IX
Granny Wolfe had signally failed to soften her son, Old Buck. She had talked to him until she was hoarse, now pleading, now threatening him, now browbeating him with her sharp and ready tongue. Several times he had walked off to keep from hearing her; twice he had seized his fiddle and gone to playing "Buffalo Gals" wildly to shut her up.
But her spirits were not so low this morning. She had put on her red flannel petticoat wrong side out by mistake, and that certainly meant better luck in the future. It was a sign that never failed.
She had gone out, with her little black dog at her heels, to weed a bed of sky-colored ragged-robins. Her gaze sought out the not far distant family burying-ground instead. That which she saw caused her to drop her sourwood staff and step on her little dog's foot.
"Wag, ye black devil!" she creaked in response to the canine howl.
She recovered her staff, took her clay pipe from her almost toothless jaws, shaded her eyes with one hand, and looked toward the side of the Blackfern again. That which she had seen before had become an indistinct blur.
"I wonder what!" she muttered.
The eyes of Old Buck Wolfe were keener. He threw a last clod at a marauding hen, snatched up his always ready rifle, and hurried toward the mountain.
As he passed his mother's cabin, she hailed him shrilly, "Wait thar, and I'll go 'long wi' ye!"
He didn't even turn his head.
"You'd ort to be skun alive!" and she limped after him, Wag following at her heels.
Colonel Mason looked for water with which to revive Tot and, it being unfamiliar territory to him, failed to find any. Wondering whether he could mount unassisted with the young woman in his arms, he went back to his horse. Then he saw, standing less than two rods away, as motionless as the trees about him, the bearded, hard-eyed, giant mountaineer, Old Buck Wolfe.
"You're a terrible man, Buck," the colonel observed bitingly.
Wolfe changed not one feature.
"Will you be so kind, sir," and the old Southerner's voice was now not so cold,"as to hold this girl until I can get on my horse, and then pass her up to me?"
Still no word, no move, from the hillman. His mother arrived, panting heavily. She went straight to Colonel Mason. A great deal was plain to her already.
"Le' me take keer o' Tot," she said, fumbling at the bandana corners that were knotted under her chin, "ontel you can chase out the mountain thar about half a quarter and wet this here handkercher in a little spring ye'll find. Hey?"
The colonel returned not long afterward with the bandana soaking wet. Tot opened her eyes the moment the water touched her face. Granny Wolfe smiled, swept the matted and tangled hair back from the high, smooth brow and crooned:
"Now don't you worry yore little self no more, Tot, honey. Why, the' hain't a blessed thing to worry about! Little Buck ain't dead at all! His pap thar, the cross-grained old fool, he made that 'ar grave thar, and set up a tombstone to it, as a sign to the whole world 'at his best son was dead to him. Don't ye see, Tot, honey? Why, it's as plain as yore nose!"
"Cat-Eye didn't kill him?" Tot breathed uncertainly.
"Shorely not!" the old woman assured her.
"I thought Cat-Eye—had got him," Tot mumbled weakly, and slowly closed her eyes.
Colonel Mason rose and faced Old Buck Wolfe squarely.
"You could be a mighty good man," said he, "if you would. I know you've got plenty of chances to be bad; still, that's a very fine reason why you shouldn't be. I tell you, sir, there's nothing much coming to the fellow who is good simply because he hasn't any chance to be bad—and don't you ever forget that. Come, now! Help your son instead of hindering him. Be what you ought to be to him. You owe him your——"
"I don't owe nobody nothin'!" cut in the man who kept his word, told the truth, and paid his debts; who bent his knees only to a woodchuck's den, a ginseng root, or the furnace of a moonshine still; and who believed in nothing that he couldn't see with his temporal eyes.
Old Kirby Mason drew himself up straight, as straight as he had stood at Chickamauga when a general had complimented him to his face. But he was pale now, instead of flushed.
"By George, sir!" he bellowed.
With that he sprang to the head of the new black mound, tore away the slab of sandstone, lifted it in both hands and brought it down hard against the stump of a tree, breaking it into half a dozen pieces. The mountaineer went toward him, his rifle ready. The colonel looked into the barrel of the weapon without flinching.
"You ort to be hung as high as Haman or higher, Buck Wolfe!" the old woman cried. "You go home! Some says a old fool is the biggest fool on earth, and some says a young fool is the biggest; but me, I say you settle the question forever. Now you go on home!"
"Nobody hain't axed you fo' none o' yore edvice," growled her son.
"By gyar," Granny Wolfe retorted witheringly, "you need edvice, as shore as the Old Scratch hain't a jaybird."
Colonel Mason turned to his waiting horse, and swung himself into the saddle with the agility of a cavalryman. Tot seemed only half-conscious, only half-alive, and it was with some difficulty that the colonel and Granny Wolfe lifted her to the saddlefront. The grizzled mountain man stood and watched it with a face like a mask of stone.
Then the horseman left the old hillwoman berating her son mercilessly, and rode toward the basin's bottom.
"Now, little lady," he said when they had come to level ground, "I'll take you to your mother in short order. I'm afraid to try to take you to Johnsville; it would probably be too much for you. It'll be all right for you to go home. Your father is sorry he was so hasty with you."
Tot stared wide-eyed into his patrician old face. Her spirit fluttered up quickly.
"I want to go back to Mis' Mason," she told him.
"Oh!" smiled the colonel. "Back to Mrs. Mason, eh? Very well. Perhaps it would really be better. You may need the services of a doctor, and you couldn't get one out here—though I'd never dare to tell Granny Wolfe that! And I fancy, little lady," he added pleasantly, "that Mrs.Mason will be right glad to have you back."
They soon met young Wolfe, who had just ridden through Devil's Gate. He heard the story as they rode toward Johnsville, and made no comment, though there was a glint in his eyes that his foster-father hadn't been accustomed to seeing there.
Mrs. Mason saw them coming, and called the doctor by phone. Then she ran to make ready the bed in the blue-and-white room upstairs.
It was a case of utter physical exhaustion and high nervous strain, the doctor said; there was some fever now, and would doubtless be more before morning. Tot watched him as though she were not the least interested. After an hour, Doctor Rice left medicine and directions for giving them, and turned homeward.
Another hour went by. The patient spoke to the anxious-faced little woman who sat at her bedside.
"That tombstone. I can see it as plain as daylight. Ef I look somewhar else, it moves whar I look. 'Hear lays Little Buck Wolfe.' Are you shore he ain't dead, Mis' Mason, plum' shore?"
"Very sure," promptly. "He's perfectly safe."
"Ef you don't keer, Mis' Mason," and Tot strove to lift herself to an elbow, "I'll jest step downsta'rs and see."
"Delirium," the colonel's wife whispered to herself. Aloud, "No, you mustn't get up! Wait, dear; I'll call him."
Wolfe entered the blue-and-white bedroom a minute later. He went to the bedside and knelt there, took one of the hot and fluttering hands and caressed it awkwardly.
"I'm all right," he told her over and over. "Don't you see? Everything is all right."
She appeared to be satisfied, and accepted a teaspoonful of queer-tasting liquid without a murmur.
But the fever kept going higher in spite of the queer-tasting liquid, and the doctor was summoned again. He gave a powder, left others, and departed. Out in the hallway, Wolfe paced the floor anxiously. On the veranda the colonel sat smoking and swearing under his breath at the forces that had brought themselves together in a mighty attempt to crush him that was as flesh and blood of his own.
Wolfe stopped his nervous pacing at the sound of soft footfalls behind him, turned, and faced his foster-mother.
"I don't think you need worry yourself like this, Arnold; the case isn't so desperate," said Mrs. Mason, half-whispering. She went on smilingly, "If you hadn't told me about Alice, I'd think you were about to fall in love with Tot—or that you'd already fallen in love with her! She's handsome, honey boy, isn't she?"
"Very," he agreed, "but I'm not in love with her, mother."
Mrs. Mason gave him a wise look. "Of course, you aren't, not yet. It's gratitude and appreciation, now. But a man of your make-up could hardly help caring for a girl like Tot—after she has had a little polish, you know. That was a boyish affair you had with Alice, a sort of flashlight affair; you hadn't been much used to women, and she dazzled you. You'll see the day, dear boy, when you'll be quite thankful that Alice wouldn't have you. Now go straight off to bed, Arnold!"
"You'll call me if she gets worse?"
The colonel's wife promised. Wolfe went to his room. He shook his head and smiled a trifle bitterly at that which Mrs. Mason had said concerning "a flashlight affair." He thought she didn't understand.
But she did.
At noon of the next day, Sheriff Alvin Starnes, tall and lank, brave and illiterate, rose from his office chair and went to a telephone instrument on the wall. He asked for Colonel Mason's residence.
"This is Sheriff Starnes," he growled into the transmitter. "Is the young lady still improvin'?"
"Doing finely, thank you, Sheriff." It was Little Buck Wolfe talking. "The colonel told you about her, eh?"
"This mornin', sir. I think I'd better go after Mayfield, Mr. Mason. I ain't forgot that I promised to let you run that end o' the county, on account o' your kinfolks; but Mayfield ain't your kinfolks."
"Go ahead!" laughed Wolfe. "Hope you catch him."
"Startin' right now," replied Starnes. "Goo'-by!"
He hung up the receiver, rang off, crossed the room and took his broad-brimmed black hat from a nail that had been half driven up in the corner of a board lettered boldly:NO SWARING ALOUD. He buckled on a revolver-laden cartridge-belt, andtook a pair of buckskin riding gloves from a drawer of his desk.
Just then there came a slow, heavy rapping at the door, the rapping of a rifle's butt.
The sheriff's lean face showed signs of annoyance. He went to the door. Two men stood a few feet from the steps. One of them was loosely-built, angular, and bullet-headed; the other was a big, square-chested man with sunburned black hair and beard. Only the big man was armed.
"You're the high sheriff o' this here county; hey?" said Alex Singleton.
"I am, sir."
"Then you arrest this here rattlesnake—take him off o' my hands afore I lose what little holt I've got on myself and put out his blasted light!" old Singleton roared. His voice was hoarse, rasping, like the sound a dull file makes when drawn across a thin steel edge. "He tried his best to kill a man I call my friend, Little Buck Wolfe; and the damned yaller dawg"—he was blind with rage, choking full—"he struck the one and only gyurl I've got——"
"And arrest him, too," Mayfield broke in desperately—"arrest him, too, fo'——"
"Shet yore mouth!" cried Singleton. His eyes blazed gloriously now, and his voice held a note of triumph. He wheeled and faced Sheriff Alvin Starnes again.
"And arrest me," he said, "fo' a-killin' Mort Gibson in a cyard game, over on Shelton Laurel, five year ago come eight o'clock o' the night o' next September the thirteenth!"
Alex Singleton, winner as well as loser, passed the officer his rifle and a revolver, and held out his wrists for manacles.