CHAPTER V

"They put John on the island. Fare ye well, fare ye well.An' they put him there to starve him. Fare ye well, fare ye well."

It was Parson Peppers, and of his reverence be it said that no Brother of the Coast, rollicking drunk on a dead man's chest, ever owned a finer bellow.

I turned around in my saddle. "Peppers!" I cried. "Man alive! How did you know that it was the old bell-wether's horse?"

Ump chuckled. "I saw her shod once. A number six shoe an' a toe-piece."

A spring of eternal youthfulness gushing somewhere under the bed of the mountains, was a dream of the Spanish Main, sought long and found not, as the legends run. But it is no dream that some of us carry our inheritance of youthfulness shoulder to shoulder with Eld into No Man's Country. Such an one was Simon Betts the waggon-maker.

I sat by his smouldering fire of shavings and hickory splinters, and wondered at the old man in the chimney corner. He was eighty, and yet his back was straight, his hair was scarcely grey, and his hands, resting on the arms of his huge wooden chair, were as unshrunken and powerful, it seemed to me, as the hands of any man of middle life.

Eighty! It was a tremendous hark back to that summer, long and long ago, when Simon came through the gap of the mountains into the Hills. The land was full of wonders then. The people of the copper faces prowled with the wolf and whooped along the Gauley. The Dwarfs lurked in the out-of-the-way corners of the mountains, trooping down in crooked droves to burn and kill for the very joy of doing evil. And who could say what unearthly thing went by when the wind shouted along the ridges? The folk then were but few in the Hills, and each busy with keeping the life in him. The land was good, broad waters and rich hill-tops, where the blue-grass grew though no man sowed it. A land made ready for a great people when it should come. With Simon came others from the south country, who felled the forest and let in the sunlight, and made wide pastures for the bullock, and so elbowed out the wandering and the evil.

High against the chimney, on two dogwood forks, rested the long rifle with its fishtail sight and the brass plate on the stock for the bullets and the "patching." Below it hung the old powder-horn, its wooden plug dangling from a string,—tools of the long ago. Closing one's eyes one could see the tall grandsires fighting in the beech forest, a brown patch of hide sighted over the brass knife-blade bead, and death, and to load again with the flat neck of the bullet set in the palm of the hand and covered with powder.

That yesterday was gone, but old Simon was doing with to-day. On two benches was a cart wheel, with its hickory spokes radiating like fingers from the locust hub, and on the floor were the mallet and the steel chisel with its tough oak handle. Stacked up in the corner were bundles of straight hickory, split from the butt of the great shell-bark log; round cuts of dry locust, and long timbers of white and red oak, and quarters of the tough sugars, seasoning, hard as iron. With these were the axe, the wedge, the dogwood gluts, and the mauls made with no little labour from the curled knots of the chestnut oak, and hooped with an iron tire-piece.

It was said on the country side that old Simon knew lost secrets of woodcraft taught by the early man;—in what moon to fell the shingle timber that it might not curl on the roof; on what face of the hill the sassafras root was red; how to know the toughest hickory by hammering on its trunk; when twigs cut from the forest would grow, if thrust in the earth; and that secret day of all the year when an axe, stuck into the bark of a tree, would deaden it to the root.

Simon Betts was not a man of many words. He smoked in the corner, stopping now and then to knock the ashes from his pipe, or to put some brief query. Jud and Ump had come in from the old man's log stable, throwing their saddles down by the door and spreading the bridles out on the hearth so that the iron bits would be warm in the morning.

"How will the day be to-morrow?" I asked of the waggon-maker.

"Dry," he responded; "great rains in the mountains, but none here for a week; then storms."

"Isn't it early for the storms?"

"Yes," he answered; "but the wild geese have gone over, and the storms follow."

Then he asked me where we were riding, and I explained that we were going to bring up Ward's cattle from beyond the Valley River. He said that we would find dry roads but high rivers. The gates of the mountains would be gushing with rains. The old man studied the fire.

Presently he said, "Mr. Ward is a good man. I have seen him buy a poor scoundrel's heifers and wink his eye when the scoundrel salted them the night before they were weighed, and then drove them to the scales in the morning around by the water trough."

I laughed. This was a trick originated long ago by one Columbus, an old grazing thief of the Rock Ford country, who went ever afterward by the name of "Water Lum." It was a terrible breach of the cattle code.

Again the old man relapsed into silence. His eyes ran over the shoulders of the big Jud who squatted by the fire, sewing his broken bridle reins with a shoemaker's wax-end.

"Are you the strong man?" he said.

The giant chuckled and grinned and drew out the end of his thread.

"Well," continued the waggon-maker, "Mr. Ward spoiled a mighty good blacksmith when he put you on a horse." Then he turned to me. "Is he the one that throwed Woodford's club-footed nigger in the wrastle at Roy's tavern?"

"Yes," I said, "but one time it was a dog-fall, and Lem Marks says that Malan slipped the other time."

"But he didn't slip," put in Jud. "He tried to lift me, an' I knee-locked him. Then I could a throwed him if he'd been as big as a Polled-Angus heifer."

"Was you wrastling back-holts or breeches-holts?" asked old Simon, getting up from his chair.

"Back-holts," replied Jud.

The waggon-maker nodded his head. Doubtless in the early time he had occasion to learn the respective virtues of these two celebrated methods.

"That's best if your back's best," he said; "but I reckon you ain't willing to let it go with a dog-fall. You might get another chance at him to-morrow. I saw him go up the road about noon."

Behind the old man Ump held up two fingers and made a sweeping gesture. The waggon-maker went back to the corner of his house for some bedding. Ump leaned over. "Two flyin'," he said. "One went east, an' one went west, an' one went over the cuckoo's nest. If I knowed where that cuckoo's nest was, we'd have the last one spotted."

"What do you think they're up to?" said I.

Ump laughed. "Oh ho, I think they're out lookin' for the babes in the woods!" And the fancy pleased him so well that he rubbed his hands and chuckled in his crooked throat until old Simon returned.

It was late, and the waggon-maker began his preparations for the night. He gave me a home-made mattress of corn husks and a hand-made quilt, heavy and warm as a fur robe. From a high swinging shelf he got two heifer hides, tanned with the hair on them, soft as cloth. In these Jud and Ump rolled themselves and, putting the saddles under their heads, were presently sleeping like the illustrious Seven. The old man fastened his door with a wooden bar, took off his shoes, and sat down by the fire.

I went to sleep with the picture fading into my dream,—the smoked rafters, the red wampus of the old waggon-maker, and the burning splinters crumbling into a heap of rosy ash. A moment later, as things come and go in the land of Nod, Cynthia and Hawk Rufe were also sitting by this fire. Cynthia held the old picture with the funny curls,—the one that stands on the mantel shelf at home,—and she was trying to rub out the curls with her thumb, moistening it in her red mouth. But somehow they would not rub out, and she showed the picture to Woodford, who began to count on his outspread fingers, "Eaney, meany, miny mo." Only the words were names somehow, although they sounded like these words.

Then the dream changed, and I was on El Mahdi in a press of fighting cattle, driven round and round by black Malan and Parson Peppers bellowing like the very devil.

When I awoke the fire was blazing and the grey light of the earliest dawn was creeping in through the chinks of the log wall. Ump and Jud had gone to the stable and the old waggon-maker was busy with the breakfast. On the hearth a mighty cake of corn-meal was baking itself brown; potatoes roasted in the ashes, and on a little griddle about as big as a man's hat a great cut of half-dried beef was broiling.

Famous chefs have spent a lifetime fitting beef for the royal table, and a king of France slighted the business of an empire for the acquirement of this art, and a king of England knighted a roast; but they all died and were buried without tasting beef as it ought to go into a man's mouth. I write it first. A Polled-Angus heifer, fed and watered and cared for like a child, should be killed suddenly without fright, and butchered properly; let the choice pieces hang from a rafter by green withes and be smoked with hickory logs until the fibres begin to dry in them, then cut down and broil.

I arose and went out of doors to wash the night off. Between the house and the log stable, under a giant sugar tree a spring of water bubbled out through the limestone stratum, ran laughing down a long sapling spout, and splashed into a huge old moss-covered trough.

With such food and such water, and the air of the Hills, is it any wonder that Simon Betts was a man at eighty? Hark ye! my masters of the great burgs, drinking poison in your smoky holes.

I plunged my head into the water, and my arms up to the elbows, then came out dripping and wiped it off on a homespun linen towel which the old man had given me when I left the house. As I stood rubbing my arms on the good linen, Ump and Jud came down from the stable and stopped to dip a drink in the long gourd that hung by the spring. They were about to pass on, when Ump suddenly stopped and pointed out a man's footprints leading from the stable path over the wet sod to the road. There were only one or two of these prints in the damp places below the spring, but they were fresh, and made by a foot smaller far than the wide one of old Simon Betts.

We followed Ump to the road. A horse had been hitched to the "rider" of the rail fence, and there were his tracks stamped in the hard clay. There was not light enough to see very clearly, so we struck matches and got down on the bank to study the details of the tracks. I saw that the horse had been one of medium size,—a saddle horse, shod with a "store" shoe, remodelled by some smith. But this knowledge gave no especial light.

Ump and Jud lay on their bellies with their noses to the earth searching the shoe marks. "It's no use," I said, "we can't tell." And I sat up. The two neither answered nor paid the slightest attention. No bacteriologist plodding in his eccentric orbit ever studied the outlines of a new-found germ with deeper or more painstaking care. Presently they began to compare their discoveries.

"He was a Hambletonian," began Jud; "don't you see how long the shoe is from the toe to the cork?" Ump nodded. "An' he was curbed," Jud went on; "his feet set too close under him fer a straight-legged horse. Still, that ain't enough."

"Put this to it," said the hunchback, "an' you've got your hand on him. Them's store nails hammered into a store shoe, an' the corks are beat squat. That's Stone's shoein'. Now you know him."

Then I knew him too. Lem Marks rode a curbed Hambletonian, and Stone was Woodford's blacksmith.

Jud got up and waved his great hand towards the south country.

"They're all ridin'," he said, "every mother's son of the gang. An' they know where we are."

"With rings on their fingers, an' bells on their toes," gabbled Ump; "an' we know where they are."

Then I heard the voice of the old waggon-maker calling us to breakfast.

There are mornings that cling in the memory like a face caught for a moment in some crowded street and lost; mornings when no cloud curtains the doorway of the sun; when the snaffle-chains rattle sharp in the crisp air and the timber cracks in the frost. They are good to remember when the wrist has lost its power and the bridle-fingers stiffen, and they are clear with a mystic clearness, the elders say, when one is passing to the ghosts.

It was such a morning when I stood in the doorway of the old waggon-maker's house. The light was driving the white fogs into the north. A cool, sweet air came down from the wooded hill, laden with the smell of the beech leaves, and the little people of the bushes were beginning to tumble out of their beds.

We asked old Simon if he had heard a horse in the night, and he replied that he had heard one stop for a few moments a little before dawn and presently pass on up the road in a trot. Doubtless, he insisted, the rider had dismounted for a drink of his celebrated spring water. We kept our own counsels. If the henchmen of Woodford hunted water in the early morning, it would be, in the opinion of Ump, "when the cows come home."

We went over every inch of the horses from their hocks to their silk noses, and every stitch of our riding gear, to be sure that no deviltry had been done. But we found nothing. Evidently Marks was merely spying out the land. Then we led the horses out for the journey. El Mahdi had to duck his head to get under the low doorway. It was good to see him sniff the cool air, his coat shining like a maid's ribbons, and then rise on his hind legs and strike out at nothing for the sheer pleasure of being alive on this October day. And it was good to see him plunge his head up to the eyepits into the sparkling water and gulp it down, and then blow the clinging drops out of his nostrils.

El Mahdi, if beyond the stars somewhere in those other Hills of the Undying I am not to find you, I shall not care so very greatly if the last sleep be as dreamless as the wise have sometimes said it is.

I spread the thick saddle-blanket and pulled it out until it touched his grey withers, and taking the saddle by the horn swung it up on his back, straightened the skirts and drew the two girths tight, one of leather and one of hemp web. Then I climbed into the saddle, and we rode out under the apple trees.

Simon Betts stood in his door as we went by, and called us a "God speed." Straight, honourable old man. He was a lantern in the Hills. He was good to me when I was little, and he was good to Ward. In the place where he is gone, may the Lord be good to him!

We stopped to open the old gate, an ancient landmark of the early time, made of locust poles, and swinging to a long beam that rested on a huge post in perfect balance. Easily pushed open, it closed of its own weight. A gate of striking artistic fitness, now long crumbled with the wooden plough and the quaint pack-saddles of the tall grandsires.

We rode south in the early daylight. Jud whistled some old song the words of which told about a jolly friar who could not eat the fattest meat because his stomach was not first class, but believed he could drink with any man in the Middle Ages,—a song doubtless learned at Roy's tavern when the Queens and the Alkires and the Coopmans of the up-country got too much "spiked" cider under their waistbands. I heard it first, and others of its kidney, on the evening that old Hiram Arnold bet his saddle against a twenty-dollar gold piece, that he could divide ninety cattle so evenly that there would not be fifty pounds difference in weight between the two droves, and did it, and with the money bought the tavern dry. And the crowd toasted him:

"Here's to those who have half joes, and have a heart to spend 'em;But damn those who have whole joes, and have no heart to spend 'em."

On that night, in my youthful eyes, old Hiram was a hero out of the immortalIliad.

We passed few persons on that golden morning. I remember a renter riding his plough horse in its ploughing gears; great wooden hames, broad breeching, and rusty trace chains rattling and clanking with every stride of the heavy horse; the renter in his patched and mud-smeared clothes,—work-harness too. A genius might have painted him and gotten into his picture the full measure of relentless destiny and the abominable indifference of nature.

Still it was not the man, but the horse, that suggested the tremendous question. One felt that somehow the man could change his station if he tried, but the horse was a servant of servants, under man and under nature. The broad, kindly, obedient face! It was enough to break a body's heart to sit still and look down into it. No trace of doubt or rebellion or complaint, only an appealing meekness as of one who tries to do as well as he can understand. Great simple-hearted slave! How will you answer when your master is judged by the King of Kings? How will he explain away his brutality to you when at last One shall say to him, "Why are these marks on the body of my servant?"

The Good Book tells us on many a page how, when we meet him, we shall know the righteous, but nowhere does it tell more clearly than where it says, he is merciful to his beast. In the Hills there was no surer way to find trouble than to strike the horse of the cattle-drover. I have seen an indolent blacksmith booted across his shop because he kicked a horse on the leg to make him hold his foot up. And I have seen a lout's head broken because the master caught him swearing at a horse.

As we rode, the day opened, and leaf and grass blade glistened with the melting frost. The partridge called to his mate across the fields. The ground squirrel, in his striped coat, hurried along the rail fence, bobbing in and out as though he were terribly late for some important engagement. The blackbirds in great flocks swung about above the corn fields, man[oe]uvring like an army, and now and then a crow shouted in his pirate tongue as he steered westward to a higher hill-top.

All the people of the earth were about their business on this October morning. Sometimes an urchin passed us on his way to the grist mill, astride a bag of corn, riding some ancient patriarchal horse which, out of a wisdom of years, refused to mend his gait for all the kicking of the urchin's naked heels. And we hailed him for a cavalier.

Sometimes a pair of oxen, one red, one white, clanked by, dragging, hooked in the yoke-ring, a log chain that made a jerky trail in the road, like the track of a broken-backed snake, and we spoke to the driver, inquiring which one was the saddle horse, and if the team worked single of a Sunday. And he answered with some laughing jeer that set us shaking in our saddles.

We had passed the flat lands, and were half way up Thornberg's Hill, a long gentle slope, covered with vines and underbrush and second-growth poplar saplings, when I heard a voice break out in a merry carol,—a voice free, careless, bubbling with the joy of golden youth, that went laughing down the hillside like the voice of the happiest bird that was ever born. It rang and echoed in the vibrant morning, and we laughed aloud as we caught the words of it:

"Can she bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?Can she bake a cherry pie, charming Billy?She can bake a cherry pie quick as a cat can wink its eye,She's a young thing and can't leave her mother."

It required splendid audacity to fling such rippling nonsense at the feathered choirs in the sassafras thickets, but they were all listening with the decorous attitude of a conventional audience. I marked one dapper catbird, perched on a poplar limb, who cocked his head and heard the singer through, and then made that almost imperceptible gesture with which a great critic indicates his approval of a novice. "Not half bad," he seemed to say,—this blasé old habitué of the thicket music-halls. "I shouldn't wonder if something could be made of that voice if it were trained a trifle."

We broke into a trot and, rounding a corner of the wood, came upon the singer. She was a stripling of a girl in a butternut frock, standing bolt upright on a woman's saddle, tugging away at a tangle of vines, her mouth stained purple with the big fox-grapes, her round white arms bare to the elbows, and a pink calico sun-bonnet dangling on her shoulders, held only by the broad strings around her throat.

The horse under her was smoking wet to the fetlocks. This piping miss had been stretching his legs for him. It was Patsy, a madcap protegée of Cynthia Carper, the biggest tomboy that ever climbed a tree or ran a saddle-horse into "kingdom come." She slipped down into the saddle when she saw us, and flung her grapes away into the thicket. We stopped in the turnpike opposite to the cross road in which her horse was standing and hailed her with a laugh.

She looked us over with the dimples changing around her funny mouth. "You are a mean lot," she said, "to be laughing at a lady."

"We are not laughing at a lady," I answered; "we're laughing at the fun your horse has been having. He's tickled to death."

"Well," she said, looking down at the steaming horse, "I had to get here."

"You had to get here?" I echoed. "Goodness alive! Nobody but a girl would run a horse into the thumps to get anywhere."

"Stupid," she said, "I've just had to get here,—there, I didn't mean that. I meant I had to get where I was going."

"You were in a terrible hurry a moment ago," said I.

"The horse had to rest," she pouted.

"You might have thought of that," I said, "a little earlier in your seven miles' run." Then I laughed. The idea of resting the horse was so delicious that Ump and Jud laughed too.

The horse's knees were trembling and his sides puffing like a bellows. Here was Brown Rupert, the fastest horse in the Carper stable, a horse that Cynthia guarded as a man might guard the ball of his eye, run literally off his legs by this devil-may-care youngster. I would have wagered my saddle against a sheepskin that she had started Brown Rupert on the jump from the horse-block and held him to a gallop over every one of those seven blessed miles.

"Well," she said, "are you going to ride on? Or are you going to sit there like a lot of grinning hoodlums?"

Ump pulled off his hat and swept a laughable bow over his saddle horn. "Where are you goin', my pretty maid?" he chuckled.

She straightened in the saddle, then dropped him a courtesy as good as he had sent, and answered, "Fair sir, I ride 'cross country on my own business." And she gathered up the bridle in her supple little hand.

Jud laughed until the great thicket roared with the echo. Sir Questioner had caught it on the jaw.

"My dear Miss Touch-me-not," I put in, "let me give you a piece of advice. That horse is winded. If you start him on the gallop, you'll burst him."

She lifted her chin and looked me in the eye. "A thousand thank you's," she said, "and for advice to you, sir, don't believe anything you hear." Then she turned Brown Rupert and rode down the way she had come, sitting as straight in the saddle as an empress. For a moment the sunlight filtering through the poplar branches made queer mottled spots of gold on her curly head, then the trees closed in, and we lost her.

I doubled over the pommel of my saddle and laughed until my sides ached. Jud slapped his big hand on the leg of his breeches. "I hope I may die!" he ejaculated. It was his mightiest idiom. But the crooked Ump was as solemn as a lord. He sat looking down his nose.

I turned to him when I got a little breath in me. "Don't be glum," I said. "The little spitfire is an angel. You're not hurt."

The hunchback rubbed his chin. "Quiller," he said, "don't the Bible tell about a man that met an angel when he was a goin' somewhere?"

"Yes," I laughed.

"What was that man's name?" said he.

"Balaam," said I.

"Well," said he, "that man Balaam was the second ass that saw an angel, an' you're the third one."

The road running into the south lands crosses the Valley River at two places,—at the foot of Thornberg's Hill and twenty miles farther on at Horton's Ferry. At the first crossing, the river bed is piled with boulders, and the river boils through, running like a millrace, a swift, roaring water without a ford. At Horton's Ferry the river runs smooth and wide and deep, a shining sheet of clear water, making a mighty bend, still ford-less, but placid enough to be crossed by a ferry, running with a heavy current when swollen by the rains, except in the elbow of the bend where it swings into a tremendous eddy.

Over the river, where the road meets it first, is a huge wooden bridge with one span. It is giant work, the stone abutment built out a hundred feet on either side into the bed of the plunging water, neither rail nor wall flanking this stone causeway, but the bare unguarded width of the road-bed leading up into the bridge.

On the lips of the abutment, the builders set two stone blocks, smooth and wide, and cut places in them for the bridge timbers. It was a piece of excellent judgment, since the great stones could not be broken from the abutment, and they were mighty enough to bear the weight of a mountain. The bridge rests on three sills, each a log that, unhewn, must have taken a dozen oxen to drag it. I have often wondered at the magnitude of this labour; how these logs were thrown across the boiling water by any engines known to the early man. It was a work for Pharaoh. On these three giant sleepers the big floor was laid, the walls raised, and the whole roofed, so that it was a covered road over the Valley.

The shingle roof and the boarded sides protected the timber framework from the beating of the elements. Dry, save for the occasional splash of the hissing water far below, the great bones of this bridge hardened and lasted like sills of granite. The shingle roof curled, cracked, and dropped off into the water; the floor broke through, the sides rotted, and were all replaced again and again. But the powerful grandsires who had come down from the Hills to lay a floor over the Valley were not intending to do that work again, and went about their labour like the giants of old times.

Indeed, a legend runs that these sills were not laid by men at all, but by the Dwarfs. As evidence of this folklore tale, it is pointed out that these logs have the mark of a rough turtle burned on their under surface like the turtle cut on the great stones in the mountains. And men differ about what wood they are of, some declaring them to be oak and others sugar, and still others a strange wood of which the stumps only are now found in the Hills. It is true that no mark of axe can be found on them, but this is no great wonder since the bark was evidently removed by burning, an ancient method of preserving the wood from rot.

We swung down Thornberg's Hill in a long trot, and on to the bridge. The river was swollen, a whirling mass of yellow water that surged and pounded and howled under the timber floor as though the mad spirits of the river still resented the work of the Dwarfs. It was the Valley's business to divide the land, and it had done it well, leaving the sons of Eve to bite their fingers until, on a night, the crooked people came stumbling down to take a hand in the matter.

We clattered through, and down a long abutment. It almost made one dizzy to look over. A rail or a tree limb would ride down into this devil's maw, or a log would come swimming, its back bobbing in the muddy water, and then strike the smooth nose of a boulder and go to splinters.

Beyond the mad river the mild morning world was a land of lazy quiet. The sky was as blue as a woman's eye, and the sun rose clear in his flaming cart. Along the roadside the little purple flowers of autumn peeped about under the green briers. The fields were shaggy with ragweed and dead whitetop and yellow sedge. The walnut and the apple trees were bare, and the tall sycamore stood naked in its white skin. Sometimes a heron flapped across the land, taking a short cut to a lower water, or a woodpecker dived from the tall timber, or there boomed from the distant wooded hollow the drum of some pheasant lover, keeping a forgotten tryst.

It was now two hours of midday, and the October sun was warm. Tiny streaks of dampness were beginning to appear on the sleek necks of the Cardinal and El Mahdi, and the Bay Eagle was swinging her head, a clear sign that the good mare was not entirely comfortable.

I turned to Ump. "There's something wrong with that bridle," I said. "Either the brow-band or the throat-latch. The mare's fidgety."

He looked at me in astonishment, like a man charged suddenly with a crime, and slid his long hand out under her slim throat, and over her silk foretop; then he growled. "You don't know your A, B, C's, Quiller. She wants water; that's all."

Jud grinned like a bronzed Bacchus. "The queen might wear Spanish needles in her shirt," he said, "an' be damned. But the Bay Eagle will never wear a tight throat-latch or a pinchin' brow-band, or a rough bit, or a short headstall, while old Mr. Ump warms the saddle seat."

The hunchback was squirming around, craning his long neck. If the Bay Eagle were dry, water must be had, and no delay about it. Love for this mare was Ump's religion. I laughed and pointed down the road. "We are almost at Aunt Peggy's house. Don't stop to dig a well." And we broke into a gallop.

Aunt Peggy was one of the ancients, a carpet-weaver, pious as Martin Luther, but a trifle liberal with her idioms. The tongue in her head wagged like a bell-clapper. Whatever was whispered in the Hills got somehow into Aunt Peggy's ears, and once there it went to the world like the secret of Midas.

If one wished to publish a bit of gossip, he told Aunt Peggy, swore her to secrecy, and rode away. But as there is often a point of honour about the thief and a whim of the Puritan about the immoral, Aunt Peggy could never be brought to say who it was that told her. One could inquire as one pleased. The old woman ran no farther than "Them as knows." And there it ended and you might be damned.

The house was a log cottage covered with shingles and whitewash, set by the roadside under a great chestnut tree, its door always open in the daytime. As we drew rein by this open door, the old woman dropped her shuttle, tossed her ball of carpet rags over into the weaving frame, and came stumbling to the threshold in her long linsey dress that fell straight from her neck to the floor.

She pulled her square-rimmed spectacles down on her nose and squinted up at us. When she saw me, she started back and dropped her hands. "Great fathers!" she ejaculated, "I hope I may go to the blessed God if it ain't Quiller gaddin' over the country, an' Mister Ward a-dyin'."

It seemed to me that the earth lurched as it swung, and every joint in my body went limber as a rag. I caught at El Mahdi's mane, then I felt Jud's arm go round me, and heard Ump talking at my ear. But they were a long distance away. I heard instead the bees droning, and Ward's merry laugh, as he carried me on his shoulder a babbling youngster in a little white kilt. It was only an instant, but in it all the good days when I was little and Ward was father and mother and Providence, raced by.

Then I heard Ump. "It's a lie, Quiller, a damn lie. Don't you remember what Patsy said? Not to believe anything you hear? Do you think she ran that horse to death for nothin'? It was to tell you, to git to you first before Woodford's lie got to you. Don't you see? Oh, damn Woodford! Don't you see the trick, boy?"

Then I saw. My heart gave a great thump. The sunlight poured in and I was back in the road by the old carpet-weaver's cottage.

The old woman was alarmed, but her curiosity held like a cable.

"What's he sayin'," she piped; "what's he sayin'?"

"That it's all a lie, Aunt Peggy," replied Jud.

She turned her squint eyes on him. "Who told you so?" she said.

"Who told you?" growled Ump.

"Them as knows," she said. And the curiosity piped in her voice. "Did they lie?"

"They did," said Ump; "Mister Ward's hurt, but he ain't dangerous."

"Bless my life," cried the old woman, "an' they lied, did they? I think a liar is the meanest thing the Saviour died for. They said Mister Ward was took sudden with blood poison last night, an' a-dyin', the scalawags! I'll dress 'em down when I git my eyes on 'em."

"Who were they, Aunt Peggy?" I ventured.

She made a funny gesture with her elbows, and then shook her finger at me. "You know I can't tell that, Quiller," she piped, "but the blessed God knows, an' I hope He'll tan their hides for 'em."

"I know, too," said Ump.

The old woman leaned out of the door. "Hey?" she said; "what's that? You know? Then maybe you'll tell why they come a-lyin'."

"Can you keep a secret?" said Ump, leaning down from his saddle.

The old woman's face lighted. She put her hand to her ear and craned her neck like a turtle. "Yes," she said, "I can that."

"So can I," said Ump.

The old carpet-weaver snorted. "Humph," she said, "when you git dry behind the ears you won't be so peart." Then she waved her hand to me. "Light off," she said, "an' rest your critters, an' git a tin of drinkin' water."

After this invitation she went back to her half-woven carpet with its green chain and its copperas-coloured widths, and we presently heard the hum of the wooden shuttle and the bang of the loom frame. We rode a few steps farther to the well, and Jud dismounted to draw the water. The appliance for lifting the bucket was of the most primitive type. A post with a forked top stood planted in the ground. In this fork rested a long, slender sapling with a heavy butt, and from the small end, high in the air, hung a slim pole, to the lower end of which the bucket was tied.

Jud grasped the pole and lowered the bucket into the well, and then, while one watched by the door, the others watered the horses in the old carpet-weaver's bucket. It was the only thing to drink from, and if Aunt Peggy had caught us with the "critters'" noses in it we should doubtless have come in for a large share of that "dressing down" which she was reserving for Lemuel Marks.

She came to the door as we were about to ride away and looked over the sweaty horses. "Sakes alive," she said, "you little whelps ride like Jehu. You'll git them horses ga'nted before you know it."

"You can't ga'nt a horse if he sweats good," said Ump; "but if he don't sweat, you can ga'nt him into fiddle strings."

"They're pretty critters," said the old woman, running her eyes over the three horses. "Be they Mister Ward's?"

"We all be Mister Ward's," answered Ump, screwing his mouth to one side and imitating the old carpet-weaver's voice.

"Bless my life," said the old woman, looking us up and down, "Mister Ward has a fine chance of scalawags."

We laughed and the old woman's face wrinkled into smiles. Then she turned to me. "Which way did you come, Quiller?" she asked.

"Over the bridge," said I. Now there was no other way to come, and the old carpet-weaver turned the counter with shrewd good-nature.

"Maybe you know how the bridge got there," she said.

"I've heard that the Dwarfs built it," said I, "but I reckon it's talk."

"Well, it ain't talk," said the old woman. "A long time ago, folks lived on the other side of the river, and the Dwarfs lived on this side, an' the folks tried to git acrost, but they couldn't, an' they talked to the Dwarfs over the river, an' asked them to build a bridge, an' the Dwarfs said they couldn't build it unless the river devils was bought off. Then the folks |asked how to buy off them river devils, an' the Dwarfs said to throw in a thimble full of human blood an' spit in the river. So, one night the folks done it, an' next morning them logs was acrost."

The spectacles of the old woman were fastened around her head with a shoestring. She removed them by lifting the shoestring over her head, polished them for a moment on her linsey dress and set them back on her nose.

"Then," she went on, "the devilment was done. Just like it allers is when people gits smarter than the blessed God. The Dwarfs crost over an' rid the horses in the night an' sucked the cows, an' made faces at the women so the children was cross-eyed. An' the folks tried to throw down the bridge an' couldn't do it because the Dwarfs had put a spell on them logs."

She stopped and jerked her thumb toward the river. "Did you ever hear tell of old Jimmy Radcliff?" she asked.

We had heard of the old-time millwright, and said so.

"Well," she went on, "they was a-layin' a floor in that bridge oncet, an' old Jimmy got tight on b'iled cider, an' 'low'd he'd turn one of them logs over. So he chucked a crowbar under one of 'em an' begun a-pryin', an' all at oncet that crowbar flew out of his hand an' old Jimmy fell through, an' the men cotched him by his wampus an' it took four of 'em to pull him up, because, they said, it felt like somethin' was a-holdin' his legs."

"I reckon," said Ump, "it was the cider in Jimmy's legs. If there had been anything holdin', they could have seen it."

"'Tain't so certain," said Aunt Peggy, wagging her head, "'tain't so certain. There's many a thing a-holdin' in the world that you can't see." And she turned around in the door and went stumping back to her loom.

We rode south in no light-hearted mood. Again we had met the far-sighted cunning of Hawk Rufe, in a trap baited by a master, and had slipped from under it by no skill of ours. Had we missed those last words of Patsy, flung back like an angry taunt, I should have believed the tale about my brother and hurried north, if all the cattle in the Hills had gone to the devil. It was a master move, that lie, and I began to see the capacity of these dangerous men. This was merely an outpost strategy, laid as they passed along. What would it be when we came to the serious business of the struggle?

And how came that girl on Thornberg's Hill? Cynthia was shoulder to shoulder with Woodford. We had seen that with our own eyes. Had Patsy turned traitor to Cynthia?

I looked over at Ump. "What did that little girl mean?" I said.

"I give it up," said he.

"I don't understand women," said I.

"If you did," said he, "they'd have you in a side-show."

A great student of men has written somewhere about the fear that hovers at the threshold of events. And a great essayist, in a dozen lines, as clean-cut as the work of a gem engraver, marks the idleness of that fear when above the trembling one are only the gods,—he alone, with them alone.

The first great man is seeing right, we know. The other may be also seeing right, but few of us are tall enough to see with him, though we stand a-tiptoe. We sleep when we have looked upon the face of the threatening, but we sleep not when it crouches in the closet of the to-morrow. Men run away before the battle opens, who would charge first under its booming, and men faint before the surgeon begins to cut, who never whimper after the knife has gone through the epidermis. It is the fear of the dark.

It sat with me on the crupper as we rode into Roy's tavern. Marks and Peppers and the club-footed Malan were all moving somewhere in our front. Hawk Rufe was not intending to watch six hundred black cattle filing into his pasture with thirty dollars lost on every one of their curly heads. Fortune had helped him hugely, or he had helped himself hugely, and this was all a part of the structure of his plan. Ward out of the way first! Accident it might have been, design I believed it was. Yet, upon my life, with my prejudice against him I could not say.

That we could not tell the whims of chance from the plans of Woodford was the best testimonial to this man's genius. One moved a master when he used the hands of Providence to lift his pieces. The accident to Ward was clear accident, to hear it told. At the lower falls of the Gauley, the road home runs close to the river and is rough and narrow. On the opposite side the deep laurel thickets reach from the hill-top to the water. Here, in the roar of the falls, the Black Abbot had fallen suddenly, throwing Ward down the embankment. It was a thing that might occur any day in the Hills. The Black Abbot was a bad horse, and the prediction was common that he would kill Ward some day. But there was something about this accident that was not clear. Mean as his fame put him, the Black Abbot had never been known to fall in all of his vicious life. On his right knee there was a great furrow, long as a man's finger and torn at one corner. It was scarcely the sort of wound that the edge of a stone would make on a falling horse.

Ump and Jud and old Jourdan examined this wound for half a night, and finally declared that the horse had been shot. They pointed out that this was the furrow of a bullet, because hair was carried into the wound, and nothing but a bullet carries the hair with it. The fibres of the torn muscle were all forced one way, a characteristic of the track of a bullet, and the edge of the wound on the inside of the horse's knee was torn. This was the point from which a bullet, if fired from the opposite side of the river, would emerge; and it is well known that a bullet tears as it comes out. At least this is always true with a muzzle-loading rifle. Ward expressed no opinion. He only drew down his dark eyebrows when the three experts went in to tell him, and directed them to swing Black Abbot in his stall, and bandage the knee. But I talked with Ump about it, and in the light of these after events it was tolerably clear.

At this point of the road, the roar of the falls would entirely drown the report of a rifle, and the face of any convenient rock would cover the flash. The graze of a bullet on the knee would cause any horse to fall, and if he fell here, the rider was almost certain to sustain some serious injury if he were not killed. True, it was a piece of good shooting at fifty yards, but both Peppers and Malan could "bark" a squirrel at that distance.

If this were the first move in Woodford's elaborate plan, then there was trouble ahead, and plenty of trouble. The horses came to a walk at a little stream below Roy's tavern, and we rode up slowly.

The tavern was a long, low house with a great porch, standing back in a well-sodded yard. We dismounted, tied the horses to the fence, and crossed the path to the house. As I approached, I heard a voice say, "If the other gives 'em up, old Nicholas won't." Then I lifted the latch and flung the door open.

I stopped with my foot on the threshold. At the table sat Lem Marks, his long, thin legs stretched out, and his hat over his eyes. On the other side was Malan and, sitting on the corner of the table, drinking cider from a stone pitcher, was Parson Peppers,—the full brood.

The Parson replaced the pitcher and wiped his dripping mouth on his sleeve. Then he burst out in a loud guffaw. "I quote Saint Paul," he cried. "Do thyself no harm, for we are all here."

Marks straightened in his chair like a cat, and the little eyes of Malan slipped around in his head. For a moment, I was undecided, but Ump pushed through and I followed him into the room.

There was surprise and annoyance in Marks's face for a moment. Then it vanished like a shadow and he smiled pleasantly. "You're late to dinner," he said; "perhaps you were not expected."

"I think," said I, "that we were not expected, but we have come."

"I see," said Marks.

Peppers broke into a hoarse laugh and clapped his hand on Marks's shoulder. "You see, do you?" he roared; "you see now, my laddie. Didn't I tell you that you couldn't stop runnin' water with talk?"

The suggestion was dangerously broad, and Marks turned it. "I recall," he said, "no conversation with you about running water. That cider must be up in your hair."

"Lemuel, my boy," said the jovial Peppers, "the Lord killed Ananias for lyin' an' you don't look strong."

"I'm strong enough to keep my mouth shut," snapped Marks.

"Fiddle-de-dee," said Peppers, "the Lord has sometimes opened an ass's mouth when He wanted to."

"He didn't have to open it in your case," said Marks.

"But He will have to shut it in my case," replied Peppers; "you're a little too light for the job."

The cider was reaching pretty well into the Reverend Peppers. This Marks saw, and he was too shrewd to risk a quarrel. He burst into a laugh. Peppers began to hammer the table with his stone pitcher and call for Roy.

The tavern-keeper came in a moment, a short little man with a weary smile. Peppers tossed him the pitcher. "Fill her up," he roared, "I follow the patriarch Noah. He was the only one of the whole shootin' match who stood in with the Lord, an' he got as drunk as a b'iled owl."

Then he turned to us. "Will you have a swig, boys?"

We declined, and he struck the table with his fist. "Ho! ho," he roared; "is every shingle on the meetin'-house dry?" Then he marked the hunchback sitting by the wall, and pointed his finger at him. "Come, there, you camel, wet your hump."

That a fight was on, I had not the slightest doubt in the world. I caught my breath in a gasp. I saw Jud loosen his arm in his coat-sleeve. Ump was as sensitive as any cripple, and he was afraid of no man. To my astonishment he smiled and waved his hand. "I'm cheek to your jowl, Parson," he said; "set out the O-be-joyful."

"Hey, Roy!" called Peppers, "bring another pitcher for Humpty Dumpty." Then he kicked the table with his great cowhide boots and began to bellow:

Back to Index Next