VIII
A slender, barefooted feminine figure in a torn and bedraggled, blue-dotted calico dress stood motionless behind the twisted body of a wind-swept jackpine on the crest of a baby mountain miles from Wolfe's Basin. Her face was thin from starving, and her coppery hair matted and tangled, but in the depths of her blue eyes there was fire. An Army-type revolver hung heavily from her right hand. Over her heart shone an officer's shield. She was slyly watching the side of another baby mountain, on the crest of which lay lightly the dying, golden summer sun.
The yellow disc sank out of sight, and shadows began to thicken in the valley before her. Still she stood motionless behind the wind-swept pine, too full of her purpose to sit down and rest. Darkness came on out of the east, and a little brown owl somewhere below her cried a mournful welcome to it. A nighthawk cut the air over her head with its knife-sharp wings; its shriek was like the dying note of a steamer's siren. From far across the other mountain came the shrill sound of a panther's scream, imitating the call of a woman in mortal distress.
Then there was silence, a deep and awesome silence. The earth, the sky, and all between, formed one vast and hollow loneliness. But Tot did not feel it. She herself was loneliness.
At last she sat down on the pine needles. Her weariness, the weariness of long hours of tramping without food, of long vigils on mountain tops, forced her to rest. What a game of hide-and-seek it had been! Half a dozen times she had been almost upon him. His way of eluding her was both uncanny and maddening. He had really seemed to be enjoying it!
Again the owl cried out; again the nighthawk shrieked; again the panther screamed. And again did Tot Singleton pay no attention to the gruesome trinity.
Some time later, she saw on the side of the other mountain a tiny point of light. It brought a cold but triumphant smile to her lips. How sure of himself he was! She rose, and began to move swiftly and noiselessly down through the scrubby laurel and ivy, going as straight toward the point of light as the slopes of the valley would allow.
After nearly an hour, she divided a wall of rank green undergrowth and stepped into a little, round patch of huckleberry bushes, in the center of which was a small brushwood fire—and beyond the fire, eating berries, his rifle lying across his knees, sat Cat-Eye Mayfield, who also was pale and haggard. He looked up. His jaws stopped their movement as though they had been that moment paralyzed. He stared at her half-defiantly and half-reproachfully.
She went closer to him, the big revolver ready in her hand, her gaze riveted on his.
"You're onder arrest fo' tryin' to kill Little Buck Wolfe," she said in a low voice that carried the ring of ice. With the forefinger of her left hand she pointed to the officer's shield that she wore over her heart like a target and a dare.
"Ye don't say!" he sneered.
"But I do say!" she replied.
"Depity-Sheriff Tot Singleton!" grinned Mayfield.
"C'rect, sir!" boldly. "It's jest what I am. I'll haf to ax ye to pass that 'ar rifle acrost to me, Mister Cat-Eye."
"Humph!" scornfully.
"Pass me that 'ar rifle, butt fust—pass it, quick!"
Mayfield saw, or imagined he saw, her finger tighten on the trigger. He gave her the gun, butt first, reluctantly. She lifted it in her left hand and brought it down hard on a stone, disabling the mechanism of the breech. Mayfield muttered an oathand leaped to his feet, but the revolver's muzzle held him off.
"You better hadn't!" she warned, her finger now so hard on the trigger that the cylinder trembled. "I've got the whole United States ahind o' me now, and I shore hain't afeared to shoot. Ef you think I am, try me and see!"
The other prepared to play his last card. He had some faith in it. He tucked his thumbs under his homemade suspenders, and cocked his bullet-shaped head to one side.
"We've had a fine time a-playin' whoopy-hide, hain't we?" He tried to laugh, and failed. "But it's all come to a show-down now, I reckon. You've sp'iled it all; the fun's all over. Tot Singleton, you won't want me to go to jail when I've told ye what I've got to tell ye!"
"Tell it!" impatiently.
"All right. Well," leered Mayfield, "you rickollect 'at time me and yore pap went over to Shelton Laurel and stayed a week at the big shootin'-match, sev'ral year ago? And you rickollect yore pap acted pow'ful strange fo' a long time atter we'd got back? It was the talk o' the whole Singleton tribe. You rickollect, Tot?"
"Yes. Shorely," she nodded. "Git the rest of it out o' ye quick."
"All right. Well, yore pap he killed a man named Mort Gibson over thar," Cat-Eye Mayfield went on, "and I seed him do it. I was the only witness. I'm the only pusson on earth 'at knows who done it—'ceptin' yore pap. Take me to jail, and I'll shore tell who it was killed Mort Gibson. Then yore pap he'll land in the penitenchy even ef he don't hang!"
Tot Singleton saw light in a place that had been mysteriously dark to her for years.
"So that," she cried, shaken hard, "is why pap never would make you stop a-pesterin' me to marry you! He was afeard to make you mad, acause he was afeard you'd tell! But," with fine scorn, "he knowed he could trust me never to tie up to sech as you, o' course. Do ye reckon, Cat-Eye Mayfield, they'd take yore word about the killin', and you in jail?"
"Tumph! I'd jest tell 'em to ax yore pap about it, and he'd give hisself away. He hain't got over it yit. It's nigh driv' him crazy."
It was all too true. Then the young woman's countenance took on an expression that fascinated Mayfield because he couldn't begin to guess what it meant.
"You turn yore back to me, quick!" she ordered.
The revolver threatened. The firelight gleamed on the deputy's badge she wore. Mayfield lost faith in his last card. He turned his back to Tot, and bent his head dejectedly. She stepped to him, gripped the waistband of his blue denim trousers in her left hand, and shoved him forward.
"Move on!" she said, bleakly but desperately, and he moved on. "Try anything I don't like the looks of, and see ef I don't shoot—then you cain't tell on pap. I—I've got the whole United States ahind o' me now."
They reached the crest of a high and rugged mountain just before daybreak. Tot decided to halt there and wait for the dawn to show her the surrounding country, in order that she might get her bearings again.
When the gray light came, she found that the great pile of earth and stone under her feet was the Big Blackfern, the eastern wall of Wolfe's Basin!
"Listen, Cat-Eye," she said wearily. "This is what we're a-goin' to do. We're a-goin' straight down the mountainside to the aidge o' the basin; then we're a-goin' to sneak out to the right under cover o' the trees ontel we're to the Gate. Anything about that you don't onderstand?"
"Yes," growled her prisoner, "I onderstand ye."
"Rickollect, ef you try to run, I'll shoot."
She released her hold on his clothing, now that he no longer had darkness for a friend. She followed him doggedly, fighting for strength to keep on her feet. Before they were halfway to the basin's edge, she was stumbling, and the trees were beginning to run grotesquely together like drunken monsters, and there was in her eyes a light closely akin to that of delirium. Mayfield knew that she soon would be completely exhausted, and upon this he was depending for his escape. Now and then he cast a sly glance over his shoulder, and with each succeeding glimpse of her his countenance grew a degree less heavy.
When they had come to a point a hundred yards from the level ground of the basin's bottom, Mayfield halted suddenly and began to stare ahead of him. His captor thrust the muzzle of the revolver weakly against his back. Still he didn't move. His immobility was like that of an evil bird that a snake holds charmed.
"Go on!" mumbled Tot. "Go on!"
"Looky thar!" exclaimed Mayfield. He pointed.
"What is it?"
She saw that they were standing at the lower side of the family burying-ground of the Wolfes.
"Thar!" Mayfield growled, pointing again.
At last she saw. "It was you," she gasped, "that done it!"
A thick, black mist was already settling down before her. She couldn't see anything at all now. Mayfield seized the revolver and tore it from her weakened grip. She made no attempt to recover it, for nothing mattered; the universe had become one great, dark void; it was finished. She staggered and fell prostrate, with her arms flung out helplessly. There she lay quite still, with the officer's shield pressed close to the earth and no more like a target, no more like a dare.
In the basin below were two men, one of whom was mounted, who had been watching with rising interest the progress of the pair down the rugged slope of the Blackfern. They had recognized Tot and Mayfield only when the latter-named halted suddenly and pointed; captor and captive had come into plain view at that moment.
Colonel Mason uttered an exclamation that was half-oath, and spurred his horse forward. The man on foot also was an elderly man, and he was tired and worn from days and nights of fruitless searching through the mountain wilderness. He thought that Mayfield had struck Tot down. He choked back a sob and cried out a whole oath instead, and ran, not toward his daughter, his one little girl, but after Cat-Eye Mayfield.
The colonel dismounted and with infinite tenderness gathered Tot's limp body up from the new mound of black earth on which it had fallen. He shook his head sorrowfully, regretfully, at sight of the new slab of sandstone that had been put at the head of the mound only that morning.
For on it had been chiseled crudely this pitiful inscription:
Hear Lays Little Buck Wolfe