XII
Dawn of that memorable day at Devil's Gate found the general manager of the Unaka Lumber Company dressed and standing in the opening of the tent he shared with Weaver. The foreman, too, was awake; he sat on a box inside, busily lacing his boots. Wolfe hadn't slept well because of that which bore so heavily upon his mind; he was quite nervous, which was exceedingly unusual for him; strive as he would, he could not rid himself of the feeling that disaster was very near.
After a few minutes spent in absentmindedly watching the antics of a playful squirrel on the side of a nearby hickory, he turned to Weaver. Weaver was fully acquainted with the circumstances; Wolfe had found him extremely solid, and he had confided in him unreservedly. The two had grown to like each other well in the few months they had spent in working together.
"You're sure," Wolfe asked, "that we've got enough ties cut and piled at the Gate to reach to the mill-site?"
"There's four thousand in that pile, sir," said the foreman.
"It ought to be enough. I'm going down to the engine, Weaver, to see if Tom's got her fired up. Wake the camp, and let's get out as early as we can."
The foreman went out, put his cupped hands to his mouth and shouted an echoing, "Coo-ee!" In response to it, the tents of the negroes became instantly alive, and laughter and joking began to fill the morning air. There came from the cook's canvas domain the rattling of cast-iron. Soon the laborers were kneeling beside the sparkling creek with soap and towels. Not long afterward, many nostrils were sniffing hungrily at the mingled odors of frying bacon and steaming coffee.
Wolfe found his geared locomotive already lifting at its safety-valve spring. He passed the negro engine-man a word of praise, and returned to the camp by an indirect route, trying to engage his worried mind with the autumnal splendor of the woods as he went.
Breakfast was eaten as heartily as though no one expected anything out of the ordinary that day—and no one did, except for Weaver and Wolfe; the laborers had sensed nothing of the barrier that awaited the little railroad at the basin's mouth.
Less than an hour later, the slow but powerful locomotive drew its string of lumber flats to a halt at a point near where the rails ended; it was a short distance below the Gate. The crew sprang to the ground, each man of it with a pick or a shovel, a spike-driving hammer or a crowbar, an ax or a saw. The work began forthwith.
Wolfe and his foreman walked ahead to the lower edge of the Gate, entrance to the forbidden land. They stopped near a slender young poplar that had been felled squarely across the trail during the night just gone; it reached from one side of the pass to the other, and it was strong testimony to the nice calculation of the person who had cut it. Weaver looked puzzled, then he faced Wolfe.
"Who did this?"
"This," Wolfe answered correctly, turning to his companion, "is the deadline."
"You mean your father——?"
"Nothing else." Wolfe picked up a leaf of transparent yellow, and began to tear it to pieces without even seeing it.
Weaver suddenly wheeled and looked off down the creek. "I wonder what's wrong back there?" he grumbled. "The boys have quit singing, and they don't do that when everything is moving along smoothly. Suppose we see if anything's happened; eh?"
He retraced his steps of a few minutes before, with Wolfe following at his heels. They found the crew, even to the engineer, standing grouped under a crooked water-oak; all their jaws were sagging, and all their eyes were staring upward.
Suspended by a white cord, some twenty feet from the ground, was a foot-square piece of cardboard which bore in pencil this crudely-printed warning:
BLACK MAN DON'TLET THE SUN GODOWN ON YE HEAR
"Say, Boss Weaver, suh," inquired a dozen uneasy voices at once, "what do that mean, suh?"
Weaver did not answer the question. He looked toward Wolfe. It was Wolfe's place to answer. But there was only silence.
The driver of the locomotive approached the foreman then. "What them mountain people gwine do to us black men effen the sun go down on us heah, Boss Weaver, suh?" he asked frightenedly.
Before Weaver could utter the "I don't know" that was on his tongue, there came from a point a few rods above in the laurel the keen report of a rifle. The white cord parted, and the piece of lettered cardboard fluttered to the ground. It was a forceful answer to the negro engineer's question.
"Good marksman, all right," Weaver observed.
"Stay right here until I come back, boys," ordered Wolfe.
He hurried up the rugged steep, searched the laurel and the rocks, and saw no sign of any one. He climbed to the top of a huge boulder, and looked in all directions from that point of vantage. Then he saw a huge, gaunt man with a rifle under his arm step from the underbrush below and walk rapidly toward the settlement of the Wolfes. It was his iron-hearted father.
"I thought so," he muttered.
He went back to Weaver and the negroes.
"I'll answer for your safety, boys, until the middle of the afternoon," he told the crew. It would require that long, he figured, to build the railroad to the deadline. "You know very well that you can trust me to keep my promises. Double pay from now on. Go to it."
The laborers resumed their work, but not very willingly. There was a spirit of certain danger in the air they breathed.
A few minutes later, Wolfe faced this pointed inquiry from his foreman: "Well, sir, have you any plans as to what we're going to do after the middle of the afternoon?"
"I must admit, Weaver," promptly, "that I haven't."
He thought, then, of something he had once said to Colonel Mason: "When I get to the barrier, I'll go over it, or under it, or around it, or through it."
The little speech had seemed dramatic enough at the moment of its utterance. Now it seemed tragic and pitiful.
"See here," said Weaver, gripping Wolfe's arm firmly, "there's only one way out for you. I'll not deny that it's a hard way; it will cripple or kill your first purpose, the—er, elevating of your people; but there's no alternative. The law, I mean; that's your one way out. When you cross the deadline with the track, your dad and his men will be up there on the Big Blackfern's side of the Gate with rifles in their hands—all but your brother Nathan—and the devil will be to pay. After that, you won't be able to keep the law out; don't you see, sir?"
"The law——"
"Yes," Weaver nodded. He continued, "It wouldn't be hard for Starns and a picked posse to steal upon them from behind while their attention is turned toward your crossing the deadline, and arrest them; it could be done without any trouble, I think. Then they could be kept—er, out of harm's way until they promised to behave themselves. I'm only your foreman, I know, sir. But I don't want to see you fail!"
Wolfe shook his head. "Even granting that the arrest could be made without hurting anybody, it isn't the thing for me to do," he said gloomily. "My people would refuse to work when they were put into jail; they'd be starved to it; it would build up a hatred for me that no length of time could wipe away. It is useless to talk about it, Weaver."
"But there's no other way, sir!" the foreman insisted.
"No other way?" echoed Wolfe. He faced Weaver sternly. "I'll show you. There must be another way. It's up to me to make another way."
The other smiled a rather mirthless smile. "All right," he said. "Go the limit. I'll try to be there with you, if you need me, no matter what or where the limit may be. I'm no quitter, sir."
"I'm very much obliged to you," Wolfe said earnestly, "but——"
He never finished it.
The work went on sluggishly. The negroes were afraid of the men who could so easily cut down a hanging thread with a rifle's bullet. Weaver had learned well the subtle diplomacy necessary to his trade; but, try as he would, he was unable to get those under him to move beyond a certain pace.
Just before noon, Little Buck Wolfe went to see his father. Old Buck sat in his cabin's front doorway; he was moodily whittling at a stick of soft red cedar. The son stopped at the rickety gate, andleaned lightly against one of the decaying posts.
"Good morning, father," he said brightly.
The big mountain man looked up, saw his namesake, and went to his feet. His face was the face of a savage now. His coal-black eyes glared his unspeakable contempt. Every big, hard muscle in his body seemed to be gathering itself for action. He was a human tiger.
"What in hell do ye want here?" he demanded in a voice that was as cold and as merciless as death itself.
"I came to ask you for advice," quietly. "I'm very much up against it, as the saying is. If you were in my place, trying to help your people, trying to make good for the sake of those who put up everything they had to back you, trying to win out without recourse to law—I say, if you were in my place, what would you do? You know the circumstances. Please advise me."
The shot failed to tell. It glanced off without leaving the slightest impression as a shot.
"Ef I was in yore place," came readily and sneeringly, "I'd change my name to Singleton—or Dawg—and 'en I'd go out in the woods and sp'ile a good rope by a-hangin' myself with it. That's edzactly what I'd do ef I was in yore place."
"That's no answer to my question," the younger Wolfe protested, trying hard to hold his temper in leash and succeeding barely. There were times when education fought almost a losing fight with his hot hill blood, the blood that was not so far removed from the dark wildernesses and their animal skins and clubs with heads of stone, and this was one of those times.
"Yes, it is, too," blared Old Buck Wolfe. "Ef the's anything else ye wants to know, spit 'er out; ef the' hain't, make some quick tracks away from here!"
"One thing more," said the son, with enforced calmness. "Do you actually mean to make murderers and outlaws of yourselves in the attempt to keep me out of the basin?"
His father took up from beside the doorstep a repeating rifle of heavy caliber. Old Buck held the weapon in his left hand, and with his right forefinger slowly tapped the blued-steel barrel.
"The fust man 'at drives a spike on this side o' the little poplar in the Gate will be shot by me, myself," he declared in a voice that had become hoarse. "Now ye've got my word fo' that, and you know mighty well 'at I keeps my word."
"The first man to drive a spike on this side of the deadline," Little Buck Wolfe replied, "will be me. You know that you could never shoot your own son. Our people never would stand for that. You wouldn't be chief of your 'clan' any longer. You'd be cast out, just as you've cast me out. And if it's necessary, I'll drive all the spikes that remain to be driven."
This was a shot that made an impression. Old Buck had gone ashen behind his beard, and his eyes were wide and staring. But he was not long in a quandary. His rage had drawn him deep into the vortex of primitive passion. The ties of blood were none too sacred now. He advanced a few steps, and shook a great fist at his fifth son.
"Ef you don't believe I'll shoot you fo' a-drivin' the fust spike on this side o' the little poplar, jest try it and see!" he cried. "I'll do it ef I haf to shoot myself wi' the next ca'tridge in my rifle. I'll do it ef I haf to shoot every man Wolfe by name. And ef you think you can send a sheriff's posse out here to take me, try it. The' hain't no sheriff's posse 'at can take me!"
He meant every word of it. He was almost a madman now. It drove young Wolfe into the depths of despair.
"I'm not going to send a sheriff's posse out here," he said broken-heartedly. He had a strangle-hold on his temper now. "I'm not going to resort to law. I'm even forgetting that I'm an officer of the law myself. I think—perhaps—I'd better—I'm going to drive that first spike and let you shoot me. It's the only honorable way out for me. Good-by, and maybe I'll meet you at another Gate after we've met again at the Devil's!"
He turned and walked off blindly.
Blindly, and bitterly. The fates were set against him. The fates were laughing in their sleeves at the failure of his strongest efforts, at the defeat of his best impulses. In his despondency he really believed that it would be best to drive thespike of destiny, take the bullet from the cruel, never-erring rifle and die, and go out honorably along with the soul of his iron father. Only two need die this way. The work would be carried on by others, the Masons would not lose, and his benighted people would ultimately be led into the paths of light. The result, surely, would be worth the sacrifice.
He found difficulty awaiting him when he reached the workers below the Gate. The negroes had talked matters over among themselves, and they were anxious to be off from the place where danger lurked everywhere. Wolfe went into their midst, and prevailed upon them finally to stay with him for two more hours. The little railroad began to creep toward the deadline once more.
Wolfe seated himself beside the old trail, on a stone the size of a small barrel, and watched the work almost without seeing anything of it. A hand placed lightly on his shoulder from behind brought him back to himself. He turned his head and saw a tall, slender but very muscular, finely-featured young mountaineer smiling down upon him. Through the newcomer's sharp resemblance to Tot Singleton, Wolfe recognized him as her brother, "Fightin' Lon"—the only brother she had.
"Hello!" said Wolfe. He rose and proffered his hand. Young Singleton took the hand and shook it warmly.
"We've jest had a letter from pap," said Fightin' Lon, in his musical drawl. "Tot she sent it out from town by a hunter. Pap says he had to git a real lawyer to write the letter fo' him, and we had to ax the hunter to read it fo' us. Pap he said 'at he was acquitted on grounds of self defense and 'count of no one believing Cat-Eye Mayfield and 'at he'd be a-comin' home right off, and he said fo' us to light in and he'p you any way we could, Little Buck. So we gethered ourselves together and cut the mustard right down here to he'p you build yore railroad, all of us."
As though he had given a signal, more than a score of stalwart, strapping hillmen emerged from the thick laurel, not one of them armed, and formed a half-circle before Wolfe. The Unaka Lumber Company's general manager shook hands with the last man of them.
"We heerd you a-talkin' to them 'ar darkies, Little Buck," smiled Fightin' Lon. "You needn't to keep 'em a minute longer. We'll lay yore road fo' ye, clean smack-dab to the top o' the Dome ef ye wants it to go thar. And it shain't cost ye a red copper cent!"
Wolfe began to stare at the brown and gold carpet of autumn leaves under his feet. Here was a dilemma, indeed. He didn't dare refuse the assistance of the Singletons, on their own account; on account of his own people, he didn't dare to accept that assistance. He wondered it were possible to make Lon and his kinsmen understand. That appeared to be his only hope.
"Men," he said impressively, "first I want to say that I don't know how to thank you as I'd like to thank you, for this. Remember that. I'm grateful. Now pay close attention to what I'm going to say to you."
He made them an eloquent address there in the mellow autumn sunlight, there amid the sad glory of falling and fallen leaves. He appealed with impassioned words to the good that he knew slumbered in their half-savage breasts. There was little in his heart, indeed, that he did not lay bare to them. But he saw their faces cloud in spite of all that he could say. They could not, or would not, see far enough into the truth to grasp his point of view.
"Let loose o' that 'ar pizenvine-and-honey stuff!" Fightin' Lon finally interrupted. "You're a-wastin' puffectly good breath a-doin' it!"
The Singletons had reasoned, of course, that they were bending their pride close to the breaking-point by conferring this great favor. They had debated the question warmly upon receiving the letter from old Alex from Nashville, and the affirmative had carried only because of the stubborn insistence of Lon. Consequently, Lon was now by far the angriest of them all. He drew himself up as straight as an Indian, and, like an Indian, folded his fine sun-browned arms over his ample chest. He held his head high, and looked down along his aquiline nose and to the pale face of Little Buck Wolfe.
"Yore own folks has done cut you off,"he said, his voice dry and hard and pinched. "They even put up a tombstone wi' yore name on it as a sign 'at you was dead fo'ever so far as they was concerned. I know 'em, Little Buck, and I know 'at you cain't never be at peace with 'em. We're mad at this, o' course. We got a danged good right to be mad. We had to fo'git a lot o' things to come down here this a-way, and it hurts to be turned down flat. We come willin' to work the blood o' our hearts out through our hands fo' ye. We come willin' to fight fo' ye ef ye need it!"
He swallowed hard, and continued hotly. "Halfway stuff don't go wi' us at all. I give ye this here: you can either put us to work without any pay, or else we'll take the Lost Trail's side o' the Gate and stop yore railroad afore it gits to the poplar tree deadline! Well," impatiently, "which one is it a-goin' to be?"
"I believe," said Wolfe, "that I told you my people would fire on you the minute you went to work for me. I explained to——"
He stopped trying to talk. It was of no use to talk.
"Didn't I tell ye," almost shouted Lon Singleton, "'at we was willin' to fight fo' ye as well as work? Why, fightin' it's our middle names, dang it to the devil!"
It was here that Weaver the foreman took a hand. He walked angrily up to Singleton.
"Don't you see that you're tormenting him for nothing?" he asked. "He's got the right dope, sure; you're wrong, absolutely. And it won't pay to try sniping at us from the rocks up there, so take my advice and don't. Now take your men away, won't you?"
He was fumbling nervously at the butt of the big revolver he wore at his right hip. The Singletons glanced at each other, winked, turned into the laurel and were gone like so many spirits. Wolfe beckoned to his foreman.
"They'll be back pretty soon, Weaver. If they have to go home to get their rifles, it'll be an hour—but they won't have to go home to get their rifles. We'd better let the men go. Tell them——"
A rifleshot rang out sharply. A bullet struck a negro's shovel, ricocheted, and buried itself deep in a tree with a quick and spitefulsnak! Another rifle bullet came whining down and splintered the handle of a pick. Still another leaden warning struck a light steel rail that rested on a laborer's shoulder, gave forth a nastyting! and dropped, flattened, to the ground. The blacks let out a wild howl of fright, and broke incontinently for the shelter offered by the four thousand ties. Once there, they looked reproachfully toward Wolfe; he had promised to answer for their safety, and they were certainly not safe now!
Wolfe and Weaver also went to the shelter of the ties. They did not succeed in convincing even one of the crew that they had not foreseen the immediate thing they were facing.
Before long the Singletons separated, a man to himself, seeking to get at all sides of the refuge the negroes had chosen. They did not mean to shoot to kill; they meant only to shoot to scare. If they stopped the building of the little railroad, that which they considered their injured pride would be healed.
Then they opened fire again with hair-fine aim. But a glancing bullet drew blood from the engineman's forearm—and Wolfe heard bitter words of blame directed toward himself. It put Wolfe at the end of the tether that had been strained so hard. He could have held himself in no longer. The primitive part of him rose above his better self. He snatched his revolver from its holster, and turned upon Weaver almost savagely.
"We're going to fight, my friend," he said calmly but with a dangerous glitter in his eyes. "Their bluff is getting serious—if it's a bluff. A barricade all around us first—at it, boys!"
The ties made it. When it was done, Little Buck Wolfe, bright-eyed, white in the face, straightened behind it and began to look for a Singleton. He wanted to see Fightin' Lon. He had forgotten now that Lon was Tot's only brother; that Tot had loved him nearly all her life; and that Tot had saved him from death at the hands of the murderous Cat-Eye Mayfield—the vise of circumstance had pressed it entirely out of his memory in that moment of crisis.
He caught a glimpse of Fightin' Lon, and he fired six shots at him!
And Fightin' Lon, safe behind a tree, laughed down, "Bah! You couldn't hit the United States, Little Buck, wi' a double-barreled scatter-gun!"
Wolfe growled out one of the few oaths of his responsible years, and began to reload his revolver's cylinder hastily. A Singleton bullet jumped his hat tantalizingly on his head, but he paid no attention whatever to it. When he began to fire again, the foreman joined in with his own revolver. The air in the barricade became thick with powdersmoke. The echoes of the firing became one continuous roar.
Then one of the hillmen cried out in pain, and following that, the acting-chief of the Singletons shouted in a black rage, "You've got blood now, Little Buck Wolfe! We're a-goin' to shoot to kill from now on!"
Weaver caught the general manager by a shoulder and drew him down and out of danger. Bullets began to fairly pepper the barricade. The real seriousness of their position smote Wolfe like a blow. He wasn't used to this.
"Look up there!" said Weaver, pointing toward the Big Blackfern's jaw of Devil's Gate.
Old Buck Wolfe and his men, all of them armed, stood in plain view up there among the boulders.
"If your people don't help us," Weaver went on, "right here is where we either stick up a white flag, or check out. We can't handle the Singletons; there's too many of them. Let me ask your father for help!"
"No!" Wolfe objected. "No to the white flag, too!"
But Weaver was already shouting lustily to the leader of the Wolfes.
And Old Buck roared back this, "No, sirree! I've done promised I'd never start another fight wi' the Singletons!"
Then a great silence fell over everything. The Singletons were saving ammunition, and waiting patiently for a man inside the puny barricade to show his head. Wolfe knew they wouldn't wait long. He knew they would become impatient, and rush the barricade. He looked around at the groveling negroes. Their lives were in his keeping; he was responsible for their safety. For their sake, he decided that he would humiliate himself in the eyes of both the Singletons and the Wolfes.
He drew from his pocket a white handkerchief, ever the emblem of rank cowardice to the mountaineer, and began to knot a corner of it to a sourwood switch.
But it was not necessary that he suffer the humiliation of being looked upon as a coward. A big, square-chested man came running up the track; he bellowed two words that were as magic—"Go home!"
The attacking party turned unhesitatingly to obey!
Wolfe leaped over the barricade to meet the newcomer. Wolfe was altogether himself now. The spirit of civilization was again in the ascendency.
"Alex Singleton, by the grace of God!" he cried dramatically.