The search was terribly silent. The snow deadened the tread. Only the wind was loud among the muffled trees, and sometimes a dull thud sounded when the weight of snow fell from the evergreen laurel as the men thrashed through its dense growth. They separated after a time, and only here and there an isolated stellular light illumined the snow, and conjured white mystic circles into the wide spaces of the darkness. The effort flagged at last, and its futility sharpened the sense of injury in Luke Todd's heart.
He was alone now, close upon the great rock, and looking at its jagged ledges all cloaked with snow. Above those soft white outlines drawn against the deep clear sky the frosty stars scintillated. Beneath were the abysmal depths of the valley masked by the darkness.
His pride was touched. In the old quarrel his revenge had been hampered, for it was the girl's privilege to choose, and she had chosen. He cared nothing for that now, but he felt it indeed a reproach to tamely let this man take his horse when he had all the mountain at his back. There was a sharp humiliation in his position. He felt the pressure of public opinion.
“Dad-burn him!” he exclaimed. “Ef I kin make out ter git a glimge o' him, I'll shoot him dead—dead!”
He leaned the rifle against the rock. It struck upon a ledge. A metallic vibration rang out. Again and again the sound was repeated—now loud, still clanging; now faint, but clear; now soft and away to a doubtful murmur which he hardly was sure that he heard. Never before had he known such an echo. And suddenly he recollected that this was the great “Talking Rock,” famed beyond the limits of Lonesome. It had traditions as well as echoes. He remembered vaguely that beneath this cliff there was said to be a cave which was utilized in the manufacture of saltpetre for gunpowder in the War of 1812.
As he looked down the slope below he thought the snow seemed broken—by footprints, was it? With the expectation of a discovery strong upon him, he crept along a wide ledge of the crag, now and then stumbling and sending an avalanche of snow and ice and stones thundering to the foot of the cliff..He missed his way more than once. Then he would turn about, laboriously retracing his steps, and try another level of the ledges. Suddenly before him was the dark opening he sought. No creature had lately been here. It was filled with growing bushes and dead leaves and brambles. Looking again down upon the slope beneath, he felt very sure that he saw footprints.
“The old folks useter 'low ez thar war two openings ter this hyar cave,” he said. “Tobe Gryce mought hev hid hyar through a opening down yan-der on the slope. ButI'llgo the way ez I hev hearn tell on, an' peek in, an' ef I kin git a glimge o' him, I'll make him tell me whar that thar filly air,—or I'll let daylight through him, sure!”
He paused only to bend aside the brambles, then he crept in and took his way along a low, narrow passage. It had many windings, but was without intersections or intricacy. He heard his own steps echoed like a pursuing footfall. His labored breathing returned in sighs from the inanimate rocks. It was an uncanny place, with strange, sepulchral, solemn effects. He shivered with the cold. A draught stole in from some secret crevice known only to the wild mountain winds. The torch flared, crouched before the gust, flared again, then darkness. He hesitated, took one step forward, and suddenly—a miracle!
A soft aureola with gleaming radiations, a low, shadowy chamber, a beast feeding from a manger, and within it a child's golden head.
His heart gave a great throb. Somehow he was smitten to his knees. Christmas Eve! He remembered the day with a rush of emotion. He stared again at the vouchsafed vision. He rubbed his eyes. It had changed.
Only hallucination caused by an abrupt transition from darkness to light; only the most mundane facts of the old troughs and ash-hoppers, relics of the industry that had served the hideous carnage of battle; only the yellow head of the ranger's brat, who had climbed into one of them, from which the mare was calmly munching her corn.
Yet This Was Christmas Eve 201
Yet this was Christmas Eve. And the Child did lie in a manger.
Perhaps it was well for him that his ignorant faith could accept the illusion as a vision charged with all the benignities of peace on earth, good-will toward men. With a keen thrill in his heart, on his knees he drew the charge from his rifle, and flung it down a rift in the rocks. “Chrismus Eve,” he murmured.
He leaned his empty weapon against the wall, and strode out to the little girl who was perched up on the trough.
“Chrismus gift, Cunnel!” he cried, cheerily. “Ter-morrer's Chrismus.”
The echoes caught the word. In vibratory jubilance they repeated it. “Chrismus!” rang from the roof, scintillating with calcspar; “Chrismus!” sounded from the colonnade of stalactites that hung down to meet the uprising stalagmites; “Chrismus!” repeated the walls incrusted with roses that, shut in from the light and the fresh air of heaven, bloomed forever in the stone. Was ever chorus so sweet as this?
It reached Tobe Gryce, who stood at his improvised corn-bin. With a bundle of fodder still in his arms he stepped forward. There beside the little Colonel and the black mare he beheld a man seated upon an inverted half-bushel measure, peacefully lighting his pipe with a bunch of straws which he kindled at the lantern on the ash-hopper.
The ranger's black eyes were wide with wonder at this intrusion, and angrily flashed. He connected it at once with the attack on the stable. The hair on his low forehead rose bristlingly as he frowned. Yet he realized with a quaking heart that he was helpless. He, although the crack shot of the county, would not have fired while the Colonel was within two yards of his mark for the State of Tennessee.
He stood his ground with stolid courage—a target.
Then, with a start of surprise, he perceived that the intruder was unarmed. Twenty feet away his rifle stood against the wall.
Tobe Gryce was strangely shaken. He experienced a sudden revolt of credulity. This was surely a dream.
“Ain't that thar Luke Todd? Why air ye a-wait-in' thar?” he called out in a husky undertone.
Todd glanced up, and took his pipe from his mouth; it was now fairly alight.
“Kase it be Chrismus Eve, Tobe,” he said, gravely.
The ranger stared for a moment; then came forward and gave the fodder to the mare, pausing now and then and looking with oblique distrust down upon Luke Todd as he smoked his pipe.
“I want ter tell ye, Tobe, ez some o' the mounting boys air a-sarchin fur ye outside.”
“Who air they?” asked the ranger, calmly.
His tone was so natural, his manner so unsuspecting, that a new doubt began to stir in Luke Todd's mind.
“What ails ye ter keep the mare down hyar, Tobe?” he asked, suddenly. “Tears like ter me ez that be powerful comical.”
“Kase,” said Tobe, reasonably, “some durned horse-thieves kem arter her one night. I fired at t'em. I hain't hearn on 'em sence. An' so I jes hid the mare.”
Todd was puzzled. He shifted his pipe in his mouth. Finally he said: “Some folks 'lowed ez ye hed no right ter take up that mare, bein' ez ye war the ranger.”
Tobe Gryce whirled round abruptly. “What war I a-goin' ter do, then? Feed the critter fur nuthin till the triflin' scamp ez owned her kem arter her? I couldn't work her 'thout takin' her up an' hevin her appraised. Thar's a law agin sech. An' I couldn't git somebody ter toll her off an' take her up. That ain't fair. What ought I ter hev done?”
“Wa'al,” said Luke, drifting into argument, “the town-folks 'low ez ye hev got nuthin ter prove it by, the stray-book an' records bein' burnt. The town-folks 'low ez ye can't prove by writin' an' sech ez ye ever tried ter find the owner.” “The town-folks air fairly sodden in foolishness,” exclaimed the ranger, indignantly.
He drew from his ample pocket a roll of ragged newspapers, and pointed with his great thumb at a paragraph. And Luke Todd read by the light of the lantern the advertisement and description of the estray printed according to law in the nearest newspaper.
The newspaper was so infrequent a factor in the lives of the mountain gossips that this refutation of their theory had never occurred to them.
The sheet was trembling in Luke Todd's hand; his eyes filled. The cavern with its black distances, its walls close at hand sparkling with delicate points of whitest light; the yellow flare of the lantern; the grotesque shadows on the ground; the fair little girl with her golden hair; the sleek black mare; the burly figure of the ranger—all the scene swayed before him. He remembered the gracious vision that had saluted him; he shuddered at the crime from which he was rescued. Pity him because he knew naught of the science of optics; of the bewildering effects of a sudden burst of light upon the delicate mechanism of the eye; of the vagaries of illusion.
“Tobe,” he said, in a solemn voice—all the echoes were bated to awed whispers—“I hev been gin ter view a vision this night, bein' 'twar Chris-mus Eve. An' now I want ter shake hands on it fur peace.”
Then he told the whole story, regardless of the ranger's demonstrations, albeit they were sometimes violent enough. Tobe sprang up with a snort of rage, his eyes flashing, his thick tongue stumbling with the curses crowding upon it, when he realized the suspicions rife against him at the county town. But he stood with his clinched hand slowly relaxing, and with the vague expression which one wears who looks into the past, as he listened to the recital of Eugenia's pilgrimage in the snowy wintry dawn. “Mighty few folks hev got a wife ez set store by 'em like that,” Luke remarked, impersonally.
The ranger's rejoinder seemed irrelevant.
“'Genie be a-goin' ter see a powerful differ arter this,” he said, and fell to musing.
Snow, fatigue, and futility destroyed the ardor of the lynching party after a time, and they dispersed to their homes. Little was said of this expedition afterward, and it became quite impossible to find a man who would admit having joined it. For the story went the rounds of the mountain that there had been a mistake as to unfair dealing on the part of the ranger, and Luke Todd was quite content to accept from the county treasury half the sum of the mare's appraisement—with the deduction of the stipulated per cent.—which Tobe Gryce had paid, the receipt for which he produced.
The gossips complained, however, that after all this was settled according to law, Tobe wouldn't keep the mare, and insisted that Luke should return to him the money he had paid into the treasury, half her value, “bein' so brigaty he wouldn't own Luke Todd's beast. An' Luke agreed ter so do; but he didn't want ter be outdone, so fur the keep o' the filly he gin the Cunnel a heifer. An' Tobe war mighty nigh tickled ter death fur the Cunnel ter hev a cow o' her own.”
And now when December skies darken above Lonesome Cove, and the snow in dizzying whirls sifts softly down, and the gaunt brown leafless heights are clothed with white as with a garment, and the wind whistles and shouts shrilly, and above the great crag loom the distant mountains, and below are glimpsed the long stretches of the valley, the two men remember the vision that illumined the cavernous solitudes that night, and bless the gracious power that sent salvation 'way down to Lonesome Cove, and cherish peace and good-will for the sake of a little Child that lay in a manger.