
under her breath.
"'And they grew and they grew to the old church top
Till they couldn't grow any higher,
And there they twined in a true lover's knot,
The red rose and the briar.'
"No--that ain't it--
"'And there they twined in a true lover's knot,
For all true lovers to admire.'"
True lovers--she crooned the word over and over. It was sweet to say it.
She thrilled through all her strong young body with the delight of what
she was doing.
"He'll wonder who put 'em there," she whispered to herself. "Ef nothin'
else don't take his eye, these here is shore to."
Chapter VI
The Play-Party
Long lanes of light crossed the grass from window and door of the
Turrentine house; Judith's play-party was in full swing. They were
dancing or playing in the big front room which was lit only by the rich
broken shimmer and shine from a fire of pine sticks in the cavernous
black chimney. Though it was early July the evening, in those altitudes,
had its own chill, and the heat from this was not unpleasant, while its
illumination became necessary, for all the lamps and candles available
were in use out where the tables were spread.
Old Jephthah held state in his own quarters, a detached log cabin
standing about thirty feet from the main structure, and once used
probably to house the loom or for some such extra domestic purpose. Here
too a fire smoldered on the hearthstone, for the head of the Turrentine
clan was tormented by rheumatism, that plague of otherwise healthy
primitive man. He lounged now on the doorstep, smoking, ready to
intercept and entertain any of the older men who might come with their
women folk. Occasionally somebody rode up, or came tramping down the
trail or through the woods--a belated merrymaker hurrying in to ask who
had arrived and who was expected.
To the father's intense disgust Jim Cal had elected to sit with the
elders that night, and obstinately held his place before the hearthstone
in the cabin room. Jephthah Turrentine's sons were none of them
particularly satisfactory to their progenitor. A man of brains, a
creature to whom an argument was ever more than the mere material thing
argued about, these male offspring, who took their traits naturally after
the spindle side, vexed him with resemblance to their handsome,
high-tempered, brainless mother. But Jim Cal was worse than a bore to his
father; the old fellow regarded a son who weighed above two hundred
pounds as a disgrace. And to-night the fact that the door of his room
commanded a sidelong view of the tables which were being spread, and
about which Iley circled and scolded, furnished so fair a reason for
James Calhoun's selection of it as an anchorage that his father was the
more offended.
"You thar, Unc' Jep?" sounded Blatchley Turrentine's careless voice from
the dark.
"I make out to be," returned his uncle lazily.
Blatchley came into the circle of dim light about the door, Andy and Jeff
at his shoulder. Wade followed a moment later.
"Why ain't you-all boys down thar whar the gals is at, playin'?" inquired
Jim Cal fretfully. "Looks like to me ef I was a young feller an' not
wedded I wouldn't hang around whar the old men was."
"Is Creed Bonbright comin' over here to-night?" inquired Andy abruptly,
in obedience apparently to a nudge from Blatch.
"I reckon he is," observed the old man dispassionately. "Jude has purty
well bidden the whole top of the mountain."
"Is Pone Cyard comin'?" put in Jeff. The twins usually spoke alternately,
the sum of their conversation counting thus for one.
"That I can't say," returned the old man with mildly ironic emphasis.
"Mebbe him and the chaps and the lame rooster--_and_ Nancy--will come
along at the tail of the procession."
"Well," persisted Andy, breaking a somewhat lengthened silence in which
all the newcomers stood, and through which their breathing could be
distinctly heard, "well I think Creed Bonbright has got the impudence! He
come to the jail, whar me and Jeff was at, an' he had some talk with us,
an' I let him know my mind. He stood in with that marshal--I know it--and
so does Jeff. Pone Cyard got out quicker becaze Bonbright tipped the
marshal the wink; but I don't hold with him nor his doin's."
The parent of the twins regarded them both with sardonic black eyes half
shut. "_You_ don't? And who-all might you be, young fellers?" he asked.
"This here Bonbright man has come up on Turkey Track to give us a show at
law. If they's persons engaged in unlawful practices on this here
mountain top, mebbe he'll knock up against 'em. Them that keeps the law
and lives decent has no reason to fear the law. Ain't that what you say,
Blatch?" turning suddenly to his nephew.
The big swart mountaineer drew up his shoulders with a sort of shrug.
"Ef you stand in with Bonbright, Unc' Jep," he said, bluntly, "we might
as well all go down to Hepzibah and give ourselves up. You've done rented
me the land, and yo' boys is in the still with me--air ye a-goin' to
stand from under, and have the marshal forever keepin' us on the jump?"
Old Jephthah looked wordless contempt at the nephew who knew little
enough to impute such a course to him.
"That's what I say," put in Jim Cal's thin, querulous tones from the back
of the room--the voice of a fat man in trouble; can anyone say why the
sorrows of the obese are always comic to the rest of the world? "A body
cain't sleep nights for thinkin' what may chance."
"Oh,--air you thar, podner?" inquired Blatch, with a sort of ferocious
banter in his tone which he frequently used toward his fleshy associate.
"I thort ye was down in the bed sick."
"I was," said Jim Cal sulkily; "but Iley she said--Iley 'lowed----"
Blatch burst into a great horse laugh, which the others joined.
"I know'd in reason ye'd be down when they came any trouble at the
still," he commented. "Hit always affects yo' health thataway; but I
didn't know Iley had seed reason to dig ye out. What you goin' to do
about Bonbright, Unc' Jep--stand in with him?"
"Well--you _air_ a fool," observed the old man meditatively. "Who named
standin' in with Bonbright, or standin' out agin' him? When I rented you
my farm for five year I had no thought of yo' starting up that pesky ol'
still on it. But I never was knowed to rue a trade. My daddy taught me
when I made a bad bargain to freeze the tighter to it, and I've no mind
to do other."
"They'd been a still thar," said Blatch defensively.
The old man nodded.
"Oh, yes," he agreed. "Hit had been,--I put it thar. I've made many a run
of whiskey in my young days--and I've seed the folly of it. I reckon you
fool boys'll have to see the folly of it too befo' yo've got yo' satisfy.
As for Creed Bonbright, he 'pears to think that if we have plenty of law
in the Turkey Tracks we'll all go to heaven in a hand-basket. Mebbe he's
right, and then agin mebbe he's wrong; but this I know, ain't anybody
goin' to jump on him in my house, and he gets a fair show when fightin'
time comes."
"Well, if he ain't standin' in with the marshal, what does he--" began
Andy's high-pitched boyish voice, when somebody called, "Good evening,"
in pleasant tones, and Bonbright himself got off a light-stepping mule,
tethered him to the fence, and came toward the cabin.
He had just returned from a meeting of the County Court at Hepzibah,
where he did good service in representing the needs of his district,
fighting hard for more money for schools--the plan heretofore had been to
let them have only their own pro rata of the school tax.
"It'll pay you a heap better to educate the mountain people than to hire
their keep in jail," he said to his fellow justices of the valley. "The
blue-backed speller is the best cure for crime in the mountains that I
know of."
He failed to get this; but he succeeded in another matter, one less near
his heart, but calculated to appeal perhaps more strongly to his
constituents; he secured the opening of a highway for which the people in
the two Turkey Tracks had struggled and prayed more than twenty years. It
was with the pride of this victory strong in him that he had set out for
Judith's play-party. The young fellow might have been pardoned a half
wistful belief that this first success was the entering wedge and would
lead swiftly to that standing with his neighbours lacking which he was
helpless. Yet the sons of the house replied but gruffly to his greeting,
and, as though his coming had been a signal, the younger group promptly
disappeared in the direction of the main cabin.
At the old man's hearty invitation, Creed seated himself on the doorstep,
while his host went in for a coal from the smouldering hearth to light
his pipe, and joined the guest a moment later.
"Well sir, and how's the law coming on these days?" inquired old Jephthah
somewhat humorously.
"I reckon it's doing pretty well," allowed Creed. "The law's all right,
Mr. Turrentine; it's what our people need; and if there comes any failure
it's bound to be in me, not in the law."
"That's right," old Jephthah commended him. "Stand up for yo' principles.
Ef you go into a thing, back it. I never could get on with these here
good-Lord-good-devil folks. I like to know whar a man's at--cain't hit
him unless 'n you do."
"That's what I say," piped Jim Cal's reedy voice from the interior. "Is
it true that you've done made up the Shalliday fuss over that thar cow,
Creed? I thort a jestice of the peace was to he'p folks have fusses,
place o' settlin' 'em up."
"That's what everybody seems to think," replied Creed rather dolefully.
"I can't say I'm very proud of my part in the Shalliday matter. It seemed
to be mighty hard on the widow; but the law was on her brother-in-law's
side; so I gave my decision in favour of Bill Shalliday, and paid the
woman for the cow. And now they're both mad at me."
Old Jephthah narrowed his eyes and chuckled in luxurious enjoyment of the
situation.
"To be shore they air. To be shore they air," he repeated with unction.
"Ain't you done a favour to the both of 'em? Is they anything a man will
hate you worse for than a favour? If they is I ain't met up with it
yet."
"That's what I say," iterated Jim Cal. "What's the use o' tryin' to he'p
folks to law and order when they don't want it, and you've got to buy 'em
to behave? When you git to be a married man with chaps, like me, you'll
keep yo' money in yo' breeches pocket and let other folks fix it up
amongst themselves about their cows an' sech."
"I had hoped to get a chance to do something that amounted to more than
settling small family fusses," Creed said in a discouraged tone. "I hoped
to have the opportunity to talk to many a gathering of our folks about
the desirability of good citizenship in a general way. This thing of
blockaded stills keeps us forever torn up with a bad name in the valley
and the settlement."
Old Jephthah stirred not a hair; Jim Cal sat just as he had; yet the two
were indefinably changed the moment the words "blockaded still" were
uttered.
"Do you know of any sech? Air ye aimin' to find out about em?" quavered
the fat man finally, and his father looked scornfully at him, and the
revelation of his terror.
"No. I don't mean it in that personal way," Creed answered impatiently.
"Mr. Turrentine, I wish you'd tell me what you think about it. You've
lived all your life in the mountains; you're a man of judgment--is there
any way to show our people the folly as well as the crime of illicit
distilling?"
Jephthah surveyed with amusement the youth who came to an old moonshiner
for an opinion as to the advisability of the traffic. He liked the
audacity of it. It tickled his fancy.
"Well sir," he said finally, "the guv'ment sets off thar in Washington
and names a-many a thing that I shall do and that I shan't do.
Howsomever, they is but one thing hit will come here and watch out to see
ef I keep rules on--and that's the matter o' moonshine whiskey.
Guv'ment," he repeated meditatively but with rising rancour, "what has
the guv'ment ever done fer me, that I should be asked to do so much for
hit? I put the case thisaway. That man raises corn and grinds it to meal
and makes it into bread. I raise corn and grind hit to meal and make
clean, honest whiskey. The man that makes the bread pays no tax; guv'ment
says I shall pay a tax--an' I say I will not, by God!"
The big voice had risen to a good deal of feeling before old Jephthah
made an end.
"Nor I wouldn't neither," bleated Jim Cal in comical antiphon.
In the light from the open doorway Creed's face looked uneasy.
"But you don't think--you wouldn't--" he began and then broke off.
Old Jephthah shook his head.
"I ain't got no blockade still," he asserted sweepingly. "I made my last
run of moonshine whiskey many a year ago. I reckon two wrongs don't make
a right."
Creed's dismay increased. Inexperienced boy, he had not expected to
encounter such feeling in the discussion of this the one topic upon which
your true mountaineer of the remote districts can never be anything but
passionate, embittered, at bay.
"You name the crime of makin' wildcat whiskey," the old man's deep,
accusing voice went on, after a little silence. "It ain't no crime--an'
you know it--an' no guv'ment o' mortal men can make a crime out'n it. As
for the foolishness of it," he dropped his chin on his breast, his black
eyes looked out broodingly, his great beard rose against his lips and
muffled his tones, "I reckon the foolishness of a thing is what each
feller has to find out for hisself," he said. "Daddies has been tryin'
since the time of Adam to let their knowin' it sarve for their sons; but
ef one of 'em has made the plan work yit, I ain't heard on it. Nor the
guv'ment can't neither. A man'll take his punishment for a meanness an'
l'arn by it; but to be jailed for what's his right makes an outlaw of
him, an' always will. Good Lord, Creed! What set you an' me off on this
tune? Young feller, you ort to be down yon dancin' with the gals, instead
of here talking foolishness to a old man like me."
Creed arose to his tall young height and glanced uncertainly from his
host to the lighted room from which came the sounds of fiddle and
stamping feet. It was a little hard for a prophet on his own mountain-top
to be sent to play with the children; yet he went.
Chapter VII
Kisses
With the advent of the four Turrentine boys festivities had taken on a
brighter air, the game became better worth while.
"Wade, you've got to fiddle," cried Judith peremptorily. A chair was set
upon a table in the corner, the rather reluctant Wade hoisted to it, and
soon "Weevily Wheat," as the twitting tune comes from the country
fiddler's jigging bow, was filling the room.
"I reckon I ought to have asked your ruthers before I took Wade out of
the game," Judith said to Huldah Spiller as they joined hands to begin.
"Like I cared!" retorted Huldah, tossing her red head till the curls
bobbed. She was wearing the new blue lawn dress, made by a real store
pattern cut out of tissue paper, and was supremely conscious of looking
her best.
The Lusk girls in spotted calico frocks, the dots whereof were pink on
Cliantha's dress, and blue on Pendrilla's, had bridled and glanced about
shamefaced when Andy and Jeff came in; they now "balanced" demurely with
down dropped eyes as the game moved to the music.
Judith had left the supper preparations with the elder women, pieced out
by the assistance of old Dilsey Rust, and was most active in the games.
In the white muslin, washed and ironed by her own skilful, capable
fingers, with the blue bow confining the heavy chestnut braids at the
nape of her neck, her dark beauty glowed richly. Now the players shifted
to "Drop the Handkerchief." Judith delighted in this game because,
fleeter of foot, quicker of hand and eye than the others, she continually
disappointed any daring swain who thought to have a kiss from her. Her
shining eyes were ever on the doorway, till Blatch Turrentine left his
seat at the back of the room and elected to lounge there watching the
play with the tolerant air of a man contemplating the sports of children.
It apparently gave him satisfaction that Judith time after time eluded a
pursuer, broke into the ring and left him to wander in search of a less
alert and resolute fair.
"Cain't none of the boys kiss yo' gal," panted Huldah Spiller, pausing
beside him. "I doubt mightily ef ye could do it yo'self 'less'n she had a
mind to let ye'."
Judith heard, and the carmine on her cheek deepened and spread, while the
dark eyes above gleamed angrily.
"Come on and play, Blatch," called Wade, jigging away valiantly at his
fiddle. "We all know who it is you want to kiss--most of us is bettin'
that you're scared to try."
"Play!" echoed Blatchley in a contemptuous tone. "I say play! When I want
to buss a gal, I walk up and take my ruthers--like this."
Again that daunting panther quickness of movement from the big slouching
figure; the powerful lines seemed to melt and flow as he flung himself in
Judith's direction, and cast one arm firmly about her in such a way that
it pinioned both her elbows to her side.
"You turn me a-loose!" she cried, even as Little Buck had cried. "That
ain't fair. I wasn't ready for ye, 'caze ye said ye wouldn't play. You
turn me a-loose or ye'll wish ye had."
"No fair--no fair!" came the cries from the boys in the ring. "Either you
stay out or come in. Jude's right."
"Well, some of ye put me out," suggested Blatchley, significantly. He had
brought a jug of moonshine whiskey over from the still and it was flowing
freely, though unknown to Old Jephthah, in the loft where most of his
possessions were kept.
No man moved to lay finger on him. He held Judith--scarlet of face and
almost in tears--by her elbows, and lowered his mocking countenance to
within a few inches of her angry eyes.
"Now kiss me pretty, and kiss me all yo'self. I ain't got nothin' to do
with this; hit's yo' play. You been wantin' to git a chance to kiss me
this long while," he asserted with derisive humour. "Don't you hold off
becaze the others is here; that ain't the way you do when we're--"
"Wade--Jim Cal! Won't some o' you boys pull this fool man away," appealed
Judith. "I wish somebody'd call Uncle Jep. You can hold yo' ugly old face
there till yo' hair turns grey," she suddenly and furiously addressed her
admirer. "I'll never kiss ye."
"Oh, yes you will--you always do," Blatchley maintained. "Ef I was to
tell the folks how blame lovin' ye are when jest you and me is alone
together----"
He looked over his shoulder to enjoy the triumph of the moment. Blatchley
Turrentine's delight was to traverse the will of every other human being
with his own preference. Judith's gaze, tormented, tear-blurred, followed
his and saw across the shoulders of the others, the shine of Creed
Bonbright's fair hair, in the doorway. The sight brought from her an
inarticulate cry. It fired Blatchley to take the kiss which he had vowed
should be given him. As he bent to do so, Creed stepped forward and laid
a hand upon his shoulder. The movement was absolutely pacific, but the
fingers closed with a viselike grip, and there was so sharp a backward
jerk that the proffered salute was not delivered.
In the surprise of the moment Judith pulled herself free and stood at
bay. For an instant the two men looked into each other's eyes. Creed's
blue orbs were calm, impersonal, and without one hint of yielding or
fear.
"If you don't play fair," he said in argumentative tone, "there's no use
playing at all. Let's close up the ring and try it again."
All eyes in the room turned to Blatchley Turrentine, the women in a
flutter of terrified apprehension, the men with a brightening of
interest; surely he would resent this interference in some notable
manner. But Blatch was in fact too deadly to be merely high-tempered,
quick in anger. For a moment he stared at Bonbright, trying to look him
down; then those odd, whitey-grey eyes narrowed to mere slits. He laid
the matter up in his mind; this was not the time for settling it--here
before Judith Barrier and the women. He did not mean to content himself
with mere fisticuffs, or even a chance pocket-knife which might double in
his grasp and cut his own hand. To the immense surprise of everybody he
stretched out his long arms, caught carelessly at the fingers of a player
on either side of him, and, mending the line, began to move in rhythmic
time to the fiddle.
It was soon observable that Creed Bonbright's presence caused Huldah
Spiller's spirits to mount several notes in the octave. Whether it was
that her own betrothed was looking on, and this an excellent chance to
show him that even the town feller felt her charm, or merely Creed's
personal attractions could hardly be guessed.
"Come on," she cried recklessly, "let's play 'Over the River to Feed my
Sheep.' Strike up the tune, Wade."
The game she mentioned was also a forfeit play, with the difference that
the kiss was more certain, being taken of mere choice--though delivered,
of course, with due maidenly reluctance and a show of resisting--whenever
the girl facing one could be caught over the line. All the young people
played it; all the elders deprecated it. At the bottom of Judith's heart
lay one reason for making a play-party and bidding Creed Bonbright to it;
and now Huldah Spiller was blatantly calling out the unconfessed, the
unconfessable; Wade was sullenly dropping into the old Scotch air; the
long lines were forming, men opposite the girls--and the red-headed minx
had placed herself directly across from Creed!
The laughing chains swayed back and forth to the measure of the
music--advancing, retreating, pursuing, evading, choosing, rejecting, in
a gay parody of courtship. Voices were added to that of the fiddle.
"Hit's over the river to feed my sheep,
Hit's over the river to Charley;
Hit's over the river to feed my sheep
An' to kiss my lonesome darling,"
they sang.
Shadows crouched in the corners, flickering, dancing, threatening to come
out and play, then shrinking back as the blaze leaped and the room
widened. The rough brown walls took the shine and broidered themselves
with a thread of golden tracery. In such an illumination the eyes shone
with added luster, flying locks were all hyacinthine, the frocks might
have been silks and satins.
In the movement of the game girls and boys divided. The girls tossed
beribboned heads in unwonted coquetry, yet showed always, in downcast
eyes and the modest management of light draperies, the mountain ideal of
maidenhood. Across from them the line of youthful masculinity swayed;
tall, lean, brown-faced, keen-eyed young hunters these, sinewy and light
and quick of movement, with fine hands and feet, and a lazy pride of
bearing. A very different type from that found in the lowlands, or in
ordinary rustic communities.
Judith noted the other players not at all; her hot reprehending eyes were
on the girl in the blue dress. She did not observe that she herself was
dancing opposite Andy, while Pendrilla Lusk dragged with drooping head in
the line across from the amiably grinning Doss Provine. Finding herself
suddenly in the lead and successful, Huldah began to preen her feathers a
bit. She withdrew a hand from the girl on her right to arrange the small
string of blue glass beads around her neck.
"Jest ketch to my skirt for a minute," she whispered loudly. "I reckon
hit won't rip, though most of 'em is 'stitches taken for a friend'--I was
that anxious to get it done for the party. Oh, Law!"
And then--nobody knew how it happened--she was over the line, her hold on
the hands of her mates broken, she had tripped and fallen in a giggling
blue lawn heap fairly at Bonbright's feet. He was in a position where the
least gallant must offer the salute the game demanded, but to make
assurance doubly sure Huldah put out her hands like a three-year-old,
crying,
"He'p me up, Creed, I b'lieve I've sprained my ankle."
The young fellow from Hepzibah was in a mood for play. After all he was
only a big boy, and he had been long barred out from young people's
frolics. Here was a gay, toward little soul, who seemed to like him. He
stooped and caught her by the waist, picking her up as one might a small
child, and holding her a moment with her feet off the floor. Something in
the laughing challenge of her face as she protested and begged to be put
down prompted him as to what was expected. He kissed her lightly upon the
cheek before he released her.
As he set her down he encountered Wade Turrentine's eye. A spark of tawny
fire had leaped to life in its hazel depth. The fiddler still clung
faithfully to his office. If he missed a note now and again, or played
off key, he might be forgiven. It is to be remembered that he sawed away
without a moment's pause throughout the entire episode.
Creed reached out to join the broken line and touched Jeff's arm. The boy
flung away from the contact with a muttered word. He looked helplessly at
Judith, but she would not glance at him; head haughtily erect, long
lashes on crimson cheeks, red lip curled to an expression of offence and
disdain, the young hostess mended the line by joining the hands of the
two girls on each side of her.
"You-all can go on playin' without me," she said in a constrained tone.
"I got to see to something in the other room."
"See here, Mister Man," remarked Blatch, as Judith prepared to leave.
"You're mighty free and permisc'ous makin' rules for kissin' games, but I
take notice you don't follow none of 'em yo'se'f."
Judith halted uncertainly. To stop and defend Creed was out of the
question. She was about to interpose with the general accusation that
Blatch was trying to pick a fuss and break up her play-party, when Iley's
voice, for once a welcome interruption, broke in from the doorway.
"Jude, we ain't got plates enough for everybody an' to put the biscuit
on," called Jim Cal's wife. "Ax Creed Bonbright could we borry a few from
his house."
Judith closed instantly with the diversion. She moved quickly toward the
door; Bonbright joined her.
"Why yes," he said. "You know I told you to help yourself. Let me go over
now and get what you want. Is there anything else?"
"That's mighty kind of you, Creed," Judith thanked him. "I reckon I
better go along with ye and see. I don't think of anything else just now.
Iley, we'll be back quick as we can with all the plates ye need."
Together they stepped out into the soft dusk of the summer night,
followed by the narrowed gaze of Blatch Turrentine's grey eyes.
Chapter VIII
On the Doorstone
Behind them the play was resumed in the lighted room; the whining of the
fiddle, the thud and stamp of many feet, came to them softened and
refined by a little distance. They were suddenly drawn together in that
intimacy of two who leave the company and the lights on a special
expedition. Judith made an impatient mental effort to release the
incident of Huldah and the kiss, which had so unreasonably irritated
her.
"If we was to go acrosst fields hit would be a heap better," she advised
softly, and they moved through the odorous, myriad-voiced darkness of the
midsummer night, side by side, without speech, for a time. Then as Creed
halted at a dim, straggling barrier which crossed their course and laid
down a rail fence partially that she might the more easily get over in
her white frock, she returned to the tormenting subject once more,
opening obliquely:
"You and Huldy Spiller is old friends I reckon. Don't you think she's a
powerful pretty girl?"
"Mighty pretty," echoed Creed absently. All girls were of an even
prettiness to him, and Huldah Spiller was a pleasant little thing. He was
wondering what he had done back there in the play-room that had set them
all against him.
"Her and Wade is goin' to be wedded come September," put in Judith
jealously.
"Yo' cousin will be getting a mighty fine wife."
The mountain man is apt to make his comments on the marriages of his
friends with dignified formality, and Creed uttered the accustomed phrase
without heat or enthusiasm; but it seemed to Judith that he might have
said less--or more.
"Well, I never did like red hair," the girl managed to get out finally;
"but I reckon hit's better than old black stuff like mine."
"My mother's hair was sorter sandy," Creed answered in his gentle,
tolerant fashion. "Mine favours it." And he had not the wit to add that
dark hair, however, pleased him best.
Judith stepped beside him for some moments in mortified silence.
Evidently he was green wood and could by none of her old methods be
kindled. Then, their eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness, they came
out into a modified twilight in the clearing about the Bonbright house.
"You better unlock the door and go in first," suggested Judith, in a
depressed tone.
"Why, I ain't got the key," Creed reminded her. "I left it with
you--didn't you bring it?"
They drew unconsciously close together in the dark with something of the
guilty consternation of childish culprits. A mishap of the sort ripens an
acquaintance swiftly.
"What a gump I was!" Judith breathed with sudden low laughter. He could
see her eyes shining in the gloom, and the dim outline of her figure. "I
knowed well an' good you didn't have the key--hit's in the blue bowl on
the fire-board at home."
"I ought to have thought of it," asserted Creed shouldering the blame.
"And I'm sorry; I wanted to show you my mother's picture."
"An' _I'm_ sorry," echoed Judith, remembering fleetingly the swept and
garnished rooms, the wreath of red roses; "I had something to show you,
too."
Nothing was said of the dishes for the merrymakers at Judith's house.
Another interest was obtruding itself into the simple, practical
expedition, crowding aside its original purpose. The girl looked around
the dim, weed-grown garden, its bushes blots of deeper shadow upon the
darkness, its blossoms vaguely conjectured by their odour.
"There used to be a bubby bush--a sweet-scented shrub--over in that
corner," Creed hesitated. "I'd like to get you some of the bubbies. My
mother used to pick 'em and put 'em in the bureau drawers I remember, and
they made everything smell nice."
He had taken her hand and led her with him, advancing uncertainly toward
the flowers. He felt her shiver, and halted instantly.
"Yo' cold!" he said. "Let me take my coat off and put it around ye--I
don't need it. You got overheated playing back there, and now you'll
catch a cold."
"Oh, no," disclaimed Judith, whose little shudder had been as much from
excitement as from the sharp chill of the night air after the heated
play-room. "I reckon somebody jest walked over my grave--I ain't cold."
But he had pulled off the coat while he spoke, and now he turned to put
it about her, and drew her back to the doorstep. Judith was full of a
strange ecstasy as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. The lover's
earliest and favourite artifice--the primitive kindness of wrapping her
in his own garment! Even Creed, unready and unschooled as he was, felt
stir within him its intimate appeal.
A nebulous lightening which had been making itself felt behind the
eastern line of mountains now came plainly in view, late moon, melancholy
and significant, as the waning moon always is. By its dim illumination
Creed saw Judith Barrier standing at the door of his own house, smiling
at him tremulously, with the immemorial challenge in her dark eyes. To
that challenge the native man in him--the lover--so long usurped by the
zealot, the would-be philanthropist, rose thrilling, yet still bewildered
and uncertain, to respond. Something heady and ancient and eternally
young seemed to pass into his soul out of the night and the moonlight and
the shining of her eyes. He was all alive to her nearness, her
loveliness, to the sweet sense that she was a young woman, he a young
man, and the loveliness and the dearness of her were his for the
trying--for the winning. His breath caught in his throat.
"Wait a minute," he whispered hurriedly, though she had not moved. With
eager hands he wrapped the coat close about her. "Let's sit here on the
doorstep and talk awhile. There are a heap of things I want to ask you
about--that I want to tell you."
Young beauty and belle that she was, Judith had been sought and courted,
in that most primitive society, since she was fourteen. She was love's
votary by birthright, and her wit and her emotions were schooled in
love's game: to lure, to please, to exploit, to defend, evade, deny; in
each postulant seeking, testing, trying for the right man to whom should
be made love's final surrender. But Creed, always absorbed in vague
altruistic dreams, had no boyish sweethearting behind him to have taught
him the ways of courtship.
Fire-flies sparkled everywhere, thickest over the marshy places. A mole
cricket was chirring in the grass by the old doorstone. Sharp on the soft
dark air came the call of that woodland night bird which the mountain
people say cries "chip-out-o'-white-oak," and which others translate
"chuck-wills-widow."
"I--" he began, hesitated momentarily, then daunted, grasped at the
familiar things of his life--"I don't get on very well up here. I'm
afraid I've made a failure of it; but"--he turned to her in a curious,
groping entreaty, his hat in his hands, the dim moonlight full on his
fair head and in his eager eyes--"but if you would help me--with you--I
think I ought to----"
"I say made a failure!" cooed Judith in her rich, low tones. "You ax me
whatever you want to know. You tell me what it is that you're aimin' to
do--I say made a failure!"
Her trust was so hearty, so wholesale, she filled so instantly the
position not only of sweetheart but of mother to a small boy with an
unsatisfactory toy--that would always be Judith Barrier--that Creed's
heart--the man's heart--a lonely one, and beginning to feel itself
misunderstood and barred out from its kind--melted in his bosom. There
was silence between them, a silence vibrant with the coming utterance.
But even as the dark, fond, inviting eyes and the troubled, kindling blue
ones encountered, as Creed lifted the girl's hand timidly, and essayed
speech, the voice of that one who had stepped on her grave harshly
aroused them both.
"I vow--I thort it was thieves, an' I was a-goin' to see could I pick off
you-all," drawled Blatchley Turrentine's level tones from the shadow of
the garden. Mutely, with a sense of chill and disappointment that was
like the shock of a physical blow to each, the two young creatures got to
their feet and turned to leave the place, preparing to go by the high
road, without consultation. As they passed him near the gate, Blatch
Turrentine fell in on the other side of the girl and walked with them
silently for a time.
"Iley sont me over," he said finally. "She was skeered you-all wouldn't
bring any plates."
Neither Judith nor Creed offered any explanation. Instead:
"Well, I don't see how you're goin' to help anything," said the girl
bitterly--any presence must have been hateful to her which interrupted or
forestalled what Creed would certainly have said, that for which her
whole twenty years had waited.
"Oh, I've got the plates," chuckled Blatch, jingling a bulky package
under his arm.
"Why, how did you----" began Judith in amazement.
"Uh-huh, I've got my own little trick of gittin' in whar I choose to go,"
declared Turrentine. He leaned around and looked meaningly at the man on
her other side, then questioned, "How long do you-all reckon I'd been
thar?" and examined them keenly in the shadowy half light.
But neither hastened to disclaim or explain, neither seemed in any degree
embarrassed, though to both his bearing was plainly almost intolerable.
Thereafter they walked in silence which was scarcely broken till they
reached the gate and Iley came shrilling out to meet them demanding,
"Did you get them thar plates from Miz. Lusk's, you Blatch Turrentine?"
Judith looked at him with angry scorn. It was the old tyrannical trick
which she had known from her childhood up, the attempt to maintain an
ascendency over her by appearing to know everything and be
everywhere--"like he was the Lord-a'mighty Hisself," she muttered
indignantly, as Creed joined a group of young men, and she passed in to
her necessary activities as hostess.
Judith Barrier's play-party won to its close with light hearts and light
feet, with heavy hearts which the weary body would fain have denied, with
love and laughter, with jealousy and chagrin, with the slanted look of
envy, of furtive admiration, or of disparagement, from feminine eyes at
the costumes of other women, just as any ball does.
The two who had trembled upon the brink of some personal revelation, a
closer communion, were not again alone together that evening. Amid the
moving figures of the others, now to his eyes as painted automatons,
Creed Bonbright watched with strong fascination in which there was a
tincture that was almost terror, the beautiful girl who had suddenly
emerged from her class and become for him the one woman.
So adequate, so competent, Judith dominated the situation; passing among
her guests, the thick dark lashes continually lowered toward her crimson
cheeks. Some subtle sense told her that the spell was working. Smiles
from this sweet inner satisfaction curved her red lips. No need to
look--she knew how his eyes were following her. The exultant knowledge of
it sang all through her being. Gone were her perturbations, her chilling
uncertainties. She was at once stimulated and quieted.
Their good-byes were said in the most public manner, yet one glance
flashed between them which asked and promised an early meeting.
Chapter IX
Foeman's Bluff
It was near midnight when Creed sought his patient mule at the rack, to
find that Doss Provine had ridden the animal away.
"He said you was a-goin' to stay at yo' own house to-night, an' he 'lowed
ye wouldn't need the mule, an' he was mighty tired. He 'lowed hit was a
mighty long ja'nt out to the Edge whar he was a-goin'," contributed Blev
Straley, who seemed to have been admitted to Provine's confidence.
"Mighty long ja'nt--I say long ja'nt!" ejaculated old man Broyles, who
was engaged in saddling his ancient one-eyed mare. "Ef I couldn't spit as
fur as from here to the Edge I'd never chaw tobacker agin! Plain old
fashioned laziness is what ails Doss Provine. I'd nacher'ly w'ar him out
for this trick, Bonbright, ef I was you."
"Well, I did aim to stay over at my house to-night," said Creed, "But I
can't. I've got a case to try in the morning, soon, that I've got to look
up some points on yet to-night. I reckon I'll have to foot it out to Aunt
Nancy's."
As Creed spoke a fellow by the name of Taylor Stribling, a sort of
satellite of Blatchley Turrentine's came slouching from the shadows of
the nearby smoke-house. He watched old man Broyles ride away, and Blev
Straley take a leisurely departure.
"Mighty bad ye got to hoof it, Creed," he observed. "Ef you've a mind to
come with me I can show you a short cut through the woods by Foeman's
Bluff. Hit's right on the first part of my way."
Creed had been long out of the mountains or he would have known that a
short cut which led by Foeman's Bluff would certainly be a strange route
toward Nancy Card's cabin; but it was characteristic of the man that
without question or demur he accepted the proffered friendly turn at its
face value, and he and Stribling at once took the way which led across
the gulch to the still. They walked for some time, Stribling leading,
Creed following, deep in his own thoughts.
"Looks like this is a queer direction to be going," he roused himself to
comment wonderingly as they dipped into the sudden hollow.
"The trail turns a piece up yon," explained the guide briefly.
Again they toiled on in silence, crossing the dry boulder-strewn bed of a
stream, travelling always in the dense darkness of the tall timber,
finally striking the rise, which was so abrupt and steep that they had to
catch by the path-side bushes to pull themselves up. It was lighter here,
as the trail mounted toward a region of rocky bluffs where there was no
big timber, running obliquely across the great promontory that had got
the name of Foeman's Bluff, from old Ab Foeman whose hideout, still
unknown, was said to be somewhere in its front.
"Ain't it mighty curious to be goin' up so?" Creed panted. "Aunt Nancy's
place lies lower than the Turrentines'. By the road it's down hill mighty
near all the way."
"Thishyer's a short cut," growled the other evasively. "Mind how you
step. Hit's a fur ways down thar ef a body was to fall."
With the words they came out suddenly on the Bluff itself where the
trail widened into a natural terrace, and the great rock, solemn with
majestic peace, faced an infinity of sky with bared brow. As they
emerged into the light Creed took off his hat and lifted his
countenance, inhaling the beauty of the summer night. The late moon
had climbed a third of the way up the heavens; now she looked down with
a chastened, tarnished light, yet with a dusky, diminished beauty that
held a sort of mild pathos. Great timbered slopes, inky black in this
illumination, fell away on every hand down to where the mists lay
death-white in the valley; behind them was a low, irregular bulk of
brush-grown rock; and all about the whirr of katydids, a million voices
blended into one. From a nearby thicket came to them the click and liquid
gurgle, "Chip-out-o'-white-oak!" It sent Creed's heart and fancy questing
back to the past hour with the girl on the doorstone. What would he have
asked, she answered, if Blatch had not interrupted them? He scarcely heard
the wavering cry of a screech-owl that followed hard upon the
remembered notes. Stribling, however, noted the latter promptly, and
began edging toward the shadow as his companion spoke.
"This is mighty sightly," said Creed, looking about him musingly; "I do
love a moonshiny night."
For a moment there was only the noise of the katydids, backgrounded and
enfolded by the deep silence of the great mountains. Then someone broke
out into what was evidently a forced laugh, a long-drawn, girding,
mirthless haw-haw, the laboured insult of which stung Creed into a
certain resentment of demeanour.
"What's the joke?" he inquired dryly, turning toward Taylor Stribling.
But Stribling had silently melted away among the shadows of distant trees
along the trail. It was Blatchley Turrentine who stood before him
thrusting forward a jeering face in the uncertain half light, while three
vaguely defined forms moved and shouldered behind him. The apparition was
sinister, but if Blatch looked for demonstrations of fear he was
disappointed.
"What's the joke?" Creed repeated.
"I couldn't hold in when I heared your pretty talk," drawled Blatch,
setting his hands on his hips and barring the way. "Whar might you be
a-goin', Mr. Creed Bonbright?"
"Home," returned Creed briefly. "Get out of my road, and I'll be obliged
to you."
"Yo' road--_yo'_ road!" echoed Blatch. "Well, young feller, besides this
here road runnin' acrosst the south eend o' the property that I've rented
on a five-year lease, ef so be that yo're a-goin' to Nancy Cyard's house
this is a mighty curious direction for you to be travellin' in."
"I was told it was a short cut," said Bonbright controlling his temper. A
man who was justice of the peace, going home to get ready to try a case
on the morrow, must not embroil himself.
"Good Lord!" scoffed Blatch. "You claim to be mountain raised, and tell
me you think this is a short cut from whar you was at to Nancy Cyard's? I
reckon you'll have to make up another tale."
Bonbright became suddenly aware that he was surrounded, two of the men
who were with Turrentine having slipped past him and appearing now as
blots of blacker shadow against the trees on either side of the path by
which he had come. Turrentine and the remaining man barred the way ahead;
on the one side was the sheer descent of the bluff; on the other the
rough, broken rise.
It was like a bad dream. With his usual forthright directness he spoke
out.
"What is it you want of me--all of you? This meeting never came about by
chance."
Blatch shook his head. "Yo' mighty right it didn't," he said. "Me an' the
boys has a word to speak with you, and when we ketch you walkin' on our
land in the middle o' the night--with whatever intentions--we think the
time has come for talkin'."
"Andy! Jeff! Is that you?" Creed, the rash, called over his shoulder to
the two behind him.
An inarticulate growl answered, and then a boyish voice began,
"Yo' mighty free with folks' names, you Creed Bonbright. Me and my
brother both told you what we thought o' you when you come to the jail. I
told you then you'd be run out of the Turkey Tracks ef you tried to come
up here. We don't want no spies."
"Spies!" echoed Creed with a rising note of anger in his voice. "Who said
I was a spy? What should I be spying on?"
"Yo' friend Mr. Dan Haley might 'a' said you was a spy," suggested Andy's
higher pitched tones. "As for what you'd be a-spyin' on you know best.
We're all mighty peaceable, law-abidin' folks in the Turkey Tracks. I
don't know of nothin' that we're apt to break the law about 'less'n it
would be beatin' up and runnin' out a spy that----"
The childish bravado of this speech evidently displeased Blatch, who
wanted the thing done and over with. His heavier, grating tones broke
in,
"They's jest one thing to be said to you, Creed Bonbright. You've got to
get out of the Turkey Tracks--and get quick. Air ye goin'?"
"No!" Creed flung back at him. "When I take my orders from you it will be
a mighty cold day. I came up here in the Turkey Tracks to do a good work
among my own people. I'm going to stay here and do it in my own way. Is
that you, Wade Turrentine? What have you got to say to me?"
The second of the men who faced him stirred uneasily at the mention of
his name. It rankled in the expectant bridegroom's heart that all he
could complain of concerning Creed Bonbright was that Huldah had thrown
herself in his way and forced a kiss upon him--not that Bonbright had
been the amatory aggressor!
"I say what Blatch says," growled Wade as though the words stuck in his
throat.
More and more the whole thing was like a nightmare to Creed; he felt as
though with sufficient effort he might throw it off and wake. The four
men hung at the path-side eyeing him, motionless if he were still, moving
only if he stirred. Even this scarcely gave him a complete understanding
of the gravity of his situation.
"Well," he said finally, "I'm going on home. If any of you boys has
anything to say to me, to-morrow or any day after--you know where to find
me."
He made as though to pass; but Blatch Turrentine stepped swiftly to the
middle of the pathway and stood breathing a little short.
"No, by God, we don't!" he panted. "Ef we let you to go this night--we
don't know whar we'll ever find you again. Mebbe you've got yo' budget
made up--on yo' way to yo' friend Mr. Dan Haley right now. _Ye don't go
from here_!"
Instinctively Creed fell back a step. It was out at last--this was
neither more nor less than a waylaying. Did they mean to kill him? Blatch
Turrentine had crouched where he stood, and even as the question went
through the victim's mind, he launched himself with that sudden frightful
quickness bodily upon Creed.
It would seem that the slighter man must be borne down by the onset. But
Bonbright gathered himself, his arms shot out and gripped his assailant
midway. Struggling, panting, gasping, stamping, they wrenched and swayed,
the three who watched them holding aloof. Then with a sheer effort of
strength Creed tore the heavier man from his footing and lifted him clear
of the ground.
With a little sobbing oath Andy ran in. Bonbright could have heaved the
man he held over his shoulder in that terrific fall well known to deadly
wrestling. Wade's stern, "Sst! Git back there!" stopped the boy. Even as
Creed's muscles knotted themselves to the supreme effort came sudden
memory of what he must stand for to these people. It was his right to
defend his own life; he must not, in any extremity, take that of another.
His grip relaxed. Turrentine partially got his feet again; his arms were
free; the right made a swift movement, and Creed caught the gleam of a
knife-blade. Without volition of his own he flung all his weight and
strength into one mighty movement that hurled man and weapon from him.
Plunging, staggering, clutching at the air, Turrentine gave ground. The
moonlight flickered on the blade in his upflung hand as, with a strangled
hoarse cry he reeled backward over the bluff.
There was a rending sound of breaking branches, a noise of rolling rocks;
then deadly silence. For a long moment the men left standing on the cliff
strained eyes and ears to where Blatch had gone down, then,
"Keep off!" shouted Creed as the three others began silently to close in
on him. "Stand back, boys. We've had enough of this. Draw off and let me
get down and see what's happened to him." He kept slowly backing away,
striving not to be hemmed in against the rock behind him. The others
warily followed.
"Let you down and finish him, ye mean--don't ye?" screamed Andy with all
a boy's senseless rage.
"You're a fine one to bring law and order into the Turkey Tracks," Wade
taunted savagely. "You've brought murder--that's what you've done."
"He drew a knife on me," cried Bonbright. "You all saw that. I only
shoved him away. I never meant to throw him over the bluff."
"Nobody seen no knife but you, Creed Bonbright," Jeff doggedly
asseverated. "All three of us seen you fling Blatch over the bluff. You
ain't in no court of law now. Yo' lies won't do you no good. Yo' where we
kill the feller that done the killin'."
"How?" said Creed, still backing, feeling his way slowly, seeking for
some break in the rise behind, the others coming a little closer. "By
jumpin' on to him somewhere out at night, four to one--or even three to
one?"
"Yes, by God! thataway, ef we cain't do it no better way," panted Wade.
Years before--heaven knows how many--a little seep of water began to
gather between two huge stones in the small broken bluff behind Creed.
Winter after winter the crevice through which the trickle came enlarged,
the water caught in a natural basin and froze with all its puny might to
heave the stones apart. The winter before this slow process had closed
leaving a wedge of rock trembling upon its base, ready to fall into a
crevice. Yet the opening was masked with vine leaves, and when the spring
rains finally washed away the mould and the crude doorway tottered and
sank, the gap thus left was unnoted, invisible to the sharpest eye.
Bonbright pressing close against the rock to pass, stepping warily when
it was forward, but hugging his barrier as a safety, missed his footing,
and slipped almost without a sound into this opening. For a moment he
sustained himself holding to tree roots, hearkening to the voices of
those above him.
"Wade--you fool! What did you let him get a-past you for?"
And then Wade's heavier tones, "I didn't. He run back yo' way."
He could hear their footsteps pounding to and fro, their hoarse cries
which finally settled down into a demand for a lantern.
"We can't find Blatch nor do nothing for him, nor git on the track of
Bonbright nor nothin' else, without a lantern. You Jeff, run round to the
still; me and Andy'll go back and fetch pap."
Creed sought cautiously for footing, lost all hold, and began a headlong
descent.
Low limbs thrashed his face and body; again and again his head was dashed
against rocks or tree stems; his forehead was gashed; the blood poured
into his eyes; he rolled and bounded and slid down and down and down the
crevice, and into the ravine, bruised, bleeding, breathless, blinded and
choked by blood and earth and gravel. He was more than half unconscious
when he brought up at last with a rib-smashing thump upon a sapling, and
there he clung like a dazed animal, gasping.
Slowly, as his breath came back to him, and he cleared the blood and dust
from his eyes, Creed became aware of a dim glow coming through the bushes
in one direction. For some time he watched it, making ready to get away
as quickly as possible, since this must be on Blatch Turrentine's land,
and the light came probably from some of Blatch's party searching for
Turrentine himself, or for Creed.
But when he noted that the illumination was steady and stationary, he
began to move hesitatingly in its direction. He had gone probably two or
three hundred feet when he came to a place whence he had an unobstructed
view. The light shone out from the cramped opening of a cave. He went
nearer in a sort of daze. There was nobody to intercept him, Blatch and
the boys, whom he had left on the bluff above, when he so unexpectedly
descended from it, being the only sentinels out. No approach was looked
for from the quarter where he now was, and he found himself, gazing
directly into Blatch Turrentine's blockaded still. He could distinctly
see Jim Cal and the fellow Taylor Stribling moving about within the cave.
They were attending to a run of whiskey. While Bonbright stood
motionless, not yet fully comprehending the sinister colour his presence
might wear, there was the thud of running footsteps, Jeff Turrentine
rounded the boulder on the other side of the cave and called aloud to
those within,
"Jim Cal! Taylor! Buck! Creed Bonbright's killed Blatch--flung him clean
over the bluff--and got plumb away from us! Bring a lantern you-all.
We've got to hunt for Blatch in under Foeman's Bluff--I'll show you
whar."
Silently Creed drew back into the dense undergrowth. He knew where he
was, now. As he retreated swiftly in the opposite direction from that in
which Jeff had approached, he could vaguely hear the excited voices at
the still, questioning, replying, denouncing, exclaiming. Presently he
came out upon the main trail, rounded the Gulch, heading for the big road
and Nancy Card's cabin, his soul sick within him at the events of the
evening, bitterly regretting the explicit and unwelcome knowledge of the
secret still which had been forced upon him, feeling himself now a spy
indeed--a spy and a murderer.
He walked with long nervous strides; beaten and bruised though he was, he
was unconscious of fatigue; the grief and regret that surged within him
were as an anodyne to physical pain, and it was less than half an hour
later that he opened the door of Nancy Card's cabin, his white face
scratched and bleeding, his torn hands, too, covered with blood, his
clothing rent and earth-stained, his eyes wild and pain-bright.
"Good Lord, boy! What's the matter with ye?" cried the old woman, coming
toward him in terror, both hands out. "I sot up for ye, 'caze Pony he
jest come from Hepzibah an' said that spiled-rotten Andy an' that feisty
Jeff 'lowed ye was a spy an' they was a-goin' to run ye out of the Turkey
Tracks."
She laid hold of him and examined him with anxious eyes.
"I was plumb werried about ye. I knowed in reason they was a-goin' to be
trouble at that fool play-party."
"No, I ain't hurt, Aunt Nancy," said Creed desolately, and he stared past
her at the wall. "But looks to me like I'm cursed. I meant so well----"
He choked on the word. "I'd just had a talk with--She said--we--I thought
that everything was about to come right. And now--I've killed Blatch
Turrentine, and I've just got away from the others. They was all after
me."
Chapter X
A Spy
Old Jephthah was winding the clock when the door--which he had closed
some time ago after the last retiring guests--flung violently open, Andy
paused, flying foot on the threshold, and gasped out hoarsely,
"Pap--Creed Bonbright's killed Blatch and got away from us!"
The Lusk girls had staid to help Judith clear up, intending to remain
over night unless Andy and Jeff returned in time to take them home. The
three young women working at the table lifted pale faces; Pendrilla let
fall the plate in her hand and broke it. Unconscious of the fact, she
stood staring with open mouth at the fragments by her feet. Jephthah took
one more turn mechanically, then withdrew the key and laid it down.
"Whar at?" he inquired briefly.
"Up on our place," said Wade who now appeared at the boy's side.
"Bonbright throwed him over Foeman's Bluff."
"How come it?" queried the head of the tribe.
"They was a fussin'," began Andy, but his father interrupted him in a
curious tone.
"Foeman's Bluff," he repeated. "What tuck Bonbright thar at this time o'
night?"
"That's what I say," panted Jim Cal's voice in the darkness outside. He
had come straight from the still instead of going with Jeff and the
others to search; and for all his flesh he had overtaken his brothers.
But there was none now to demand sardonically why he fled the seat of war
and ran to the paternal shelter for re-enforcements. "Ef folks go nosin'
around whar they ain't wanted, sometimes they git what they don't like,"
he concluded.
Judith, very pale, had parted her lips to utter words of indignant
defence, and denial of this broad imputation, but before she could speak
Huldah Spiller irrupted into the room, her red curls flying, her bodice
clutched about her in such a fashion as to suggest she had been
undressing when the news reached her.
The mountain woman with temperament is reduced to the outlets of such
occasions as these, or revival seasons and funerals; and Huldah Spiller,
having abandoned the protesting Iley with her babies, whom the mother
could not leave alone, meant to make the most of the occasion.
"You-all ain't got no right to talk the way you do about Creed," the
red-haired girl burst out. "Him and me's been friends ever sence I went
to Hepzibah, and there ain't a better man walks the earth. Ef he done
anything to Blatch hit was becaze Blatch laywayed him an' jumped on him,
an' he had to. Oh, Lord!" and she began to weep, "I wish't my daddy was
here--I jest wish Pap Spiller was here. Pore Creed! Ef you-all git yo'
hands on him, mad thisaway, the Lord knows what will be did!"
Jephthah regarded his postulant daughter-in-law from under lowered, bushy
brows.
"Kin you make her hush?" he inquired of Wade.
"I ain't got no interest in makin' her hush nor makin' her holler,"
returned Wade contemptuously. Dishonoured before his clan, his male
dignity sadly shorn, his woman shrieking out the wrongs and excellences
of another man--and that man a young and well-favoured enemy--his
bitterness may be forgiven.
"Fetch the lantern," ordered Jephthah briefly. "We-all have got to git
over thar and see to this business."
"Well, I'll hush--but I'm goin' along," volleyed Huldah.
"Le's us go too, Jude," pleaded Cliantha Lusk in a trembling whisper.
"I'm scared to be left here in the house with the men all gone. He might
take a notion to come and raid the place and kill us. They do thataway in
feud times. My gran' mammy----"
"Do hush!" choked Judith. But she hurried out in the wake of the
departing men, Cliantha clinging to one arm, Pendrilla to the other.
They left the doors open, the candles flaring, and nobody to guard but
the toothless old hound who slept and snored on the chip pile.
The journey to Foeman's Bluff, following the flicker of the lantern in
Wade's hand, with the voices of the men coming back to her, hoarse,
fragmentary, ejaculatory, reciting Creed's offences asseverating that
they had expected nothing else, was like a nightmare to Judith. When
Cliantha screamed and clung to her and said she thought she saw Creed
Bonbright in the bushes by the path-side, Judith shook her off angrily,
but let the clamouring little thing creep back and make her peace.
"I forgot about you and Blatch--Oh, po' Judy!" moaned Cliantha. "Ef hit
was me goin' to s'arch for the murdered body of my true love I don't know
as I could put foot befo' foot!"
"The trail's mighty narrow here--I'll go in front," said Judith. She
freed herself, and thereafter walked alone with bent head.
As they descended into the hollow Andy began to hoo-ee; and finally he
was answered from the neighbourhood of the bluff. Up this they climbed,
since on this side they were cut off from the region below it by an
impassable gulley. Halting on the top and looking down, they could see a
lantern moving about and catch faint sound of the men's voices.
"Who's down thar?" Jephthah's big rolling bass sent out the call. There
was an ominous hesitation before Jeff's perturbed tones replied,
"Hit's me, pap, me an' Buck Shalliday an' Taylor Stribling."
Andy found a tall tree at the bluffs edge, and began to descend through
its branches with the swiftness and agility of a monkey.
"How is he--is he alive?"
The old man put the query at the edge of the gulf, stooping, peering
over. Jim Cal sat down suddenly and began wiping his forehead. The
moonlight showed his round face very pale under its beaded sweat.
"Andy'll git hisself killed!" whimpered Pendrilla.
And Huldah broke into loud hysteric weeping, on the tide of which
"Creed--Pap Spiller--Blatch Turrentine" were cast up now and again.
"Hush, cain't ye?" demanded Jephthah, angrily; "I cain't hear one word
they answer me down thar. Hello, boys. Is he livin'?"
Andy had evidently reached the searchers at the foot of the cliff. Loud,
confused voices came up to those above. Finally,
"W'y, Pap, we ain't never found him," Jeff called.
"Ye _what_?" demanded the father incredulously.
"We ain't--never--found him," reiterated Jeff doggedly.
The old man drew back sharply with a look of swift anger in his face.
"Well, ef ye hain't found him by now ye better quit lookin', hadn't ye?"
he suggested as he straightened to his full height and turned his back.
"Creed Bonbright's jest about been here an' hid the body, that's what
he's done," Taylor Stribling clamoured after him in futile explanation.
But the old man gave no heed. Lantern in hand, he was already addressing
himself to a careful examination of the scene of the struggle. The torn
vines where Creed had fallen through the fissure instantly caught his
eye.
"Come up here, you-all!" he turned and shouted toward the gulf. He swung
his lantern far out over the crevice. "Look at that," he said quietly.
"Thar's whar yo' man got away from ye." He handed the lantern to Wade,
and swung himself lightly down where Creed had fallen.
"Better let me go, Pap," said Wade, and Judith mutely stared after the
old man as he disappeared into the dark.
For fifteen minutes or more the watchers on the cliff waited and
trembled, straining ears and eyes. In that time they were joined by those
from the foot of the bluff, all but Stribling, who, the boys said, had
"gone on home." Then they heard sounds of clambering in the cleft, and
the old man's face appeared in the well of inky shadow, pale, the black
eyes burning, the great black beard flowing backward to join the darkness
behind him. Wade held his lantern high. It lit a circle of faces on which
terror, anger, and distress wrought. Judith could scarcely look at her
uncle, and a great trembling shook her limbs, so that she laid hold of a
little sapling by which she stood, and closed her eyes.
"Well," said the old man on a falling note, and his voice sounded
hollowly from the cleft, "well, I reckon this does settle it--whether
Blatch is hurt or no. How many of ye was a-workin' in the still
to-night?"
"I was," quavered Jim Cal; "me and Taylor Stribling and Buck Shalliday.
Blatch had left a run o' whiskey that had to be worked off, and when he
didn't come I turned in to 'tend to it--why, Pap?"
"Ef Bonbright wanted to find out about the still he shore made it, that's
all," answered Jephthah. "Ye can see right into it from whar he went. Ef
you-all boys wants to stay out o' the penitentiary I reckon Creed
Bonbright's got to leave the Turkey Tracks mighty sudden," and he swung
himself heavily to the level of the cliff.
"That's what I say," whispered Jim Cal, pasty pale and quivering. "We've
got it to do."
Old Jephthah looked darkly upon his sons.
"Well, settle it amongst ye, how an' when. I'll neither meddle nor make
in this business. I don't know how all o' this come about, nor what
you-all an' Blatch Turrentine air up to. You've made an outsider o' me,
an' an outsider I'll stay. Ef ye won't tell me the truth, don't tell me
no lies. Come on, gals."
He strode into the homeward trail, the four girls falling in behind his
tall figure. Judith was sick with misery and uncertainty; the Lusk girls
looked back timidly at Andy and Jeff; even Huldah was mute.
Chapter XI
The Warning
Five o'clock Friday morning found Creed, pale, hollow-eyed, a strip of
Nancy's home-made sticking plaster over the cut on brow and cheek, but
otherwise composed and as usual, at the pine table in his little shack,
working over the references which applied to the case he was to try that
morning. But an hour later brought old Keziah Provine to the door to
borrow the threading of a needle with white thread.
"I hearn they had an interruption," she began, pushing in past Nancy and
the two children, "but thar--you kin hear anything these days and times.
They most gen'ally does find trouble at these here play-parties, that's
why I'm sot agin 'em."
Poor old soul, it was not on account of her rheumatic legs, her toothless
jaws, nor her half-blind eyes that she objected to play-parties, of
course.
"I got no use for 'em," she pursued truthfully, "specially when they're
started up too close to a blockade still. They named it to me that Creed
had done killed one of the Turrentine boys--is that so?"
"No," returned Nancy stoutly. "By the best of what I kin git out o'
Creed, him and Blatch was walkin' along, an' Blatch missed his footin'
and fell off o' Foeman's Bluff. Creed tried to he'p him, an' fell an' got
scratched some. I reckon the Turrentines'll tell it different, but that's
what I make out from what Creed says."
"Lord, how folks will lie!" admired Keziah, piously. "Now they tell that
Blatch was not only killed up, but that some one--Creed, or some o' them
that follers him--tuck the body away befo' they could git to it. They say
they was blood all over the bushes, an' a great drug place whar Blatch
had been toted off. One feller named a half-dug hole sorter like a grave;
but thar! I never went over to see for myse'f, an' ye cain't believe the
half o' what ye hear."
"Well, I'd say not," snapped Nancy. "Not ef hit was sech a pack o' lies
as that."
Thread in hand old Keziah lingered till Arley Kittridge came with his
mother's baking-pan and request for a little risin'. Arley it seemed had
been commissioned to find out what he could on behalf of the Kittridge
family. And so it went till breakfast-time.
How these things travel in a neighbourhood where there is no telephone,
postman, milkman, nor morning paper, and where the distances are
considerable, is one of the mysteries of the mountains--yet travel they
do, and when time came for court to open Creed found that he had a crowd
which would at any other juncture have been highly gratifying.
Every man that came in glanced first at the cut on his cheek, swiftly
noted the pale face, sunken, purple-rimmed eyes, the scratched hands,
then looked hastily away. Several made proffers of an alliance with him,
being at outs with the Turrentines. All reiterated the story of the
missing body.
"You done exactly right," old Tubal Kittridge told him. "With a man like
Blatchley Turrentine, hit's hit first or git hit. I wonder he ever let ye
git as far as Foeman's Bluff; but if you made good use o' yo' time, I
reckon you found out what you aimed to," and he winked laboriously at
poor Creed's crimsoning countenance.
"I wasn't trying to find out anything, Mr. Kittridge. Blatch forced the
quarrel upon me. I was on my way home at the time."
"Well, a lee-tle out of yo' way, wasn't ye?" objected Kittridge, slightly
offended at not being offered Bonbright's confidence.
The case on the docket, one that had interested Creed deeply, being the
curious matter of a mountain creek which in the spring storms had changed
its direction, scoured off a good field and flung it to the opposite side
of the road, thus giving it to a new owner, dragged wearily. Who cared
about the question of a few rods of mountain land, even if it had raised
good tobacco, when the slayer of one of the bullies of the neighbourhood
sat before them--a man who had not only killed his victim but had, within
fifteen minutes, hidden all traces of the body--and the opening of a new
feud was taking place before their eyes?
At noon Creed, in despair, adjourned his court, setting a new date for
trial, explaining that this Turrentine matter ought to be looked into,
and he believed it was not a proper day for him to be otherwise engaged.
Then he sought old Tubal Kittridge.
"There's something I want you to do for me," he said.
"Shore--shore; anything in the world," Kittridge agreed eagerly.
"Aunt Nancy won't hear of my going over to the Turrentines'," hesitated
Creed. "I looked for them to be here--some of them--long before this."
"Huh-uh; ah, Law, no--they won't come in the daytime," smiled Kittridge.
Creed looked annoyed.
"They will be welcome, whenever they come," he asserted. "What I want you
to do is to go to Jephthah Turrentine and say to him that I thought I
ought to go over, and that I'll do so now if he wants me to--or I'll meet
him here at the office, or anywhere he says."
"Huh-uh--uh!" Old Tubal shook his head, his eyes closed in quite an
ecstasy of negation. "You cain't git Jep Turrentine in the trap as easy
as all that," he said half contemptuously. "Why, he'd know what you was
at a leetle too quick."
Bonbright looked helpless indignation for a moment, then thought better
of it and repeated:
"I want you to go and tell him that I'm right here, ready to answer for
anything I've done, and that I would like to talk to him about it. Will
you do it?"
"Oh,--all right," agreed Kittridge in an offended tone. "There's plenty
would stand by ye; there's plenty that would like to see the Turrentines
run out of the country; but if ye want to fix it some new-fangled way I
reckon you'll have to." And to himself he muttered as he took the road
homeward, "I say go to the Turrentines with sech word at that! That boy
must think I'm as big a fool as he is."
* * * * *
At the Turrentine home life dragged on strangely. Jephthah in his own
cabin, busied himself overhauling some harness. The boys had been across
at the old place, presumably making a thorough inspection of the scene of
the trouble. Judith went mechanically about her tasks, cooking and
serving the meals, setting the house in order. Only once did she rouse
somewhat, and that was when Huldah Spiller flounced in and flung herself
tempestuously down in a chair.
"How you come on, Judy?" inquired the red-haired damsel.
"About as usual," returned Judith coldly, and would fain have added,
"none the better for seeing you."
"I jest had to run over and see how you was standin' it," Huldah pursued
vivaciously. "I cried all night--didn't you?"
"What for?" inquired Judith angrily.
"Oh--I don't know. I'm jest thataway. Git me started an' thar's no
stoppin' me. But then I've knowed Creed so mighty long--him an' me was
powerful good friends, and my feelin's is more tenderer than some folks's
anyhow."
"Huldy," said Judith in a tone so rigidly controlled that it made the
other jump, "ef you'll jest walk yo'self out of here I'll be obliged to
you. I've stood all I can. I don't want to say anything plumb bad to you,
but ef you set thar an' talk to me like that for another minute I will."
"Oh, you po' thing!" cried Huldah, jumping to her feet. "I declare to
goodness I forgot all about you an' Blatch. Here I've been carryin' on
over Creed Bonbright--and you mighty near a widder. You po' thing!"
Judith faced around with such blazing eyes from the biscuits she was
moulding that Huldah beat a hasty retreat, dodged out of the door, and
ran up the slope. At Jim Cal's cabin she paused and looked about her
uncertainly. Iley had the toothache, and for various reasons was proving
a poor audience for her younger sister's conversation. The day had been a
trying one to Huldah's excited nerves, a sad anti-climax after the
explosions of the night before. It was five o'clock. The men were all
over at the old place. If she but had an excuse to follow them, now. Why,
the whole top of the Bald above Foeman's Bluff, and the broad shelf below
it, were covered with huckleberry bushes! She put her head in at the
door. Iley looked up from the hot brick which she was wrapping in a wet
cloth with ten drops of turpentine on it preparatory to applying the same
to her cheek above the swollen tooth.
"Ef you say 'Creed Bonbright'--or 'kill'--or 'Blatch Turrentine,'--to me,
I vow I'll hit ye," she warned shrilly. "I ain't never raised hand on ye
yet sence ye was a woman grown, but do it I will!"
"I wasn't goin' to say nothin' about nothin'," asserted Huldah
sweepingly. "I was jest goin' to ax did ye want any huckleberries, and
git a pail to pick some."
She sought out a small tin lard bucket as she spoke, and Iley's silence
presumably assenting, within twenty minutes was picking away eagerly on
the Bald above the bluff.
Below her stretched meadows drunk with sun--breathless. A rain crow
called from time to time "C-c-c-cow! cow! cow!" The air was still heavy
with faint noon-day smells, the sky tarnished with heat.
"I wonder where in all creation them boys has got theirselves to," she
ruminated as she peered about, dragging green berries and leaves into her
bucket, for which Mrs. Jim Cal would afterward no doubt scold her
soundly. "'Pears to me like I hearn somebody talkin' somewhars."
She pushed cautiously down to the edge of the rocks where the bushes grew
scatteringly, pretending to herself that she wanted a bit of wild
geranium that flourished in a crevice far below the top. Setting down her
pail she threw herself on her face, her arms over the edge, and reached.
But the fingers hung suspended, opened in air, her mouth open too, and
she listened greedily to faint sounds of men's voices.
"I'll bet it's old Ab Foeman's hideout that nobody but him and the
Cherokees knowed of," she muttered to herself. "Some one's found it
and--Lord, look at that!"
From the bushes below her, coming apparently out of the living rock
itself, crept Andy, and then Jeff Turrentine. Now she could see the
narrow, door-like opening of the cave which had given them up, and
realised how, from below, it passed for a mere depression in the rock.
Huldah drew back silently, inch by inch, and instinctively pulled her
black calico sunbonnet over her red curls as she crouched down among the
huckleberry bushes. When she looked again Andy and Jeff had disappeared,
but she could see the head and shoulders of a man who still lay at the
cave's mouth--and that man was Blatch Turrentine!
At first she shuddered, thinking that she had come upon the dead body;
then she noted a tiny trail of smoke, and, by craning a little farther
around, saw that Blatchley lay at ease with a pipe in his mouth,
smoking.
"The triflin', low-down, lyin' hound!" she muttered to herself. "I'm
a-goin' this very minute and tell Creed Bonbright."
She hesitated, glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the
Turrentine cabin, then bent dubiously and set up her overturned bucket.
Not a berry had spilled from it, yet the sight of its mishap gave her an
idea. Quietly slipping through the bushes till she was far enough away to
dare run, she hurried home to the cabin.
"Iley," she gasped, as soon as she put her head in at the door, "I upsot
my berry pail and lost most of the fruit. Can you make out with that?"
and she set the little bucket on the table.
"I reckon I'll have to, ef you've got so work-brickle ye won't pick any
more," returned Iley.
"I would--I'd git ye all ye need," protested Huldah with unexpected
meekness, "but I'm jest obliged to go over to--" she had all but said
Creed Bonbright's, but she caught herself in time and concluded lamely.
"I jest have obliged to run down to Clianthy Lusk's and see can she let
me have her crochet needle for to finish up my shawl."
She delayed for no criticism or demur on Iley's part, but was off with
the last word, and once out of sight of Jim Cal's cabin she took a short
cut through the woods and ran; but in spite of her best efforts darkness
began to gather before she won to the high road, for the evening had
closed in early, thick and threatening; a mountain thunder-storm was
brewing. Opposite a tempestuous, magnificent sunset, there had reared in
the eastern sky a tremendous thunder-head, a palace of a thousand snowy
domes, turning to gold, and then flushing from base to crown like a
gigantic many-petalled rose. It swept steadily up and over, hiding the
sky, and leaving the earth in almost complete darkness. There were low
rolls of thunder, at first mellow and almost musical, crashing always
louder and stronger as they came nearer. The wind thrashed and yelled
through the tossing forest; and as she approached the Card cabin she
heard the banging of barn shutters, the whipping of tree boughs against
the windows. There were the first spears of rain flung at roof and door;
and it was in the torrent itself which followed fast that Huldah beat
upon that closed door, giving her name and demanding entrance. Within,
Creed Bonbright sprang up from where he sat with a book in his hand, his
eyes fixed on vacancy, and would have answered her, but Old Nancy put a
hasty palm over his lips.
"Hush--for God's sake," she whispered.
They stood in the lighted cabin, all on foot by this time, and listened
intently, tall Creed, the little grey-haired woman clinging to him and
restraining him, Doss with his light eyes goggling, and Little Buck and
Beezy hand in hand, studying their grandmother's face, not their
father's.
"Who is it?" quavered Nancy. "I'm all alone in here, and I'm scared to
let wayfarers in."
"It's me--Huldy Spiller--Aunt Nancy," called back the voice in the rain.
"Well, I vow! You know how things air, Huldy--what do ye want, chile?"
"I want Creed Bonbright. I've got something to tell him."
"Thar--ye see now," breathed the old woman, turning toward Creed. Then
she raised her voice.
"He ain't here, honey," she lied unhesitatingly.
"Why don't ye go to his office--that's whar he stays at."
"Oh, for the Lord's sake--Aunt Nancy!" came back the girl's shrill,
terrified tones. "I've done been to the office; I know in reason Creed
ain't there, or he'd a-answered me. Please let me in; I'm scared some of
the Turrentines'll come an' ketch me."
At this Creed strode to the door, Nancy dragging back on his arm and Buck
and Beezy seconding her with all their small might, while Provine
spluttered ineffectually in the background.
"Hit's a lie," hissed Nancy. "She's a decoy. Ef you open that thar do'
with the light on ye, they'll shoot ye over her shoulders. Hit was did to
my man thataway in feud times. Don't you open the do' Creed."
"Why, Aunt Nancy," remonstrated Creed, almost smiling, "this isn't like
you. There's nothing but a girl there in the rain. Keep out of range if
you're scared. I'm sure going to open that door."
[Illustration: "They stood in the lighted cabin and listened intently."]
As he made ready to do so Nancy flew back to the table and blew out the
light, and the next minute Huldah Spiller, dripping like a mermaid, was
standing in the middle of the darkened room, and Doss Provine, breathing
short, was barring the door behind her.
"Who's here?" gasped the girl peering about the gloom. "What air you-all
a-goin' to do to me?"
Nancy relighted the lamp and set it on the table, and Huldah discovered
with a long-drawn sobbing sigh of relief that there was no one save the
immediate family present.
"I came quick as I could," she began in the middle of her story, grasping
Creed by the arm and shaking him in the violence of her emotion and
insistence. "Blatch Turrentine's alive. Andy and Jeff have got him hid
out. I seed him myse'f with my own eyes, in a hideout thar below Foeman's
Bluff, not more'n a hour ago. I'll bet he aims to layway you, ef he
cain't git ye hung for murderin' of him. You got to git out o' here. It
was as much as my life was worth to come over and tell ye. I'm afraid to
go back. I'm goin' right on down to Hepzibah and stay thar."
"Come up closeter to the fire," commanded Nancy, who had watched the girl
keenly throughout her recital. "Doss, put some sticks on and git a little
blaze so she can dry herself. Huldy, you're a good girl to come over and
warn Creed--when was you aimin' to go to Hepzibah?" She looked up from
the hearth where she knelt with the frankest inquiring gaze.
"To-night--right now," half whimpered Huldah. "I'm scared to go back. I'm
scared to be here on the mountain at all."
"And did ye aim to have Creed go along of ye?" old Nancy questioned
mildly.
"Yes--yes--he'd better," agreed Huldah hysterically. "Hit's the onliest
way for him now."
Nancy caught Creed's eye above the girl's drenched head, and shook her
own warningly. Leaving Doss to look after the newcomer, she drew the
young justice into the kitchen.
"Whatever ye do," she warned him hastily, "don't you put out with that
red-headed gal in the dark. Things may be adzackly as she says--looks to
me like she thinks she's a-speakin' the truth; but then agin the
Turrentines might a' sent her for to draw you out. They wouldn't like to
shoot ye in my cabin, 'caze they know me and my kinfolks would be apt to
raise a fuss; but halfway down the mountain with this sweetheart of
Wade's--huh-uh, boy; I reckon they could tell their own tale then, of how
you come by yo' death. Don't you go with her."
"I wasn't aiming to, Aunt Nancy," said Creed quietly. "As soon as I heard
that Blatch Turrentine was alive, I intended to go right over and have a
talk with old Jephthah. He's a fair-minded man, and if he is informed
that his nephew is living I think he and I can come to terms."
"Fa'r-minded man!" echoed Nancy contemptuously. "Jephthah Turrentine a
fa'r-minded man! Well, Creed, ef I hadn't no better eye for a fat chicken
than you have for a fa'r-minded man, you wouldn't enjoy yo' dinner at my
table as well as you do. I say fa'r-minded! This thing has got into a
feud, boy, and in a feud you cain't trust nobody--_nobody_!"
Creed went back into the room, and Nancy reluctantly followed him. Huldah
was getting dry and warm, and that fluent tongue of hers was impatiently
silent. As soon as she saw the returning pair she began to repeat again
the details of her information--how she had glimpsed the hidden man
through the bushes, how she knew in reason he could be none other than
Blatch. Nancy exchanged a glance of intelligence with Creed.
"Ye see!" she murmured, aside. "Ef she _ain't_ a decoy they've sont, she
don't know nothin' for sartin."
"I'm scared of all the Turrentines," Huldah declared. "They're awful
folks. From the old man down to Jude, they scare me. I reckon Jude's had
a big hand in this," she went on excitedly. "Her and Blatch is goin' to
wed shortly, and she'd be shore to know any meanness he was into. I'll be
glad to git shet of sech. When you're ready to be a-steppin' Creed, I
am."
She looked up at the young fellow with a sort of unwilling worship.
"I don't aim to go with you, Huldah," he said gently. "You love Wade
Turrentine, and Wade loves you; you was to be wedded this fall. I don't
aim for any affairs of mine to part you two."
The girl hung her head, painfully flushed, her eyes full of tears.
"I don't care nothin' about Wade," she choked. "Him and me has----"
"I reckon you've quarrelled" said Creed, sympathetically. "That needn't
come to anything. I'm going over and talk to Jephthah Turrentine
to-morrow morning, and I want you to come with me!"
"No," said Huldah getting to her feet and looking strangely at him. "The
rain's about done now; the moon'll be comin' up in half a hour--I'm
a-goin' on down to Hepzibah, like I said I was. Ef Wade Turrentine wants
me, he knows whar to come for me. Ef he thinks of me as he said he did
the last time we had speech together--w'y, I never want to put eyes on
his face again. Oh--Creed, I wish't you'd come with me!"
"But it was me you quarrelled about," remonstrated Bonbright with that
sudden clear vision which ultra-spiritual natures often show, and that
startling forthrightness of speech which amazes and daunts the
mountaineer. "I'm the last man you ought to leave the mountain with,
Huldah, if you want to make up with Wade."
"How--how did you know?" whispered the girl, staring at him. "Well,
anyhow, I ain't never a-goin' back thar."
She could not be prevailed on to go to bed with Aunt Nancy, when Doss
Provine and the children were asleep, and Creed had gone to his quarters
in the little office building, but sat by the fire all night staring into
the embers, occasionally stirring them or putting on a stick of wood. At
the earliest grey of dawn she waked Nancy, bidding the elder woman fasten
the door after her. Declining in strangely subdued fashion her hostess's
offer of hot coffee, she stepped noiselessly out and, with a swift look
about, dived into the steep short-cut trail which led almost straight
down the face of Big Turkey Track, from turn to turn of the main road.
A cloud clung to the Side; the foliage of only the foremost trees emerged
from its blur, and these were dimmed and flatted as though a soft white
veil were tangled among their leaves. Into this white mystery of dawn the
girl had vanished.
Nancy looked curiously after her a moment, then glanced swiftly about as
Huldah had done, her eyes dwelling long on Creed's little shack, standing
peaceful in the morning mists. Softly she turned back, and closed and
barred the door.
Chapter XII
In the Lion's Den
At seven o'clock, despite entreaties and warnings, Creed mounted his mule
and set out for the Turrentine place.
"Don't you trust nothin' nor nobody over thar," Nancy followed him out to
the gate to reiterate. "Old Jephthah Turrentine's as big a rascal as
they' is unhung. No--I wouldn't trust Judith neither (hush now, Little
Buck; you don't know what granny's a-talkin' about); she's apt to git
some fool gal's notion o' being jealous o' Huldy, or something like that,
and see you killed as cheerful as I'd wring a chicken's neck. (For the
Lord's sake, Doss, take these chil'en down to the spring branch; they
mighty nigh run me crazy with they' fussin' an' cryin'!) Don't you trust
none on 'em, boy."
"Why, Aunt Nancy, I trust everybody on that whole place, excepting
Blatchley Turrentine," said Creed sturdily. "Even Andy and Jeff, if I had
a chance to talk to them, could be got to see reason. They're not the
bloodthirsty crew you make them out. They're good folks."
She looked at him in exasperation, yet with a sort of reluctant approval
and admiration.
"Well," she sighed, as she saw him mount and start, "mebbe yo' safer
goin' right smack into the lion's den, like Dan'el, than you would be to
sneak up."
Summer was at full tide, and the world had been new washed last night.
Scents of mint and pennyroyal rose up under his mule's slow pacing feet.
The meadow that stretched beyond Nancy's cabin was a green sea, with
flower foam of white weed and dog-fennel; and the fence row was a long
breaker with surf of elder blossom, the garden a tangle of bean-vine
arbours. The corn patch rustled valiantly; the pastures were streaked
with pale yellow primroses; and Bob Whites ran through the young crops,
calling.
Creed rode forward. A gay wind was abroad under the blue sky. Every
tiniest leaf that danced and flirted on its slender stem sent back gleams
of the morning sunlight from its wet, glistening surface. The woods were
full of bird songs, and the myriad other lesser voices of a midsummer
morning sounded clear and distinct upon the vast, enfolding silence of
the mountains.
It seemed beyond reason out in that gay July sunshine that anything dark
or tragic could happen to one. But after all man cannot be so different
from Nature which produces him, and the night before had given them a
passionate, brief, destructive thunder-storm. Creed noted the ravages of
it here and there; the broken boughs, the levelled or uprooted herbage,
the washed and riven soil, as his mule moved soberly along.
At the Turrentine cabin all was quiet. The young men of the house had
been out the entire night before guarding the trails that Creed Bonbright
should not leave the mountains secretly. A
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