II
The bottom of Wolfe's Basin is two miles in length, one mile in breadth, and as level as a prairie. The rockbound and majestic Big Blackfern Mountain makes the eastern wall; the western wall is formed by great Lost Trail Mountain, which lifts high toward the heavens a bald peak called Pickett's Dome. A crystal-clear creek gushes from under a rugged gray cliff at the junction of the Big Blackfern and the Lost Trail, splits the basin's bottom in the centre, and flows out through a dizzily-portaled pass, the same being known as Devil's Gate.
Old Alex Singleton and his people lived in twenty-two low and rambling log cabins near the south end of the basin. Old Buck Wolfe and his people occupied eighteen cabins of the same kind near the basin's north end, near the pass. Old Buck's mother lived alone save for a little black dog named Wag. She was sixty-nine, white-headed, as wrinkled as parchment, very sharp of feature and of tongue; she was called wise in her understanding of the curative properties of herbs, and she was a firm believer in supernatural tokens.
Granny Wolfe rose early on this fine summer morning. She slipped her bent old body into a dark-figured calico dress, tied a pair of coarse shoes on her rheumatic feet, wound a red bandana about her white head, bathed her face and hands and dried them on a hempen towel. She filled her clay pipe with homegrown tobacco, lighted it with a coal from the yawning stone fireplace, and took up a long sourwood staff. Another moment saw her entering the crooked, grass-lined path her feet had worn to the home of her favorite son.
A sharp yowl caused her to stop, face about, and bring her staff down hard.
"Durn ye, Wag, ye little devil," she muttered, "I left ye shet up inside! But it's bad luck to turn back, and I jest hain't a-goin' to do it. So yap as much as ye please, ye little devil!"
Now Old Buck Wolfe was a fiddler as well as a fighter, and when his mother had reached a point some seventy yards from his primitive house she was startled by hearing Buffalo Gals fiddled as she had rarely or never heard it fiddled before. Thereupon Granny Wolfe's seamed countenance showed signs of a great chagrin, and she began to talk to herself:
"I'll—be—durned! Ef the durned fool hain't got out o' bed and went to fiddlin'! Wisht I may drap dead in my tracks, ef he hain't! And he'll be a-fightin' them 'ar Singletons afore night, as shore as the Old Scratch hain't a grashopper! Well, I kep' him in bed as long as I could. The bullethole it's done healed over. Now, I shore do wonder what makes menfolks be allus a-wantin' to kill each other? The Lord ha' mussy on us!"
The fiddler sat in a crude, homemade chair in the cabin's front doorway. He was a huge man, and gaunt, and his long black hair and beard were not without threads of silver. His mother halted a few feet from him, and leaned heavily on her staff; she stared at him quite as though she had never seen him before.
"Reckon ye'd know my hide in a tan-yard?" laughed Old Buck Wolfe, dropping the instrument to his knee.
"Hain't you a purty thing, now—jest hain't you!" cried the old woman, with her own particular brand of scorn.
Her son's keen black eyes twinkled. "What's got the matter o' you?"
"You git back in bed!" snapped Granny Wolfe.
Old Buck narrowed his eyes. "When I'm able to fiddle," he said, "I'm able tofight. Stick that in yore pipe and smoke it, mother. Hey?"
"I'll be durned!" shrilled Granny Wolfe. "You wildcat, ye're a fixin' to go fightin' ag'in! Sech a durned fool! And when is it ye're a-goin' to commencet a-fightin,' Buck Wolfe?"
"Us Wolfes," soberly, "is to meet here at dinner-time, and start fo' t'other end o' the basin. It'll be the last fight; d'ye onderstand that?"
The old hillwoman's voice was soft when she spoke again.
"Don't do it, honey," she pleaded, almost pitifully. "Don't. I wisht I may drap dead in my tracks ef I didn't see a star fall over this here house last night, honey; and that 'ar is a shore sign o' death. And I dreamp' o' seein' muddy water, and that's a bad sign, too. Don't do it honey!"
The giant in the doorway laughed outright. He didn't believe in the supernatural.
"My nose itches," he said, winking; "what's that a sign of?"
"Heh? Why, Buck Wolfe, it's a sign somebody is a-comin' hongry! Jest wait and see ef it don't come true. But them 'ar Singletons, don't tackle 'em ag'in!"
"I'd give a mule ef Oliver was here," her son muttered. He turned to address a meek little woman who had come up behind his chair. "Sary, that 'ar damned old blue-tailed hen's a-scratchin' up yore merrygolds ag'in."
Then he rose, kicked his chair over, and threw fiddle and bow to a nearby bed. He stepped to the ground, took his mother by her lean shoulders, and shook her slightly. His whole countenance was terrible.
"The Wolfes settled here fust!" he roared. "When I thrashed old Alex Singleton fo' a-sellin' me a jug o' cawn whisky wi' a leaf o' burley tobacker in it, he needed it. Ha! you fo'got pore little Tuck, brother Brian's boy, and the rest of 'em, a-layin' up thar in the old Blackfern's breast wi' hunks and hunks o' Singleton lead in 'em? Mother, ha' you fo'got?"
"But Tuck he'd killed one o' the Singletons, which was the very fust killin' of it all, too," Granny Wolfe returned sharply. "Asides, the Wolfes has put as many Singletons in the Lost Trail as the Singletons has put Wolfes in the Blackfern, and rickollect 'at! You'd shorely better let it lay right whar it's at, Buck Wolfe."
He glowered down upon her. "The Singleton had called Tuck a liar, mother, and you know it!" he snorted. "Now save yore breath, is my advice. The fight is to be, and it will be."
The old woman limped into the cabin, where she tried to comfort Sarah Wolfe, mother of Little Buck, the Arnold Mason that was.
Noontime came, and twenty Winchester rifles were brought and stacked against a cedar in the narrow yard. Twenty men, some of them barely grown, sat here and there, on the doorstep, on the woodpile, on the ground; they were waiting for their leader to finish his mid-day meal, and Old Buck was showing his contempt for danger by eating more than usual.
When the Wolfes started toward the south end of the basin, the Singletons moved toward the north end. Like the Wolfe chief, Alex Singleton—a big-boned, broad-bodied man with deep, dark eyes and straggling, sunburned black hair and beard—was not without some of the qualities of a general and strategist. A Singleton sentinel on the side of Pickett's Dome gave the alarm by waving a red bandana, then raced down to join his kinsmen. A woman followed each of the sets of fighters. One of them was old Granny Wolfe. The other was the Singleton leader's only daughter.
The Wolfes' one-man advance guard ran back with the intelligence that the enemy was just ahead. Old Buck rushed his little force to the left, meaning to make a surprise attack on the Singleton's flank. Oddly enough, Alex Singleton gave the same order at the same time, with the result that the two sides lost each other, and spent hours in maneuvering more or less blindly; not a shot was fired, and the silence in the basin was the silence of the tomb.
Buck Wolfe's anxious mother saw that the shadow of bald Pickett's Dome was reaching for the fringe of jackpines that grew on the jagged crest of the Big Blackfern, and she knew it was almost four o'clock. Then, there broke out ahead of her the keen, sharp thunder of rifles—the two factions had met where there was no cover save for puny bushes, and it would probably be a battle of extermination. She forgot her rheumatism, dropped her long staff, and ran toward it.
Two others reached the midway point before Granny Wolfe reached it. One ofthe two was a slender, barefooted young woman with deep blue eyes, copper-colored hair that hung down her back in a single thick plait, and a face that was quite finely handsome in spite of its tear-stains. The other sat astride a rearing, plunging black horse; he was young and stalwart, and an officer's shield gleamed over his heart.
"What's the big idea?" he was shouting. "What's the big idea, anyway?"
The daredevil personality of the newcomer awed the fighters. Even if they might have counted him out, there would have been no possibility of going on with the battle without danger to the two women. And to continue the fighting there in the open, where they had met by accident—well, the hillman is no coward, but he wants cover when he fights.
The two little clans acted wisely. As though by a common agreement, they crept off homeward without a word.
The old woman caught the rein of the now quiet horse.
"And who might you be, stranger," she cackled, "'at comes a-ridin' in here like a angel o' the Lord?"
He smiled very pleasantly. "Don't you know me?"
"Not from Adam's off ox, nor a side o' sole-leather!" declared Granny Wolfe.
"I know who it is," said the other of the three left upon the scene. "Granny, it's Little Buck!"
"La, la, la! You don't tell me it's Little Buck. I be consarned ef I'll believe it!" She shook her white head.
"And I know you, too," Wolfe said to the young woman. "Your name is Louisiana Theodosia Singleton, but they call you 'Tot.' You—er, you were my sweetheart when I was a boy. Don't you remember, Tot? Surely, you haven't forgotten the time when I thrashed Cat-Eye Mayfield and threw him into the creek—there at the sand-bar under the willow—for sticking pine-resin chewing gum into your hair! Don't you remember, Tot? Afterward, when we'd disposed of the villain," and here Wolfe's dark eyes twinkled engagingly, "you kissed me as a reward for my—er, gallantry!"
Louisiana Theodosia Singleton blushed and said nothing. Little Buck's grandmother was now convinced.
"Well ef it ain't you, shore enough," she cried. "Now didn't I tell yore contrary old pap 'at somebody was a-comin' hongry? But who'd ever ha' dreamp' you'd grow from the pesky boy you used to be into the fine-lookin' man ye are! You shore do 'mind me o' yore pore grandpap when he used to come to see me afore we was married. Look at him, Tot Singleton; don't you reelly think he's jest grand-lookin'?"
"You—you're a-doin' the talkin' now, Granny," said Tot Singleton, visibly embarrassed.
Wolfe smiled. But only for a moment. There came from somewhere near the foot of Lost Trail Mountain an old and broken voice that seemed a part of the peacefulness of the eternal hills; an old and broken voice that was filled with the holiness of a benediction:
"'And, lo, the star, which they saw in the East, went before them——'"