V
Tot Singleton didn't go home just then. There was nothing she could do at home. Her mother was a very strong, stout woman who didn't want any "dreamin' gyurls a-piddlin'" in her household affairs; who sometimes worked in the woods with an ax, or hoed corn, or helped to make a run of whisky; and who lightened her daily burdens by the constant whistling of old-fashioned hymns.
The young woman absentmindedly destroyed a hundred or so of black-eyed mountain daisies by pulling off their defenseless heads between her bare toes; then she went back to her shrine—it was just that to this unspoiled creature who had been half child and half woman at sixteen and was very nearly the same today.
She stood leaning against the body of the willow, and thought over all that had happened there; looked at the marks Little Buck Wolfe's high-laced boots had made in the sand, at the marks of the struggle that had been so short and so one-sided. Soon she went to the edge of the creek, and peered into the crystal water. He hadn't known about the pool's being so shallow now, when he had thrown the ring into it.
She gathered up her calico skirts in one hand, waded in, found the ring, and hastened back to the sand-bar.
Tot looked at it closely now. It sparkled so in the same yellow disc of sunlight that had burnished the copper of her hair a little while before; almost it hurt her eyes! Wonderment and something very different from wonderment wrote their signs alternately on her countenance. She pressed the ring on her engagement finger, and tried to imagine that it was her own engagement ring; but the iron truth wouldn't be forgotten even for a moment, and a wee smile of intense hurt came to the lips that the sweetheart of those happy other days had so recently kissed in so chivalrous a manner.
When she tried to get the ring off, it wouldn't come! Perhaps she didn't try very hard. Anyway, she laughed a little to herself, and her blue eyes were as bright as stars.
Tot Singleton went slowly up the bank of the creek, going homeward by instinct rather than by design. And she had not covered half of the mile when she met her father and the slouching young man they called Cat-Eye, both of whom were armed with rifles.
With a little gasp, she stopped suddenly and hid her left hand behind her. Her father was very angry, angrier than she had ever seen him before; she knew it the moment she saw his bearded face. It was all plain to her immediately. Mayfield had told her father that she had met one of the hated Wolfes halfway for the purpose of making love. Her face whitened with scorn.
"Well?" she asked.
"Le's see what ye've got on that 'ar third finger o' yore left hand, Louisiany," demanded Alex Singleton, slipping the butt of his repeater to the ground.
Tot remembered that she had been watching the changing colors of the stone when they came upon her. She stared silently and defiantly, and made no move toward obedience.
"It's his'n, that 'ar ring," frowned Mayfield. "He——"
"You shet yore snaky mouth!" Tot interrupted desperately.
"Le's see it, Louisiany!" Old Singleton's voice trembled now.
Still no move whatever from the young woman. The Singleton chief stepped to her, caught her left forearm in his big and sinewy hand, and brought the shining stone up near his eyes by force. The clear, pure beauty of the diamond held his attention for a few seconds; then he threw his daughter's arm from him roughly, as though the bare touch of it were a contamination.
"Take it off!" he blared.
"I—I cain't git it off!" cried Tot, a pink splotch in either of her cheeks.
"Then cut yore finger off!"
Cat-Eye Mayfield chuckled, and it maddened Tot Singleton.
"I don't want it off!" she declared.
The old mountaineer shot upward two inches. "You—you say you don't want it off?" he roared. "You say you don'twantit off? By the Etarnal, you shain't never take that 'ar thing into no house o' mine as long as ye live! You're the only gyrul I got, but I'd ruther bury ye, 'an to see ye wi' that 'ar damned thing on yore finger!"
Being her father's daughter, Tot also straightened. She, too, could be obstinate. She pushed the ring a little farther up. Her voice was low and pinched.
"Ef you had ha' come to me and said, 'Louisiany, honey, I'd ruther ye wouldn't wear that,' I'd shorely ha' took it off don't matter how much trouble it was to me. But you a-sayin' what ye said, and the way ye said it, with Cat-Eye thar all a-grinnin' and a-gloatin'—well, pap, I shorely wouldn't be no kin to you ef I was to take it off now."
"All right. You cain't never darken the door o' none o' yore people no more," decreed Alex Singleton, shaking with a great rage. "Any o' yore kin 'at harbors ye will shore haf to reckon wi' me, and I'm a hard man to reckon with—you know that."
"I hain't a-goin' to take it off."
"All right!"
Old Singleton turned upon his heel with almost military precision, jerked his rifle into the hollow of his arm and strode away.
When he had gone, Cat-Eye Mayfield smirked and gave an exhibition of miserably poor judgment by trying to take Tot's hand. Tot struck him across the cheek so hard that her fingers left purplish red bars under the sunburn of his skin. For it was because of him that she was cast out, homeless, without a place to lay her head.
"You'd better take yoreself away from here!" She clenched her hands and stamped one little foot. "You shorely better had! I'm done wi' you a-taggin' atter me, you—you sneakin' old rattlesnake of a tattle-teller! I wouldn't marry you to save yore life and mine, too. And this is the last time I'm a-goin' to take the trouble o' tellin' ye, Cat-Eye. Git."
Mayfield quailed before the fire of her finely glittering eyes. He took a few steps backward, watching her as though he feared she would spring upon him and rend his loosely knit body to pieces; then he turned and went straight toward the foot of Lost Trail Mountain. After he had gone a hundred yards, Tot saw him make a careful examination of his rifle.
Now one doesn't examine a gun like that when he means to shoot squirrels, not when he knows already that the gun is loaded and in order. Tot Singleton fell upon the idea that Cat-Eye Mayfield meant to watch the gate for Little Buck Wolfe, and shoot him from ambush. Mayfield was as unscrupulous a man as ever drew life's breath, and this was just the thing for him to do under the circumstances, she knew.
And Little Buck would start for Johnsville at noon!
After having searched the central part of the basin in vain, she decided that to protect him from the danger would be more sensible than to try to warn him of it. Of course, she couldn't go to the Wolfes' settlement. Besides, there was a strong chance of his being killed while trying to protect himself. In another moment she was running hard toward the nearest cabin, which was Grandpap Singleton's, and which, she thanked whatever gods there were, was not more than a quarter of a mile away; and she kept well to cover, in order that her irate father might not see her.
When she burst into the poor little house, the white-headed, white-bearded old hillman was poking the embers in the wide stone fireplace for a baked potato; he, like Granny Wolfe, lived alone and did for himself because he didn't want to be in the way. He looked around and slowly straightened his lean figure, and the fire-blackened hickory stick fell clattering from his unsteady hand.
"Tot Singleton," he demanded anxiously, "what in the name o' Fiddlin' Bob Taylor is the matter o' you?"
"I want yore old rifle, Grandpap," panted Tot.
"Now jest what're you a-plannin' to shoot wi' my old rifle, I'd like to know?"
"A rattlesnake—mebbe."
"A rattlesnake—mebbe! Heh! Take the rifle out o' the rack up thar over the mantel." He motioned toward it. "My pore old arms is so stiff and screaky wi' the rheumatiz 'at I cain't hardly reach up far enough fo' to scratch my pore old head no more."
His granddaughter stood on her bare toes and took down the long-barreled Lancaster muzzle-loader. She ignored the powderhorn and leathern bullet-pouch the Prophet had taken from a peg in the log wall and was holding out to her. The one load that was in the rifle would be enough. Tot, like the rest of the Singletons, didn't miss.
But as she turned toward the door, her grandfather caught her by an arm and held her firmly. His suspicions were at work.
"Wait, Tot, honey," he said. "You've got to tell me about it fust. It hain't no common rattler you're a-goin' to shoot—mebbe!"
She had been afraid to let him know, because of his strict religiousness. The earnest pleading, the deep love for her in his old eyes, now urged her to confide in him. She told it in a few words, for there was precious little time to be wasted.
"And so he's come back here to save his people, Little Buck has." Grandpap Singleton seemed very much affected. "I tell ye, Tot, honey, they needs him, as shorely as you're a foot high. Well, we'll he'p him ef we can. Shorely, a man ort to believe in a-fightin' fo' the right as well as prayin' for it. Heh?"
The Prophet certainly was not in one of his wandering fits now. He caught up a worn felt hat and pulled it low on his white head, and took the rifle masterfully from Tot's hands.
"Come wi' me," he ordered, almost with the snap of youth.
The pair of them hurried across the little vegetable plot, and were soon swallowed up by the trees and laurels of the mountainside.
"Ef the's any killin' to be done," muttered the aged mountaineer, "I'll do it myself. You're young, Tot, honey, whilst I'm as old, mighty nigh it, as Methusalem's house cat. But I can yit see how to shootpurty tol'able straight. Heh! Do ye know what they used to call me fo' a nickname when I was a young man? 'Cracker,' that's what. Acause I was a crack shot. It was said I was the man who invented shootin' squirrels in the middle o' the eye!"
Considering that he had long been a sufferer from rheumatism, that scourge of the aged, the pace that Grandpap Singleton set and kept was truly surprising.
When they drew up stealthily behind a scrubby oak and peered down the Lost Trail's side of Devil's Gate, they saw just what they had expected to see. Crouched above a stone the size of a barrel, on which lay his repeating rifle on its side, was Cat-Eye Mayfield, motionless, waiting in a diabolical patience.
"We've got to ketch him mighty nigh in the act itself," whispered Grandpap Singleton, "so's the'll be enough real proof to send him to jail. We hain't got no real proof as yit, ye know, Tot. We'll jest wait here ontel he picks up his rifle, which same he'll do when Little Buck comes in sight, and 'en we'll make him put up his hands and call Little Buck up to arrest him. Heh? Shorely. He's a-plannin' to let Little Buck have it when he slows his hoss to ford the creek down thar."
Tot kept a watch on the trail below, which lay in plain view before her for several hundred yards. A few silent minutes went by; then she motioned to her kinsman to get ready.
She saw him kneel, lay the long barrel across a moss-covered stone, rest one shoulder against the scrubby oak's body, and bend his head until his right cheek touched the rifle's stock. After he had trained the old weapon properly, he raised his white head and turned his eyes upward without spoiling his aim; and Tot heard him speak in the lowest of undertones:
"Lord, ef I haf to do it, You'll onderstand, won't Ye? And ef I am in the wrong, which I'm purty shore I hain't, I ax Ye to fo'give me. Aymen."
The young woman wiped a dimness from her blue eyes, and looked toward the trail again. She bent and whispered nervously:
"He's a-comin' fast. He hain't more'n a hundred steps from the Gate. Now you watch Cat-Eye Mayfield, Grandpap Singleton, and don't you let him k-k-kill Little Buck!"
"You leave it to me!"
Mayfield picked up his rifle, drew the hammer back, and began to settle himself like a cat settling for a spring.
"Drap that 'ar gun, Cat-Eye!" cried Grandpap Singleton.
Tot pulled aside a laurel branch, in order that the would-be assassin might see the frowning muzzle that bore upon him. Mayfield was in no haste to turn his sallow face toward them; he looked at them only long enough to see who they were, and did not drop his rifle. Perhaps it was because he did not believe the religious old man would shoot; perhaps it was because his thirst for revenge was so great at that moment that his narrow mind had in it no room for any other thought.
"Drap that rifle, Cat-Eye!" Grandpap Singleton cried again.
Still Mayfield did not obey. The horseman was now almost to the ford, and reining in. Mayfield's round head seemed to sink halfway into his shoulders—he began to look along the sights.
"Shoot!" Tot urged frantically.
The old Lancaster cracked like a giant's whip. Cat-Eye Mayfield dropped his rifle now. He turned a dumfounded, ashen face toward the two Singletons, and babbled something unintelligible. Then—although the bullet had only passed through the upper part of his right arm, thanks either to Providence or to a dimness in the old mountaineer's eyes—Mayfield sank to the stones. The sight of his own blood had made him limp.
The Prophet rose unsteadily. The strain on his feeble mind was telling. He stretched wide his lean arms, and the bright sun threw his shadow down the incline in the form of an inverted cross.
He called to the man in the Gate, "Come up here, Little Buck Wolfe," thickly, "and arrest me fo' mudder!"