CHAPTER III
For a long time after Lloyd had quitted the place Clotilda Pinnott stood on the porch and listened to his retreating footsteps. An impressive silence had succeeded the turmoils of the storm. No more the echo repeated the sonorous proclamation of the imperious thunder. One could hardly realise how the trumpeting wind had blared through those narrow, deep, mute valleys with their yet more secluded, cup-like coves. The glancing lyrical notes of the rain, falling on the ear like myriads of uncomprehended words keyed to harmony in rhythmic measure, had left but now and again the patter of glittering silver drops from the low-hanging boughs of some moisture-weighted tree. In this quiescence of nature she could mark his progress, as silent, too, she leaned against the post of the rickety porch, her fresh gown of faint blue cotton still distinct in the fading light, so clarified was the air, so pervasive the reflection of the great expanse of the deeply yellow western sky, glowing like burnished copper above the dusky purple mountains that deployed against the horizon line, high above the emerald valleys below. Now she heard the impact of his foot on stone, and again it was the shifting of sand and gravel dislodged by his step that told her he had turned the curve of the road; now she knew he was almost immediately in a line with the house, but nearly a thousand feet below on the mountain side. She was apprised when he passed the chalybeate spring, not indeed by the sound of his tread, for the distance here was too great; some vague reverberations began to issue from the gigantic gneiss cliff hard by that rose austere, grey, columnar, nearly one thousand feet sheer, standing out in half relief from the main mountain mass like a flying buttress of some buried castle in the mythical days of the giants. Its niched and creviced summit was on a level with the cabin perched so high on the mountain side, and now and then a broken vibration betokened the sound of a step below; then came the echo of a voice faintly singing the orchard song. Then silence—a long lapse of time—and still silence.
"He's gone," she said. "He's gone!"
She sighed with a vague languor, an unappreciated pain, and shifted her posture. The tension of her vigilance was relaxed. She stretched up both her arms against the post and dully yawned. Then she looked out at the scene with the effect of observing it for the first time. For a long interval she gazed at the burnished translucent yellow glow of the west that despite its brilliance seemed to diffuse no light upon the world below. Shadows were mustering; the valley beneath could hardly be discerned now, but for the rising of the mists. Their white glimmer among the darker tree tops prolonged the visibility of the forests. Only the horizon line, sharply drawn against the saffron glamours of the heavens, preserved the contour of the mountains, otherwise lost in the dull purplish dusk.
No longer silence reigned. First she heard the tremulous trilling of a tree-toad; a pause ensued in the moist vacuity of the atmosphere, and then came a raucous tentative note of a frog, and presently there sounded a dozen like voices, and now the air rocked to and fro with the strophe and antistrophe of the batrachian tribe, all a-croak by the water courses, and the continuous shrilling of the cicada. All were loud in the calm twilight, so loud that an appreciated sense of silence seemed attendant on the evening star, pellucid, white, quivering in the yellow glow of the west, and the slow dropping of the crescent moon adown and adown the sky.
Clotilda appeared as if she were going to meet it, as she suddenly stepped into the bridle path and began to take her way up the steep ascent of the mountain. A pine tree showed high against the heavens, and as she looked the moon seemed for a time as if entangled amidst its fibrous boughs. Then, as the direction of the path veered, the mystic cresset once more swung against the rich daffodil sky, with opaline glimmers trailing after on all the sea of mist which now submerged valley and forest, still vibrant with the voices of the night; the mist rose above the precipices to the left and tossed its waves, spectre-like, detached, flickering amongst the dense jungle of the laurel growths through which the path had begun to stray. Its trend grew difficult to discern; now it was obliterated, then it reappeared, and again was altogether and finally lost to view. A darksome, dubious way to be sure, and lonelier than aught might express. Even Clotilda lingered, reluctant, perhaps, turning her white face toward the moon, its glamour full upon her pensive pallor. The darkness annulled all else save only this elfin face among the glossy leaves gazing on the magic bow of pearl and loath to quit the light. Suddenly she was gone.
The rhododendron jungle closed about her. If there were ever a path in its densities only memory might discern it, so thick and interlacing were the evergreen branches. Down and down she went, retracing her way, it might seem, and ever and anon parting the redundant dripping boughs to gaze upward at the moon. She evidently steered her course through this sea of leaves by its station in the sky. More than once she deviated from a direct line, but it was an oft-travelled route and she showed no signs of hesitation or doubt. When she reached a moss-covered rock, lying with a score of its unbroken kind in the density of the jungle she seated herself for an interval of rest after her long tramp, betraying not an instant's uncertainty of the landmark. She rose presently, passed between the great boulder and another, impossible to be distinguished from it even in the light of mid-day, stepped down into a crevice beneath them, and vanished from the world.
She had entered an underground passage so often traversed that the gruesome lonely way did not seem long to her, nor more beset with danger than a dark hall of one's familiar home. Her foot struck upon rock here and there where obviously there had been drilling and blasting to remove obstructions to free passage; now and again a wing passed her, and as with a woman's horror of a bat she shrank aside, the uncanny, mouse-like cry of the creature smote the silence with a nerve-thrilling shrillness and she set her teeth in endurance, though all on edge from the repetitious echo. Louder sounds soon caught her attention and these too the echo multiplied. She seemed to hear many voices in the infinitely lonely subterranean reaches of the mountain. At last a vague light began to glimmer dully at the end of a long descent. As she drew nearer and turned suddenly the cavern opened broadly before her and the flash in her eyes was almost overpowering for a moment. She stood still as she always did here, and put her face in her hands to gradually accustom her sight to the transition from intensest gloom to glare.
Yet it was not that the light in itself was so powerful. The glimmer of a tallow dip, however, was adequate to summon glittering coruscations from the great crystals of iridescent calc-spar that studded the ceiling, and the limestone walls reflected the light with myriad sparkles. Their gleaming whiteness was shared by the stalactites which hung down from the roof to meet the stalagmites uprising from the floor, and in the midst of this colonnade of the fantastic sculpture of the waters and the ages—even now she could hear the ceaseless trickle as drop by drop the mountain rill, charged with its solution of lime, wrought out the purpose of creation—the moonshiner had mounted his still. The great rotund copper, standing over the rude furnace of stone masonry, the slouching uncouth figures of the distillers, with their grotesque shadows following them amidst these columns of mystic whiteness, the coiling worm, the big ungainly mash-tubs, the reeking mass of refuse pomace at one side, were all as incongruous with the weird subterranean beauty of the place as some unseemly work of kitchening wrought in the halls of a palace.
And indeed even these uncultured louts could not be insensible of the unique splendours of these surroundings. Unlike the majesty of the mountain landscape, rendered stale by custom, since from birth they had known naught else, this expression of nature was rare and strange, and now and again their minds opened to its aspect.
"I jes' tell you uns, boys," Shadrach Pinnott sometimes remarked over his meditative pipe, "the looks o' this hyar spot air plumb splendugious. Even the parlour in the hotel at Colb'ry ain't ez fine a sight ez this place, fur I hev walked along the front porch thar, an' looked in the door an' viewed it."
The rare qualities of the place aided their appreciation, for though caves, vast and varied, were common in the mountains, and also "rock-houses," as limited grottoes of special geological deposits were called, they were generally of a different formation. This was not a limestone region, and only through some gigantic "fault" of the ranges, bringing diverse and alien strata into juxtaposition this calcareous cavern, these halls of white stone, with their stately colonnades and semblance of statuary and fantastic carvings, became possible. It was not, however, sufficiently rare to render it a curiosity or to lure hither the unwelcome explorer. Along the line of the range, perhaps within the purlieus of the same vast upheaval, a few limestone caves were known to the experience or the tradition of the mountaineers. But it was the only one of which the Pinnotts had knowledge, and they piqued themselves upon the fact that their discovery was not shared. Its existence, so far as Shadrach Pinnott was aware, was absolutely unsuspected save to a few woodsmen like himself whose prowlings amidst the primeval wildernesses of the Great Smoky had led them to these deep seclusions, and these were associated in the profit and the dangers of the illicit distillery. Thrice since the still had been in operation under the white splendours of the stalactitic roof had the marshal's men scoured this region in search of the manufacturers of moonshine whisky—thrice had they ridden away no wiser than they came. Old Shadrach began to fancy his stronghold impregnable, to look forward to a long lease of vinous prosperity. While it might be rumoured that he was concerned in the "wild-cat," he could not be tracked to his lair, and much immunity had made him daring and enterprising.
Even now the girl's entrance remained unnoticed in the vehemence of the remonstrance urged upon him, as he sat on one of the stalagmites that had risen only a few feet from the floor, the stalactite depending from above scarcely reaching the top of his old wool hat. He looked as immovable, as impervious to argument, as if his uncouth figure piecing out the column were of the same material.
"It's a resk—it's a turrible resk," one of the younger men was saying. He had an eager, ardent aspect, unlike the usual mountain type, the dull lack-lustre Pinnott men. He had large, excited brown eyes, and his chestnut hair hung in straight locks to the collar of his blue hickory shirt. His cheeks were red, and now that his blood was up it looked as if it might burst through them. He was tall and agile. He wore his boots drawn to the knees over his brown jeans trousers—there were spurs on the heels and his belt held a pistol. He stood in the flare of the tallow dip glimmering from a low stalagmite which was consigned to other table-like usage and held also a pone of bread, a box of tobacco, a pipe, and an old hat. The others had paused at their labours, the discussion evidently being a matter of special importance, and looked around without other change of posture. Tom Pinnott, stooping to lift a keg of "singlings" to the doubling still, his head lower than the vessel, seemed as if he might have been petrified in that attitude, so little did it seem possible to sustain it by mere muscle.
"It's a resk, to be sure," said Shadrach Pinnott, his face under his shock of red hair as devoid of animation as if it had been carved from a turnip. "But everything is a resk. Livin' is a resk—no man knows what he air goin' ter run up agin pernicious afore night,—but we uns all resk it."
"We uns don't all resk the revenuers though—fur nuthin'," Eugene Binley declared significantly.
It was a word seldom mentioned here—the old moonshiner elected to affect free agency and fear of naught. If he had been asked he would have averred that this place was selected because of its peculiar convenience in getting the gear easily down from the mountains. It had a great shaft-like opening only fifty feet above the valley, and by means of a "rope-and-tickle," as he called it, the kegs and barrels were lowered to a level space in a most secluded nook, whence they could be taken in the midst of the jungle of the laurel and rolled down the incline of a sandy slope, loaded into a waggon on the bank of the river and thence conveyed along the highway under cover of the night to the store of the merchants hardy enough to handle this extra-hazardous ware. Shadrach Pinnott would never have admitted in words the necessity to elude the raiders of the revenue force. He had so long enjoyed safety, ease, the pursuit unmolested of his chosen vocation, that he actually felt well within his rights, and that no interference with him was either justifiable or possible. This immunity had given his courage a tinge of fool-hardiness inconsistent with his age, his earlier devices of precaution, and the terrible and certain penalties of discovery. His character had taken on an arrogance unsuited to a man so obnoxious to the law. He knew, of course, that suspicions of moonshining had clung about his name, but never with aught of proof. The marshal's force came and went, and perhaps he was in their minds merely rated with others maligned by malice without a cause, for except that he was an unusually good farmer, and raised great crops of corn and orchards of fruit, no evidence of illicit distilling could be urged against him. For his crops and fruit, valueless on account of the distance from the rail and the impossibility of such cumbrous transportation with a profit, he could show great droves of well-fed hogs, and they, easily driven through the country, always found a market and brought fair prices. Therefore suspicion on this score was readily evaded, although his detractors significantly averred that hogs are always fattest when fed on distillery mash.
Dangers had grazed him close, however. Once his waggon had been stopped in the road with a barrel of "wild-cat" whisky under a load of goose-feathers. The driver at the approach of a body of mounted men had taken the alarm, cut the traces and fled with the team, and till it rotted the waggon had stood there unclaimed, its ownership unproved, and suspicion could not warrant even the arrest of a man with two good waggons in his shed and feather-beds on every couch in his house. These incidents and their discussion might well sharpen the eyes of the law, and to Eugene Binley it seemed actually opening the lion's jaws by main force to go to the Street Fair in the dry town of Colbury with a waggonload of the liquid product of the fiery still, under the flimsy disguise of baskets to sell. He had urged this to no avail.
"Them baskets?—why, me an' my industrious fambly hev been weavin' them splints all las' winter," and Shadrach gave a humorous snuffle intended to express the humble, frugal hopes of the worthy poor. Then he broke out into a satirical guffaw.
But the blunt mention of the "revenuers" was more distasteful. He could but feel his jeopardy when it was thus brought before him. Perhaps,—who knows?—now that he was old he regretted his course for the sake of his sons, to whom he must leave so desperate a vocation, so rash an example, so uncertain a fate. The delight of defying the law when the conscience can apprehend no wrong,—for Shadrach Pinnott could never be brought to perceive that he had not an inalienable prerogative to do as he chose with his own, his corn, his fruit, to feed them, to distil them, to export them, for were they not his, had he not wrested them from his own land by the sweat of his brow, the work of his hands,—better men have shared and resisted encroachments, and defied taxation, and risen in defence of claims that the law disallowed and made them law. Of late years he had more earnestly argued this position within himself, and now and again in full conclave as they all sat in the chill white cavern over the coiling toils of the worm, the younger men drinking in his prelections that had the native strength of apple brandy. He was an autocrat amongst them; it was an indignity, an affront, a disrespect to his grey hair and his pre-eminence in his station to confront him, even in warning, with so appalling and degrading a disaster. He retorted instantly.
"Waal, the resk ain't much ter be medjurin'," he said. "Folks that ain't so damned quick on the trigger ain't got no call ter be so powerful 'feared."
Eugene Binley winced palpably for a moment. Then his dark eyebrows met above his blazing eyes and the blood surged up from his cheeks to the roots of his hair. His breath came hard and fast. He turned from one to the other as two of the Pinnott sons, taking the word from their father, began alternately to bait him.
"Which air you uns mos' afeard of, Eujeemes—ter stay hyar by yer lone an' let the revenuers ketch ye?"
"Or ter go ter Colb'ry along o' we uns an' hev the sher'ff nab ye?" the other agreeably suggested.
Eugene Binley stood snorting like an angry horse, glancing first at the one with a bag of grain on his shoulder and then at the other with the keg of singlings, as both, half bent, leered up at him from under their shocks of frowsy light hair, their long tobacco-stained teeth all bared in their flouting laugh. His right hand was continually touching the butt of his pistol in his belt, and drawing back as if he found it scorching hot. The old man felt called upon to interfere.
"Leave Eujeemes be, boys," he said pacifically. "'Twon't do ter bait him like a b'ar. Mos' men in the mountings hev killed a man, fust or las', funnin' or fightin'. Eujeemes ain't the fust an' 'tain't likely ez he will be the las'."
"But 't war self-defence," the harassed creature cried out in a harsh, strained voice. He had made this plea often enough at the bar of conscience—his flight had precluded his arraignment at the bar of justice. "'T war self-defence—the world knows it, and the law allows it."
"Then why n't ye leave it ter men, Eujeemes?" Tom's strong back was still bent under the keg of singlings, and his face was still maliciously a-grin. Shadrach could not so easily call off his pack.
This problem of "leaving it to men," the rural synonym of a court of justice, had tortured the hunted fugitive day and night. With the limited mental development of a backwoodsman and the lack of urban or worldly experience he could not measure the unseen forces to which he might consign his fate and thus he resolved and then shrank back, and ventured forth to again run precipitately to cover. What the lawyers could prove and what they could not; how much their own codes constrained them and what they stretched here and let fall slack there; what powers the judge possessed; how grim was the jail; how fell and rancorous were the officers of the constabulary—he could not decide. And thus he lurked here innocent of the crime of which he dreaded to be accused, and by his lurking he became inculpated with the illicit distillery. Now he was doubly amenable to arrest—to escape on one score would convict him on another, and the suggestion that he should leave aught to men had become a nettling taunt. As he remained silent Ben flung at him in antistrophe—"Ef he be so willin' ter leave it ter men why do he shelter hyar with we uns?"
Once more Shadrach sought to interfere, beginning in an unctuous soothing voice—"Stop, boys, stop, boys," when suddenly Clotilda stepped forward into the white lustre of the sparkling walls and the glimmer of the tallow dip. Her presence ended logic. "Why, thar's daddy's leetle gal! How do, Baby. Been singin' an' chirpin' with the stranger man like a grasshopper in August weather."
Clotilda received this simile with a shrug of disdain. She had begun to think exceedingly well of her gifts of singing and dancing and scarcely cared that they should be so lightly and jocosely mentioned. Vanity of all the human traits is the most easily cultivated, and when Eugene Binley, gathering his composure, asked if she were going to Colbury, too, with the others, she replied with a duplicate of the shrug—"Why, 'courseIbe. They air all goin' jes' on account o'Me."