XVIII
Ten minutes after the slow rain set in, the grounds about the almost consumed building were deserted save for the general manager. Wolfe had not been able to leave the thing that had been his palm of victory and the pride of his heart. Colonel Mason and a number of others had insisted upon his seeking shelter, to no avail; they had then insisted upon remaining with him, but he wouldn't permit it. He walked slowly and alone, like a sentinel upon his beat, and watched the flames die down and leave a great pile of glowing coals and red-hot, twisted iron and steel. When finally he turned toward the house he had built for his father, he was wet to the skin.
Just as he left the dimming red glare, there came to his ears a dull rumbling that was like an explosion of dynamite. He paid little attention to it then, though he remembered it vividly enough afterward.
Already he had decided upon a course for the future. He would go to one of the lumbering districts of the Northwest, and establish himself there; he would pay back, the Masons first, every cent of the money that had been lost in the ill-starred Unaka Lumber Company. It would require the best part of his life, perhaps, but he would do it. It should be his one purpose.
Whitney Fair met him on the new house's veranda. They were about to pass, when Fair said gruffly, "I'll take the key to the office door, if you please."
Wolfe frowned. He knew why Fair was going to the office. The wonder of it was that Fair had not demanded the key sooner. He meant, of course, to telephone Sheriff Starnes at Johnsville, and notify him of the outrageous doings of the escaped prisoners.
"The key, if you please!" Fair growled.
In no heart are the ties of blood stronger than in the mountain heart. Wolfe drew back. His kinsmen had wronged him deeply, it was true, but they were still his kinsmen. They hadn't had the advantage that had been his.
He took the key from his pocket, and gave it over. There was, plainly, nothing else to do. Anyway, he told himself, the chances were that the jail delivery had already become known, and Sheriff Starnes and his posse were perhaps even then on their way out to the basin. Whitney Fair turned the collar of his greatcoat up close around his neck, and hastened toward the crude little office.
Wolfe entered the new house without rapping. There was a cheery log fire in the living-room. Old Buck Wolfe, his blistered back bandaged, sat very straight on a couch.
"Where are the others?" his son asked.
"I run 'em out," sourly.
"Why?"
"I wanted to be by my lowdown self, damn it," answered the old mountaineer. "Whose fine dwellin' is this here?"
"Yours and mother's. I built it for you."
Old Buck nodded thoughtfully. "That's what they told me, but I jest couldn't believe it was the truth to save my life. And whose fine fiddle is that up 'ar on the mantel?"
"Yours. I bought it for you."
Old Buck cleared his throat. "That's what they told me, but I jest couldn't believe it. I figgered you'd got married to Alex Singleton's Tot and lived here wi' her. Hadn't ha' been fo' them Singletons, I reckon I'd ha' done been burnt to a cinder; wouldn't I?"
"There's no doubt of it," promptly.
"Little Buck," the father said with striking earnestness, "no man cain't be the same atter he's look death in the eyes, and tasted of it, like I've done tonight. Death it showed me things. Death and the cross and the crown of thorns. I'm a-tellin' ye, son, a man can shorely live a whole etarnity in his one dyin' minute—though I'm no coward, and don't ye fo'git that. I reckon I been the meanest, lowdownest polecat 'at ever lived, hain't I?"
"I guess not." Wolfe the younger turned his face away. "There are worse men than you."
Silence fell between them. Old Buck's fifth son then went gloomily to the semi-darkness of the veranda, and dropped into a chair.
After what seemed a very long time to Little Buck Wolfe, a slim feminine figure, in clothes that were wet and bedraggled, ran through the gateway, ran up to him, and put a hand rather hard on his shoulder.
"Tot!" he exclaimed. "Where've you been, Tot?"
"I followed Mr. Fair," breathlessly. She dropped to her knees beside his chair and went on, "He told Sheriff Starnes everything over the phone. They'd already found out about the escape, and Deputy Sheriff Howard Cartwright'll be here with a posse before very long. And—listen! The office safe has been dynamited and robbed! Mr. Fair found your gloves and flashlight lyin' on the floor, Little Buck, and he thinks you did it! He thinks that's why you stayed behind. He told the sheriff it was you. Oh, I'm so sorry; it seems that the—the Lord is tryin' to see how much you can bear!"
"I heard the explosion that opened the safe," Wolfe told Tot. "How I wish I'd investigated then!"
He felt through one of his pockets after another. Both gloves and flashlight were gone.
"I must have left them in the locomotive's cab," he reasoned aloud, "and some ransacker found them. Afterward the ransacker found the dynamite in the tool-house, and the safe in the office. It all fits in very nicely, Tot."
"Yes. How much money was there in the safe?" she asked.
"Twenty-eight hundred."
He went to his feet, and at that instant his father appeared on the veranda. Old Buck walked slowly and with considerable pain. He had overheard the conversation between his son and the daughter of old Alex Singleton.
"The fire it was all my fault," he confessed. "Ef it hadn't ha' been fo' me, nothin' wouldn't ha' been set afire at all. I headed the whole thing, me and a kag o' licker did. Tot, I want you to go and tell Oliver and Brian and the others 'at they must light a rag out o' here and keep from a-bein' arrested. Tell 'em to go away back to the Balsam Cone section. Their wimmenfolks and children can foller 'em atter a little while. I made this here debt, and I'll pay it all myself. Tell 'em that, Tot, please."
Tot Singleton looked questioningly toward Little Buck, who said no word, gave no sign.
"Please, Tot," the old hillman begged, "go and tell Oliver and Brian and the rest what I said. The debt it's all mine, and I hain't a-goin' to let nobody else pay none of it. Please go, Tot!"
"Must I?" Tot whispered to Little Buck.
She had no answer whatever. After half a minute of waiting, she disappeared in the rainy night.
A quarter of an hour afterward, the clan stole hurriedly up to its leader. Old Buck asked them to go while there was yet time. But they would not agree to it. They wouldn't be yellow. One man should not pay all of the debt to the law.
"Ef you'd jest go along wi' us, Buck,"finally said Brian Wolfe, "then we might go."
"But I cain't hardly walk!" Old Buck exclaimed. "I'd be nothin' but a drawback and dead weight on ye. Go on, boys! You cain't resk a-bein' sent to the State penitenchy, a-leavin' yore famblies to make their own way; don't ye see? It hain't fair to 'em! Yore fust duty lays to yore wimmenfolks and children, boys; hain't ye got hoss sense enough to know that much?"
Little Buck Wolfe caught his strapping brother Oliver by the shoulders and shook him.
"You've got to do it, Oliver," he said hoarsely. "I'll hide him—" he pointed to his father, and looked covertly toward the open front door—"somewhere; and when he's able to travel he can follow the rest of you to the Balsam Cone country. You've got to do it!"
"Atter the way we treated you?" Oliver Wolfe's voice was almost pathetic. "You'll shorely hide him?"
"I certainly will. You'd better hurry, or it'll be too late, Oliver."
Not until they were gone did Little Buck Wolfe realize fully just what he had done. He had put himself into the place of an accessory to the crime of arson, and he was liable to almost as much punishment as the principals themselves! The thought was staggering to him. He began to pace the veranda floor nervously.
Tot Singleton appeared before him. She understood fully. She strove to make him feel that he had but done right.
"Don't feel so blue about it, Little Buck," she said to him gently. "What else could you do? Their families need them more than the prison needs them. They're as sorry now as the penitentiary ever could make them. Besides, the mountain man can't stand imprisonment for long; most of 'em wouldn't live through the fifteen years—that's what I understood Mr. Fair to say it would be. You m-mustn't worry, Little Buck!"
Wolfe stepped to his father and took him by the arm.
"We must go," he whispered. "Cartwright will soon be here. I must have you hidden before he comes. We must go!"
"I guess," Old Buck demurred, "I'd better let Cartwright have me."
"No! Let's go—for mother's sake. You must think of her, and not of yourself. You've been too unkind to her in the past." He was fairly dragging his sire toward the steps. "Quick—we must be quick. Fair may come back at any minute, and he—let's go!"
Old Buck permitted his son to lead him out of the yard and away in the murky drizzle.
A bleak, gray dawn was slowly breaking over the scene of black desolation when the two men arrived at a small-mouthed cavern in the side of the Big Blackfern. The elder of the pair squeezed himself through the rocky opening with some difficulty. The other placed a great flat stone over the hole, and almost ran back to the new house to tell his mother and the Masons and Tot Singleton good-by; he meant to start for the far-away Northwest immediately.
Whitney Fair met him at the gate. Fair had discovered that every man of the escaped Wolfes had disappeared; he was purple in the face, and his small, pale-blue eyes glittered like those of an angry animal.
He seized one of the lapels of Wolfe's coat and cried savagely, "You'll pay for this! You warned them, and that makes you as guilty as they are—give me the money you took from the safe!"
"I didn't take any money from the safe," Wolfe replied with a level calmness that surprised even himself.
"You did!"
"Be careful, Mr. Fair!"
Whitney Fair went ashen instead of purple. "And there are some other things against you, too," he fumed. "You had an agreement by which you were to have this land for a pittance an acre when the sawing was done; you drew your salary for—er, more than a year in advance. Oh, but I'll have the net around you good and hard before you know what's happened! Hand that money right back, you thief!"
There was a quick step behind him. Colonel Mason, tall, patrician, and now white, caught his arm.
"Let him go, sir!" the colonel ordered hotly. "He is no thief—and anybody that says he is, sir, lies outright!"
Fair sniffed like a disgusted hound."Meaning that I have lied outright, Colonel?"
"Exactly that," the old Southerner said quickly. "If the shoe doesn't fit, take it off!"
The cleft in Whitney Fair's chin deepened in a black scowl. He swore. He took his right hand from Wolfe's coat lapel, tore his arm from Colonel Mason's grip, and struck Colonel Mason in the chest——
The world turned as red as blood to Little Buck Wolfe. He couldn't stand idly by and see the man who had been to him a better father than his own father thus brutally mistreated. He went at Fair like a combination of cyclone, pile-driver and battering-ram and, with his two fists pounded Fair until his coarse face was almost unrecognizable. The worsted man sank dazedly to the wet ground.
"The next time you feel like striking anybody that's seventy-five pounds lighter and twenty years older than you," advised Wolfe, "be sure that there's no son of his near to take his part."
He led the colonel aside, and took him by the hand.
"I'm going away," he whispered, and he hastily explained why. "You can see that the evidence is big against me, and I can't possibly spare the time that it would take to spend a term in prison. I'll write when I think it's safe. Tell my two mothers and Tot good-by for me. I——"
Strong man that he was, he had choked. Colonel Mason choked, too.
"Son," he whispered thickly, "be careful when you write. Fate has left nothing undone, it seems—Fair is soon to be appointed postmaster at Johnsville! But you don't owe us anything, Arnold, my boy. We are willing to accept life's brimming cup of bitterness along with life's honey-sweetness. It was not your fault, certainly! But I must admit that the case against you looks bad, for Fair is undoubtedly influential, and you really had better get out from under. Good luck to you, and God be with you always——"
He was unable to say more. Mrs. Mason and Old Buck Wolfe's wife ran toward them from the house. The two women had seen and overheard much; they had easily guessed the truth. Wolfe embraced them tenderly, and kissed them on the cheek with reverence. Then he tore himself from their arms, and went rapidly toward the foot of scarred Lost Trail Mountain.
Once behind the border of burned and blackened laurels that stood along the edge of the basin's bottom, he noted that the slow rain had ceased, and halted and looked back. He could see the long, strong arm of the law, in the shape of the doughty Deputy Sheriff Howard Cartwright and a posse, coming by way of Devil's Gate!
Wolfe ran toward the other end of the basin, keeping always behind the border of blackened laurel. Before he had covered half a mile, he met Alex Singleton and his son, Fightin' Lon. Both the Singletons wore thick bandages over their palms. They questioned Wolfe anxiously, and he told them all there was to tell.
"You shorely can't slip out o' the basin now," declared old Alex. "That man Cartwright, I knows him. He used to be a revenuer. He's got eyes like forty hawks; they say he never fails to bring in his man. Better stay hid in the basin untel tomorrow night, anyhow, Little Buck. I'll hide ye in the apple-hole onder my cabin floor, and they cain't never find ye thar! Come on wi' me—quick."
The fugitive was hidden among bushels and bushels of green and yellow pippins. The boards were put back into place above him, and a crude table was dragged over the spot. Lying down there under the floor, he heard Alex Singleton and his son take chairs to the front doorway and sit down noisily. He heard stout Mrs. Singleton whistling one of her old-fashioned hymns in the lean-to.
A long hour afterward, there came to his sensitive ears sounds made by the tramping of dozens of human feet and ironshod hoofs.
Cartwright accosted the Singleton leader sharply. "Seen any o' the Wolfes?"
"Seed 'em all last night at the fire," quite readily, "and I seed Little Buck a-runnin' toward the Lost Trail from his pap's new house somethin' like a hour and a half ago."
The deputy then demanded pointedly, "Are any of them here?"
It had become, after a fashion, a battleof wits. Alex Singleton rose in the doorway.
"Howard Cartwright," he almost roared, "d'ye thing fo' a minute 'at I'd have little enough sense to hide anybody from the law? I hain't a-hankerin' atter the penitenchy sence I've seed the inside of it, and le' me tell ye that. But ef you think I'm a-lyin', s'arch my house and satisfy yoreself!" It was adroit.
The posse had already surrounded the cabin. Cartwright entered and looked carefully in the loft, under the beds, in the two big chimneys of stone—everywhere but in the apple-hole.
He apologized after he had finished searching the premises. They told him that it was entirely and absolutely all right. Mrs. Singleton even stopped her everlasting whistling long enough to tell him that it was all right.