"Then ride over home es fast es ye kin go—an' when ye've told yore maw what's happened, an' hid ther still, take Lee along with ye an' go cl'ar acrost inter Virginny whar no summons sarver kain't find ye. Stay plumb away from hyar till I sends ye word. Tell yore maw where I kin reach ye, but don't tell me. I wants ter swear I don't know."
Bear Cat hesitated, then his voice shook with a storm of protest.
"I don't delight none thet ye should go down thar an' sulter in jail whilst I'm up hyar enjoyin' freedom."
The older man met this impetuous outburst with the stoic's fine tranquillity.
"When they tuck me afore," he said, "I left yore maw unprotected behind me an' you was only a burden on her then. Now I kin go easy in my mind, knowin' she's got you." The prisoner's voice softened. "She war a mighty purty gal, yore maw, in them times. Right sensibly Blossom Fulkerson puts me in mind of her now."
Lone Stacy broke off with abruptness and added gruffly: "I reckon ye'd better be a-startin' home now—hit's comin' on ter be nightfall."
As Turner Stacy went out he turned and looked back. The cell was almost totally dark now and its inmate had reseated himself, his shoulders sagging dejectedly. "I'll do what he bids me now," Bear Cat told himself grimly, "but some day thar's a-goin' ter be a reckonin'."
On his way to the livery stable he met Kinnard Towers on foot but, as always, under escort. Still stinging under the chagrin of an hereditary enemy's gratuitous intervention in his behalf and a deep-seated suspicion of the man, he halted stiffly and his brow was lowering.
"Air these hyar tidin's true, Bear Cat? I've heerd thet yore paw's done been jailed," demanded Kinnard solicitously, ignoring the coldness of his greeting. "Kin I holp ye in any fashion?"
"No, we don't need no aid," was the curt response. "Ef we did we'd call on ther Stacys fer hit."
Towers smiled. "I aimed ter show ye this a'tternoon thet Ifeltfriendly, Turner."
The manner was seemingly so sincere that the young man felt ashamed of his contrasting churlishness and hastened to amend it.
"I reckon I hev need ter ask yore pardon, Kinnard. I'm sore fretted about this matter."
"An' I don't blame ye neither, son. I jest stopped ter acquaint ye with what folks says. This hyar whole matter looks like a sort of bluff on Mark Tapper's part ter make a good showin' with ther government. He hain't hardly got nothin' but hearsay ter go on—unless he kin makeyoutestify. Ef ye was ter kinderly disappear now fer a space of time, I reckon nothin' much wouldn't come of hit."
"I'm obleeged ter ye Kinnard. Paw hes don' give me ther same counsel," said Bear Cat, as he hurried to the stable where he parted with Jerry Henderson after a brief and earnest interview.
It was with a very set face and with very deep thoughts that Bear Cat Stacy set out for his home on Little Slippery. He rode all night with the starlight and the clean sweep of mountain wind in his face, and at sunrise stabled his mount at the cabin of a kinsman and started on again by a short cut "over the roughs" where a man can travel faster on foot.
When eventually he entered the door of his house his mother looked across the dish she was drying to inquire, "Where's yore paw at?"
He told her and, under the sudden scorn in her eyes, he flinched.
"Ye went down thar ter town with him," she accused in the high falsetto of wrath, "an' ye come back scot free an' abandoned him ter ther penitenshery an' ye didn't raise a hand ter save him! Ef hit hed of been me I'd hev brought him home safe or I wouldn't of been hyar myself ter tell of hit!"
Bear Cat Stacy went over and took the woman's wasted hands in both of his own. As he looked down on her from his six feet of height there came into his eyes a gentleness so winning that his expression was one of surprising and tender sweetness.
"Does ye 'low," he asked softly, "that I'd hev donethetef he hadn't p'intedly an' severely bid me do hit?"
He told her the story in all its detail and as she listened no tears came into her eyes to relieve the hard misery of her face. But when he had drawn a chair for her to the hearth and she had seated herself stolidly there, he realized that he must go and remove the evidence which still remained back there in the laurel thickets. He left her tearless and haggard of expression, gazing dully ahead of her at the ashes of the burned-out fire; the gaunt figure of a mountain woman to whom life is a serial of apprehension.
When he came back at sunset she still sat there, bending tearlessly forward, and it was not until he had crossed the threshold that he saw another figure rise from its knees. Blossom Fulkerson had been kneeling with her arms about the shrunken shoulders—but how long, he did not know.
"Blossom," he said that evening as he was starting away into banishment across the Virginia boundary, "I don't know how long I'm a-goin' ter be gone, but I reckon you knows how I feels. I've done asked Mr. Henderson ter look atter ye, when he comes back from Louisville. He aims ter see ter hit that paw gits ther best lawyers ter defend him while he's thar."
"I reckon then," replied the girl with a faith of hero-worship which sent a sharp paroxysm of pain into Bear Cat's heart, "thet yore paw will mighty sartain come cl'ar."
They were standing by the gate of the Stacy house, for Blossom meant to spend that night with the lone woman who sat staring dully into the blackened fireplace. To the lips of the departing lover rose a question, inspired by that note of admiration which had lent a thrill to her voice at mention of Jerry Henderson, but he sternly repressed it.
To catechize her love would be disloyal and ungenerous. It would be a wrong alike to her whom he trusted and to the man who was his loyal friend—and hers. But in his heart, already sore with the prospect of exile, with the thought of that dejectedly rocking figure inside and the other figure he had left in the neutral grayness of the jail cell, awakened a new ache. He was thinking how untutored and raw he must seem now that his life had been thrown into the parallel of contrast with the man who knew the broad world of "down below" and even of over-seas. If to Blossom's thinking he himself had shrunken in stature, it was not a surprising thing—but that did not rob the realization of its cutting edge or its barb.
"Blossom," he said, as his face once more became ineffably gentle, "thar's ther evenin' star comin' up over ther Wilderness Ridges." He took both her hands in his and looked not at the evening star but into the eyes that she lifted to gaze at it. "So long es I'm away—so long es I lives—I won't never see hit withouten I thinks ofyou. But hit hain't only when I seehitthet I thinks of ye—hit'salways. I reckon ye don't sca'cely realize even a leetle portion of how much I loves ye." He fell for a space silent, his glance caressing her, then added unsteadily and with an effort to smile, "I reckon thet's jest got ter be a secret a-tween ther Almighty, Who knows everything—an' me thet don't know much else but jestthet!"
She pressed his hands, but she did not put her arms about him nor offer to kiss him, and he reflected rather wretchedly that she had done that only once. Though it might be ungenerous to think of it, save as a coincidence, that one time had been before Jerry Henderson had been on the scene for twenty-four hours.
Bear Cat Stacy, with the lemon afterglow at his back and only the darkness before his face, was carrying a burdened spirit over into old Virginia, where for the first time in his life he must, like some red-handed murderer, "hide out" from the law.
Kinnard Towers felt that his plans had worked with a well-oiled precision until the day after Lone Stacy's arrest, when he awoke to receive the unwelcome tidings that Jerry Henderson had taken the train at four o'clock that morning for Louisville.
For a moment black rage possessed him, then it cleared away into a more philosophical mood as his informant added, "But he 'lowed ter several folks thet he aimed ter come back ergin in about a week's time."
On that trip to Louisville Jerry Henderson saw to it that old Lone Stacy should face trial with every advantage of learned and distinguished counsel.
Jerry and President Williams of the C. and S.-E. Railways knew, though the public did not, that the expenses of that defense were to be charged up to the road's accounts under the head of "Incidentals—in reCedar Mountain extension."
Old Lone had been an unconscious sponsor during these months and his friendship warranted recognition, not only for what he had done, but also for what he might yet do.
But the promoter's stay in the city was not happy since he found himself floundering in a quandary of mind and heart which he could no longer laugh away. He had heretofore boasted an adequate strength to regulate and discipline his life. Such a power he had always regarded as test and measure of an ambitious man's effectiveness. Its failure, total or partial, was a flaw which endangered the metal and temper of resolution.
On these keen and bracing days, as he walked briskly along the streets of the city, he found himself instinctively searching for a face not to be found; the face of Blossom Fulkerson and always upon realization followed a pang of disappointment. Unless he watched himself he would be idiotically falling in love with her, he mused, which was only a vain denial that he was already in love with her.
It was in their half-conscious pervasiveness, their dream-like subtlety, that these influences were strongest. When they emerged into the full light of consciousness he laughed them away. Such fantasies did not fit into his pattern of life. They were suicidally dangerous. Yet they lingered in the fairy land of the partially realized.
He wished that her ancestors had been among those who had won through to the promised land of the bluegrass, instead of those who had been stranded in the dry-rot of the hills. In that event, perhaps, her grandmothers would have been ladies in brocade and powdered hair instead of bent crones dipping snuff by cabin hearth-stones. All their inherent fineness of mind and charm, Blossom had—under the submerging of generations. The most stately garden will go to ragged and weed-choked desolation if left too long untended.
But he could hardly hope to make his more fashionable world see that. The freshness of her charm would be less obvious than the lapses of her grammar; the flash of her wit less marked than her difficulties with a tea-cup.
Blossom, too, of late had been troubled with a restlessness of spirit, new to her experience. Until that day last June upon which so many important things had happened the gay spontaneity of her nature had dealt little with perplexities. She had acknowledged a deep and unsatisfied yearning for "education" and a fuller life, but even that was not poignantly destructive of happiness.
Then within a space of twenty-four hours, Henderson had made his appearance, bringing a sense of contact with the wonder-world beyond the purple barriers; she had prayed through the night for Turner and he had come to her at dawn with his pledge—and finally, she had confessed her love.
In short she had matured with that swift sequence of happenings into womanhood, and since then nothing had been quite the same. But of all the unsettling elements, the disturbing-in-chief was Jerry Henderson. He had flashed into her life with all the startling fascination of Cinderella's prince, and matters hitherto accepted as axiomatic remained no longer certain.
"Gittin' education" had before that meant keeping pace with Turner's ambition. Now it involved a pathetic effort to raise herself to Henderson's more complex plane.
She had sought as studiously as Jerry himself to banish the absurd idea that this readjustment of values was sentimental, and she had as signally failed.
These changes in herself had been of such gradual incubation that she had never realized their force sufficiently to face and analyze them—yet she had sent young Stacy away without a caress!
"I'm jest the same as plighted to Bear Cat," she told herself accusingly, because loyalty was an element of her blood. "I ain't hardly got ther right to think of Mr. Henderson." But she did think of him. Perhaps she was culpable, but she was very young. Turner had seemed a planet among small stars—then Jerry had come like a flaming comet—and her heart was in sore doubt.
When, on his return, Henderson dropped from the step of the rickety day-coach to the cinder platform of the station at Marlin Town, he met Uncle Israel Calvert who paused to greet him.
"Wa'al howdy, stranger," began the old man with a full volumed heartiness, then he added swiftly under his breath and with almost as little movement of his lips as a ventriloquist. "Don't leave town withouten ye sees me fust—hit's urgent. Don't appear ter hev much speech with me in public. Meet me at ther Farmers' Bank—upsta'rs—one hour hence."
Jerry Henderson recognized the whispered message as a warning which it would be foolhardiness to ignore. Probably even as he received it he was under surveillance, so instead of setting out at once on foot, he waited and at the appointed time strolled with every appearance of unconcern into the Farmers' Bank.
At the same time Black Tom Carmichael happened in to have a two-dollar bill changed into silver, and overheard the cashier saying in a matter-of-fact voice, "Thar's been some little tangle in yore balance, Mr. Henderson. Would ye mind steppin' up to the directors' room an' seein' ef ye kin straighten it out with the bookkeeper. She's up thar."
With a smile of assent Henderson mounted the narrow stairs and Black Tom lighted his pipe and loafed with inquisitive indolence below.
CHAPTER XII
Insteadof a puzzled accountant Jerry found in the bare upper room the rosy-faced, white-haired man who had given him credentials when he first arrived in the hills, and who kept the store over on Big Ivy.
"I come over hyar on my way ter Knoxville ter lay me in a stock of winter goods," volunteered the storekeeper, "an' I 'lowed I'd tarry an' hev speech with ye afore I fared any further on." As he spoke he tilted back his chair, and thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
Henderson lifted his brows in interrogation and the storekeeper proceeded with deliberate emphasis.
"Somebody, I hain't found out jest who—aims ter hev ye lay-wayed on yore trip acrost ther mounting. I felt obleeged ter warn ye."
"Have me way-laid," repeated Jerry blankly, "what for?"
Uncle Israel shook his silvery poll. "I hain't hardly got ther power ter answer thet," he said, "but thar's right-smart loose talk goin' round. Some folks laments thet ye 'lowed ter teach profitable farmin' an' ye hain't done nothin'. They 'lows ye must hev some crooked projeck afoot. This much is all I jedgmatic'lly knows, Joe Campbell was over ter Hook Brewer's blind tiger, on Skinflint, last week. Some fellers got ter drinkin' an' talkin' aimless-like an' yore name come up. Somebody 'lowed thet yore tarryin' hyar warn't a-goin' ter be tolerated no longer, an' thet he knowed of a plan ter git ye es ye crossed ther mounting whilst Lone Stacy an' Bear Cat was both away. Joe, bein' a kinsman of mine an' Lone's, told me. Thet's all I knows, but ef I was you I wouldn't disregard hit."
"What would you advise, Uncle Israel?"
"Does ye plumb pi'ntedlyhevter go over thar? Ye couldn't jest linger hyar in town twell ther night train pulls out an' go away on hit?"
Henderson shook his head with a sharp snap of decisiveness. "No, I'm not ready to be scared away just yet by enemies that threaten me from ambush. I mean to cross the mountain."
For a moment the old storekeeper chewed reflectively on the stem of his pipe, then he nodded his approval and went on:
"No, I didn't hardly 'low ye'd submit ter ther likes of thet without no debate." He lifted a package wrapped in newspaper which lay at his elbow on the table. "This hyar's one of them new-fangled automatic pistols and a box of ca'tridges ter fit hit. I reckon ye'd better slip hit inter yore pocket.... When I started over hyar, I borrowed a mule from Lone Stacy's house ... hit's at ther liv'ry-stable now an' ye kin call fer hit an' ride hit back."
"I usually go on foot," interrupted Henderson, but Uncle Israel raised a hand, commanding attention.
"I knows thet, but this time hit'll profit ye ter ride ther mule. He's got calked irons on his feet an' every man knows his tracks in ther mud.... They won't sca'cely aim ter lay-way yer till ye gits a good ways out from town, whar ther timber's more la'rely an' wild-like.... Word'll go on ahead of ye by them leetle deestrick telephone boxes thet ye're comin' mule-back an' they'll 'low ye don't suspicion nothin'. They will be a-watchin' fer ther mule then ... an' ef ye starts out within ther hour's time ye kin make hit ter the head of Leetle Ivy by nightfall."
The adviser paused a moment, then went succinctly on.
"Hit's from thar on thet ye'll be in peril.... Now when ye reaches some rocky p'int whar hit won't leave no shoe-track, git down offen ther critter an' hit him a severe whack.... Thet mule will go straight on home jest as stiddy es ef ye war still ridin' him ... whilstyouturns inter ther la'rel on foot an' takes a hike straight across ther roughs. Hit's ther roads they'll be watchin' an'youwon't be on no road."
Jerry Henderson rose briskly from his chair. "Uncle Israel," he said feelingly, "I reckon I don't have to say I'm obliged to you. The quicker the start I get now, the better."
The old man settled back again with leisurely calm. "Go right on yore way, son, an' I'll tarry hyar a spell so nairy person won't connect my goin'-out with your'n."
As he passed the cashier's grating Henderson nodded to Black Tom Carmichael.
"Does ye aim ter start acrost ther mounting?" politely inquired the chief lieutenant of Kinnard Towers, and Jerry smiled.
"Yes, I'm going to the livery stable right now to get Lone Stacy's mule."
"I wishes ye a gay journey then," the henchman assured him, using the stereotyped phrase of well-wishing, to the wayfarer.
Gorgeous was the flaunting color of autumn as Henderson left the edges of the ragged town behind him. He drank in the spicy air that swept across the pines, and the beauty was so compelling that for a time his danger affected him only as an intoxicating sort of stimulant under whose beguiling he reared air-castles. It would be, he told himself, smiling with fantastic pleasure, a delectable way to salvage the hard practicalities of life if he could have a home here, presided over by Blossom, and outside an arena of achievement. In the market-places of modern activity, he could then win his worldly triumphs and return here as to a quiet haven. One phase would supply the plaudits of Cæsar—and one the tranquil philosophy of Plato.
But with evening came the bite of frost. The same crests that had been brilliantly colorful began to close in, brooding and sinister, and the reality of his danger could no longer be disavowed.
Twilight brought the death of all color save the lingering lemon of the afterglow, and now he had come to the head of Little Ivy, where Uncle Israel had said travel would become precarious. Here he should abandon his mule and cut across the tangles, but a little way ahead lay a disk of pallid light in the general choke of the shadows—a place where the creek had spread itself into a shallow pool across the road. The hills and woods were already merged into a gray-blue silhouette, but the water down there still caught and clung to a remnant of the afterglow and dimly showed back the inverted counterparts of trees which were themselves lost to the eye.
He might as well cross that water dry-shod, he reflected, and dismount just beyond.
But, suddenly, he dragged hard at the bit and crouched low in his saddle. He had seen a reflection which belonged neither to fence nor roadside sapling. Inverted in the dim and oblong mirror of the pool he made out the shoulders and head of a man with a rifle thrust forward. That up-side-down figure was so ready of poise that only one conclusion was feasible. The human being who stood so mirrored did not realize that he was close enough to the water's line to be himself revealed, but he was watching for another figure to be betrayed by the same agency. Henderson slid quietly from his saddle and jabbed the mule's flank with the muzzle of his pistol. At his back was a thicket into which he melted as his mount splashed into the water, and he held with his eyes to the inverted shadow. He saw the rifle rise and bark with a spurt of flame; heard his beast plunge blunderingly on and then caught an oath of astonished dismay from beyond the pool, as two inverted shadows stood where there had been one. "Damn me ef I hain't done shot acrost an empty saddle!"
"Mebby they got him further back," suggested the second voice as Jerry Henderson crouched in his hiding place. "Mebby Joe tuck up his stand at ther t'other crossin'."
Jerry Henderson smiled grimly to himself. "That was shaving it pretty thin," he mused. "After all it was only a shadow that saved me."
As he lay there unmoving, he heard one of his would-be assassins rattle off through the dry weed stalks after the lunging mule. The second splashed through the shallow water and passed almost in arm's length, but to neither did it occur that the intended victim had left the saddle at just that point. Ten minutes later, with dead silence about him, Jerry retreated into the woods and spent the night under a ledge of shielding rock.
He had lived too long in the easy security of cities to pit his woodcraft against an unknown number of pursuers whose eyes and ears were more than a match for his own in the dark. Had he known every foot of the way, night travel would have been safer, but, imperfectly familiar with the blind trails he meant to move only when he could gauge his course and pursue it cautiously step by step.
From sunrise to dark on the following day he went at the rate of a half-mile an hour through thickets that lacerated his face and tore the skin from his hands and wrists. Often he lay crouched close to the ground, listening.
He had no food and dared not show his face at any house, and since he must avoid well-defined paths, he multiplied the distance so that when he arrived on the familiar ground of his own neighborhood, his hunger had become an acute pain and his weariness amounted to exhaustion. Incidentally, he had slipped once and wrenched his ankle. Within a radius of two miles were two houses only, Lone Stacy's and Brother Fulkerson's. The Stacy place would presumably be watched, but Brother Fulkerson would not deny him food and shelter.
Painfully, yard by yard, he crept down the mountainside to the rear of the preacher's abode. Then on a tour of reconnaissance he cautiously circled it. There were no visible signs of picketing and through one unshuttered window came a grateful glow of lamplight.
He dared neither knock on the door nor scratch on the pane, but he remembered the signal that had been Bear Cat Stacy's. He had heard the boy give it, and now he cautiously repeated, three times, the softly quavering call of the barn-owl.
It was a moonless night, but the stars were frostily clear and as the refugee crouched, dissolved in shadow, against the mortised logs of the cabin's corner, the door opened and Blossom stood, slim and straight, against the yellow background of the lamp-lit door.
She might have seemed, to one passing, interested only in the star-filled skies and the starkly etched peaks, but in a low voice of extreme guardedness she demanded, "Bear Cat, where air ye?"
Henderson remembered that Turner, too, was "hiding out" and that this girl had the ingrained self-repression of a people inured to the perils of ambuscade. Without leaving the cancellation of the shadowed wall he spoke with a caution that equaled her own.
"Don't seem to hear me ... just keep looking straight ahead.... It's not Bear Cat.... It's Henderson ... and they are after me.... So far I've escaped ... but I reckon they're following." He had seen the impulsive start with which she heard his announcement and the instant recovery with which she relaxed her attitude into one of less tell-tale significance. "Thank God," breathed the pursued man, "for that self-control!"
He detected a heart-wrenching anxiety in her voice, which belied the picture she made of unruffled simplicity as she commanded in a tense whisper, "Go on, I'm hearkenin'."
"Go back into the house," he directed evenly. "Close the window shutters ... then open the back door...."
She did not obey with the haste of excitement. She was too wise for that, but paused unhurriedly, humming an ancient ballade, as though the stresses of life had no meaning for her, before she drew back and closed the door.
Reappearing, at the window, she repeated the same convincing assumption of untroubled indolence as she drew in the heavy shutters; but a moment later she stood shaken and blanched of cheek at the rear door. "Come in hastily," she pleaded. "Air ye hurted?"
Slipping through the aperture, Henderson smiled at her. His heart had leaped wildly as he read the terror of her eyes: a terror for his danger.
"I'm not hurt," he assured her, "except for a twisted ankle, but it's a miracle of luck. Where's your father?"
No actress trained and finished in her art could have carried off with greater perfection a semblance of tranquillity than had Blossom while his safety hung in the balance. Now, with that need ended, she leaned back against the support of the wall with her hands gropingly spread; weak of knee and limp almost to collapse. Her amber eyes were preternaturally wide and her words came with gasping difficulty. She had forgotten her striving after exemplary grammar.
"He hain't hyar—he won't be back afore to-morrow noon. Thar hain't nobody hyar but me."
"Oh!" The monosyllable slipped from the man's lips with bitter disappointment. He knew the rigid tenets of mountain usage—an unwritten law.
A stranger may share a one-roomed shack with men, women and children, but the traveler who is received into a cabin in the absence of its men compromises the honor of its women.
"Oh," he repeated dejectedly, "I was seekin' shelter for the night. I'm famishin' an' weary. Kin ye give me a snack to eat. Blossom, afore I fares forth again?"
It was with entire unconsciousness that he had slipped back into the rough vernacular of his childhood. At that moment he was a man who had rubbed elbows with death and he had reverted to type as instinctively as though he had never known any other life.
"Afore ye fares forth!" In Blossom's eyes blazed the same Valkyrie fire that had been in them as she barred his path to Bear Cat Stacy's still. "Ye hain't a-goin ter fare forth, ter be murdered! I aims ter hide ye out right hyar!"
Civilization just then seemed far away; the primal very near—and, in that mood, the hot currents of long-denied love for this woman who was defying her own laws to offer him sanctuary, mounted to supremacy. Such a love appeared as logical as a little while ago it had seemed illogical. Eagle blood should mate with eagle blood.
"But, little gal," Jerry protested, "ye're alone hyar. I kain't hardly tarry. Ef hit became known——"
"Thet's jest ther reason," she flashed back at him, "thet nobody won't suspicion yeairhyar an' ef ye're in peril hit don't make no differ ter me what folks says nohow. I aims ter safeguard ye from harm."
His eyes, darkly ringed by fatigue and hunger, held an even deeper avidity. He looked at the high-chinned and resolute face crowned with masses of hair which lamp-light and hearth-glow kindled into an aura and deep into amber eyes that were candid with their confession of love. Slowly Jerry Henderson put his question—a question already answered.
"I reckon ye knows what this means, Blossom. Why air ye willin' ter venture hit?"
Still leaning tremulously against the chinked wall, she answered with the thrill of feeling and purpose in her voice.
"I hain't askin' what hit means. I hain't keerin' what hit means. All I knows it thet ye're in peril—an' thet's enough."
Jerry caught her in his arms, crushed her to him, felt her lips against his lips; her arms clinging softly about his neck, and at last he spoke—no longer with restraint.
"Until to-night I've always fought against love and I thought I was stronger thanitwas, but I reckon that was just because I've never really come face-to-face with its full power, before. Now I'm going out again."
"No! No! I won't suffer hit," she protested with fervent vehemence. "Ye're a-goin' ter stay right hyar. Ye b'longs ter me now an' I aims ter keep ye—unharmed!"
Abruptly they fell silent, warned by some premonitory sense and, as they stood listening, a clamor of knocking sounded at the door.
Thrusting him into her bedroom and screening him behind a mass of clothing that hung in a small corner closet unenclosed, but deeply shadowed, she braced herself once more into seeming tranquillity and went to the front of the house. Then she threw wide the door.
"We wants ter hev speech with Brother Fulkerson," came the unrecognized voice of a stranger whose hat brim shielded his face in the darkness.
"He hain't hyar an' he won't be back afore midday ter-morrow," responded the girl with ingenuous composure. "I kain't hardly invite ye in—because I'm hyar all alone," she added with a disarming gravity. "Will ye leave any message?"
Out there among the shadows she heard the murmurs of a whispered consultation, and despite a palpitation of fear she bravely held the picture.
Then, partly because her manner carried conviction against suspicion, and partly because to enter would be to reveal identities, the voice shouted back: "No, thank ye, ma'am. I reckon we'll fare on."
CHAPTER XIII
BeforeHenderson had come that night, Blossom had been trying to study, but the pages of her book had developed the trick of becoming blurred.
Two faces persisted in rising before her imagination; one, the reproachful countenance of Bear Cat, whom she ought to love whole-heartedly; the other, that of Henderson, whom she told herself she admired only as she might admire the President of the United States or the man who had written the dictionary—with distant and respectful appreciation.
"He says I'm all right," she mused, "but I reckon heknowsin his heart that I ain't good enough fer him—ner fer his folks."
Tears sprang into her eyes at the confession, and her reasoning went upon the rocks of illogic. "In the first place," she irrelevantly argued, "I'm in love with Bear Cat—an' in the second to think about Mr. Henderson would be right smart like crying for the moon."
Then Henderson had come; had come asking refuge from danger. He had declared his love with tumultuous force—and it seemed to Blossom that, after all, the moon was hers without crying for it.
When she had fed him in silence, because of the possibility of lurking spies outside, they sat, unmindful of passing hours, before the roar of the stone hearth and as the man's arms held her close to him she let her long lashes droop over her eyes and surrendered her hair and lips to his kisses.
They had no great need of words, but sometimes she raised her lids and gazed steadfastly into his face, and as the carmine flecks of the blaze lighted her cheeks, the eyes were wide and unmasked, with a full, yet proud, surrender.
He thought that for this gift of flower-like beauty and love the abandonment of his stern opportunism was a cheap exchange. His eyes, too, were glowing with an ardent light and both were spared the irony of realization that afterward impulse must again yield to the censorship of colder considerations. There is nothing more real than an impossible dream—while it endures.
Once the girl's glance fell on a home-made doll, with a coarse wig of horse-hair, propped on the mantel-shelf. It was one of those crude makeshifts which mountain children call poppets, as our great-grandfathers' great-grandmothers called them puppets.
A shadow of self-accusing pain crossed Blossom's face. "Turney whittled that poppet fer me outen hickory wood when I was a jest a leetle gal," she whispered remorsefully, then added: "Turney 'lowed ter wed me some day."
Henderson reassured her with irrefutable logic.
"Turner wouldn't have you disobey your heart, Blossom. Only you must be sure what your heart commands."
"Iamsure. I'm plumb dead-sartain sure!" she vehemently responded, though still in a suppressed voice.
They sat before the fire, alertly wakeful, in the shadow of impending danger until the first pale hint of dawn. Then Blossom went out with water pails, ostensibly busied about her early tasks but really on a journey of investigation.
Returning, satisfied of temporary safety, she said briefly and authoritatively: "Come on, hit won't do fer ye ter tarry hyar. They'll come back, sartain sure. Thar's a leetle cave back thar in ther rocks that's beknownst only to Turner an' me. Hit's dry an' clean an' thar's sweet water runnin' through hit. I'll fotch ye yore victuals every day—an' when the s'arch fer ye lets up a leetle, I'll guide ye acrost inter Virginny whar ye kin strike the railroad without goin' back to Marlin Town."
"If I were you, Blossom," suggested the man as they slipped out of the house before full daylight, "I wouldn't tell Brother Fulkerson anything about my hiding place. These men who seek my life are probably influential. If your father can truthfully deny any knowledge of my being near, it will save him embarrassment. I don't want to make enemies for him—and you."
The girl pondered this phase of the situation judicially for a moment, then nodded gravely: "I reckon thet's ther wisest way," she agreed.
For three days Blossom carried food across the steeps to the hidden man, then late one cold night, when again her father was away on some mission of kindness which would keep him from home for twenty-four hours or more, she appeared at the mouth of the cave and signaled to the refugee.
She had decided that the moment had arrived for making the dash with him across the Virginia border, and since she knew every foot of the way, it would be better to travel in the cover of darkness.
It was a long and tedious journey, and the girl led the way tirelessly through frost-rimed thickets with a resilient endurance that seemed incompatible with her slenderness.
When the rising sun was a pale disk like platinum, they had arrived on the backbone of a high ridge and the time had come for parting.
Below them banks of white vapor obliterated the valleys. Above them, in the misty skies, began to appear opalescent patches of exquisite color and delicacy. About them swept and eddied clean and invigorating currents of frosted air.
For a little while reluctant of leave-taking, they stood silent, and the argent shield of the sun burst into fiery splendor. Then the heights stood out brilliant and unveiled.
"I reckon," said Blossom falteringly, "hit's come time to bid ye farewell."
The man took her hands in his and held them lingeringly; but with a sudden and passionate gesture Blossom withdrew them and threw her arms about his neck.
"But ye hain't a-goin' fer always? Ye aims ter come back ter me ergin in good time, don't ye?"
For a little while he held her tightly clasped with his lips pressed to her soft hair, then he spoke impetuously:
"I aims ter come back ter ye right soon."
"Ye mustn't come twell hit's safe, though," she commanded, and after that she asked softly: "Now thet we're plighted I reckon ye don't forbid me ter tell my pappy, does ye?"
Henderson's muscles grew suddenly rigid and beads of sweat moistened his forehead in spite of the frosty tang of the morning air.
The words brought back a sudden and terrifying realization; the renewed conflict of a dilemma. He was going out into the other world, leaving the dead reckoning of the primal for the calculated standards of modernity. He was plighted to a semi-illiterate! Yet as her breath came fragrantly from upturned lips against his temples, all that went down under a wave of passionate love.
"No, Blossom," he advised steadily, "don't tell him yet. There are things that must be arranged—things that are hard to explain to you just now. Wait until I come back. I've got to study out this attack from ambush so that I can know whom I'm fighting and how to fight. It may take time—and if I write to you, naming a place,—will you come to me?"
Gravely and with full trust she nodded her head. "I'll come anywhars—an' any time—to you," she told him, and the man kissed her good-bye.
Turner Stacy's longing to see Blossom had driven him to the imprudence of breaking the restrictions of exile. After traveling by night and hiding by day it happened that he was breasting a ridge just at sunrise one morning on his way to her house, when his alert gaze caught an indistinct movement through the hazy half-light of the dawn. He could make out only that two figures seemed coming west along the mist-veiled path and that they appeared to be the figures of a man and a woman.
Surprised to encounter travelers at so remote a spot at that hour, he edged cautiously into the underbrush and lay flat on a huge rock which overlooked the path from a low eminence at its right.
They had halted just beyond the range of hearing, but when with mountain suddenness, like a torn curtain, the half-light became full-light he froze into a petrified astonishment which seemed to have clutched and squeezed all the vitality out of his heart, and to have left his blood currentless.
The abrupt revelation of light had fallen on the bright hair of Blossom Fulkerson and the dark uncovered head of Jerry Henderson; and before the monstrous incredibility of the situation could be fully grasped, the girl, to whom he had bade farewell as his acknowledged sweetheart, had thrown her arms around the neck of the man to whose loyal care he had confided her, and that man was kissing her with a lover's ardor!
What their words might be he could not tell—but their clinging embrace said enough—and Blossom was giving her lips with eager willingness.
What their words might be he could not tell—but their clinging embrace said enough
What their words might be he could not tell—but their clinging embrace said enough
Bear Cat lay for a moment, sick, dizzy and motionless while a groan, which never reached his lips, spasmodically shook his chest and shoulders. Succeeding that paralyzed instant, a fever of unspeakable fury surged over him and while all the rest of his body stretched unstirring, his arms slipped forward and the muzzle of his rifle crept over the ledge of rock. But that, too, was only a response to instinct and the thumb halted in the act of cocking the hammer. His vengeance called not only for satisfaction but for glutting.
Henderson must die face to face with him, not by the stealth of ambuscade, but by open violence to be administered with bare hands—realizing the cause of his punishment—dying by inches!
But as he was on the point of rising to confront them, something arrested him: the stupor of a man whose mind and heart had trusted so implicitly that they could not yet fully credit even the full demonstration of his eyes. This must, despite all its certainty, be some hallucination—some wide-eyed nightmare!
While the spell of his stunned heart held him in the thrall of inaction, Henderson and Blossom parted with slow reluctance and took up their opposite direction of journey.
Left alone, like a man sitting, shaken and demoralized, upon the broken débris of a wrecked universe, Turner stared ahead with a dull incredulity. But inaction was foreign to his nature and after a while he rose unsteadily to his feet. He turned and started at a swift stride which broke presently into a dog-trot along the way Henderson had taken; then he hesitated, halted and wheeled in his tracks.
"No!" he exclaimed. "No, by God, ef I meets up withhimthe way I feels now, I'll kill him afore he has ther chanst ter speak with me. I kain't govern myself. I aims ter lethertell hit to me her own self!"
So he altered his direction and went plunging westward.
A short route through broken rock and tangled brush enabled him to cut ahead of Blossom's course so that, turning an abrupt angle in the trail, the girl found him standing before her with clenched hands and a face so set and pale that she started back. It seemed to her that, instead of himself, it was his ghost which confronted her.
With a slow and stifled outcry, at the apparition, she carried her hands to her face, then broke into convulsive sobs.
"I didn't aim ter eavesdrop, Blossom," said Turner, his sternness wavering before her tears. "But I seed ye givin' yore lips ter Jerry Henderson back thar. Hit seems ter me like I kin almost discern the stain of thet kiss soilin' em now. I reckon I ought rightfully ter hev speech with him fust—but I knowed I'd kill him ef I did—an' so I held my hand twell I'd done seedyou."
They were both trembling, and the girl's hands came slowly away from a face pitifully agitated. Her voice was a whisper.
"Ye mustn't censure me, Turney," she huskily protested. "I'm plighted—terhim."
"Plighted!" The word broke from the man as explosively as an oath, then after a moment's silence she heard him saying, in a slow and stunned fashion: "I 'lowed thet ye war all but plighted tome."
"I knows—I knows, Turney," she pleaded desperately. "I wants thet ye should understand. I thought thet I loved ye—Idolove ye better then ef ye war my own blood brother—but I didn't know afore now ther kind of love thet—thet——"
"Thet Jerry Henderson's done stole from me," he finished for her, in a voice she had never before heard on his lips. "Atter all I did make a mistake. Hitwarhim I should hev spoke with fust—an' I reckon hit hain't too late ter overtake him yit."
Her hands were clinging to his arms. "No, Turney," she sought to explain. "He didn't know hit an' I didn't know hit either, when ye left. Neither one of us wouldn't hev sought ter lie ter ye."
Bear Cat Stacy was only partly conscious of what she was saying. Before his eyes swam red spots of fury which blinded him. If there was any vestige of truth in his ugly suspicion that Blossom was being deceived or played with, the responsible man, trusted friend and admired preceptor though he had been, was Bear Cat's to kill—and must die!
So he stood, tensely strained of attitude and ashen of cheek while a murder light kindled afresh in his eyes, and Blossom seemed the wavering shape of a dream: the dream of every hope his life had known—now utterly unattainable. Her fingers were clutching his taut arms yet she seemed suddenly withdrawn from his world, leaving it void.
But she was talking earnestly, beseeching, and with the strained effort of one striving to separate lucid voices from the chaotic din of a delirium, he gave painstaking heed. She told the story of Jerry's narrow escape from death and of her conducting him to a place of safe departure. Part of it only he understood through the crashing dissonance of tempest which still confused his brain.
The volcanic fires within him that were destined to bring earthquake and transition were licking consumingly at the gates of his self-control.
His whole life had been builded on a single dream: the dream of her love—and she had promised it. For that he had fought the one enemy that had ever mastered him, and had conquered. For that he had shaped his life. Now he had been robbed of everything!
"Don't ye see how hit is, Turney?" she pleaded. "Hit wasn't his fault ner hit wasn't my fault.... Hit jest had ter be! Ye sees how hit is, don't ye?"
"Yes, I sees—how hit is!" The response came dully, then with a nearer recovery of a natural tone he went on. "Anyways I reckon ye've got ther right ter decide atween us. I reckon yore heart's yore own ter give or withhold. Hit war ter me that ye pledged yoreself first. Yore first kiss was mine—an' ye suffered me ter hope an' believe." There was a strained pause, then he added: "But even ef I could hold yer erginst yore free will, I wouldn't seek ter do hit."
Blossom's contrite wretchedness was so sincere and her sympathy so inarticulate that his face presently changed. The bitter and accusing sternness died gradually out of it and after a grief-stricken moment gave way to a great gentleness—such a gentleness as brought a transformation and stamped his lips and brow with a spirit of renunciation.
"Thar was murder in my heart, jest at first, little gal," he assured her softly, "but I reckon atter all hit's a right-pore love thet seeks ter kill a man fer gainin' somethin' hit's lost hitself. He kin take ye down thar whar life means sich things as ye desarves ter enjoy. With me ye'd have ter endure ther same hardships thet broke my mother down. I wants above all else thet ye should be happy—an' ef I kain't make ye happy——" He paused abruptly with a choked throat and demanded: "When does ye aim ter wed?"
The girl flushed. She did not think Turner would accord a sympathetic understanding to her lover's somewhat vague attitude on that point, so she only answered. "He 'lows ter write ter me—ef so be he kain't come back soon."
"Write ter ye!" The militant scorn snapped again in his eyes, burning away their softness as a prairie fire consumes dry grass, in its first hot breath. "Write ter ye! No, by Almighty God in Heaven, ye says ye're plighted ter wed him! Ye've done suffered him ter hold ye in his arms. Mountain men comes ter fotch thar brides ter church—they don't send fer 'em ter journey forth an' meet 'em. In these hills of old Kaintuck men come to thar women! He's got ter come hyar an' claim ye ef he has ter fight his way acrost every league of ther journey—an' ef hedon't——!" But Bear Cat broke off suddenly with a catch in his voice.
"I've got full trust, Turney," she declared, and her eyes showed it, so that the man forced himself to calmness again, and went on in a level voice.
"I aims ter see thet ye hes what ye wants, Blossom, ef I hes ter plumb tear ther hills down level by level ter git hit fer ye. I must be a-farin' back inter Virginny," he announced a moment later with a curtness meant to bulwark him against a fresh outburst of feeling.
Blossom raised her hands as if to detain him, then let them drop again with a pathetic gesture. Bear Cat picked up his hat which had fallen to the ground and stood crushing its limp brim in his clenched fingers. Finally he said, without anger, but very seriously: "I wants thet ye should give me back my pledge—erbout drinkin'. Ye knows why I give hit ter ye—an' now——"
"Oh, Turner," she interrupted protestingly, "don't ask thet!"
"I'm obleeged ter ask hit, Blossom," he obdurately answered. "I reckon mebby I kin still win my fight with licker—but I mustn't be beholden by a bond thet's lost hits cause."
Tearfully she nodded her head. "I'll free ye if ye demands hit," she conceded, "but I aims ter go on a-prayin'."
Jerry Henderson was not a scoundrel in a general sense nor had he hitherto been a weakling, but for once he was the self-governed man who has lost control of his life and fallen victim to vacillation. Surging waves of heart-hunger made him want to go recklessly back; to fight his way, if need be, through all the Towers' minions to Blossom's side and claim her as his promised bride.
Other and perhaps saner waves of tremendous misgiving beat with steady reiteration against those of impulse. He must live out most of his days among people to whom such an alliance would be stripped of all illusion; would resolve itself into nothing more than a mesalliance. For both of them it would eventuate in wreck—and so Blossom heard nothing from him and she tasted first fear, then despair.
At last Kinnard Towers either learned or guessed the truth; that Blossom had hidden Henderson out in the absence of her father and had aided his escape. He saw to it that the report gained wide currency in a land avid for gossip.
Whatever the condition of his love affairs, Jerry came up short against the realization that he could not indefinitely abandon his business. He must, in some way, demonstrate that he was not being effectively put to flight by feudal threats and so he carried his perplexities to Lone Stacy, who was awaiting trial in the Louisville jail, and unbosomed himself in a full and candid recital.
The bearded moonshiner, gaunter than ever and with the haunted eyes of a caged eagle, listened with grave courtesy but with a brow that gradually knitted into an expression half puzzled and half sinister.
"I reckon Bear Cat'll feel right-sensibly broke up," he said slowly. "Ye've done cut him out with his sweetheart, endurin' his absence from home, and ther two of 'em's growed up without no other notion then thet of bein' wed some day."
Henderson was on the point of self-justification, but before he could speak the prisoner went thoughtfully on: "Howsoever, a gal's got a rather as to her sweet-heartin'—an' ef ye won her fa'r an' above-board, I reckon Turner kin be fa'r-minded, too. I was thinkin' of somethin' else, though. From what ye tells me hit looks like es ef all these things, my jailin' an' yore lay-wayin', is jest pieces of one pattern. Hit looks likeIwas brought down hyar so thet Kinnard Towers could gityou. Ef I'd a-knowed erbout his warnin' ye off thet night ye came, I mout hev guessed hit afore now."
He rose and paced the floor of the room where prisoners were permitted to receive guests bearing special permits—under the chaperonage of a turnkey. Suddenly he halted and his eyes flared, though his voice remained low and tense.
"I'm a Christian an' a man of peace," he said ominously, "but ef what I suspicions air true I don't aim ter submit ter hit. Does ye want ter go back thar ter Little Slippery?"
"I do, indeed," replied Henderson eagerly. "And soon!"
"All right then. Ther Stacys hev still got some power acrost Cedar Mounting an' they aims ter exercise hit. I'll straightway send a letter ter my brother, Joe Stacy. Ef ye gits offen ther train in Marlin Town one week from terday, he'll be thar ter meet ye—an' he'll hev enough men thar with rifle-guns ter see ye through safe—an' hold ye safe, too."
"Joe Stacy," repeated Henderson, "I've never met him, have I?"
"I don't hardly believe ye hes. He dwells on Skinflint, but he'll knowyouwhen he sees ye."
Later that same day the turnkey, who had from time to time received certain courtesies from Mark Tapper, repeated the conversation to that officer, and within forty-eight hours a messenger relayed it verbally to Kinnard Towers.
"Ef thar's any way ter head off thet letter ter Joe, now," reflected the backwoods master of intrigue, "an' thet bodyguard don't show up—I reckon we kin still compass what we failed in, ther first time."
To the house in Virginia where Bear Cat was temporarily established came Lew Turner, a distant kinsman on an enterprise of cattle trading. The meeting was a coincidence though a natural one, since their host was a man who had migrated from Little Slippery and had long been known to both. Shortly the two sat alone in conversation, and Bear Cat demanded news from home.
"Wa'al thar hain't no welcome tidings ter give ye. They keeps puttin' off yore paw's trial jest ter frazzle him out, fer one thing," began the newcomer lugubriously. "Then Henderson come back from down below an' some fellers aimed ter lay-way him, so he sought refuge in Brother Fulkerson's dwellin'-house when ther preacher warn't thar. Blossom tuck him in outen charity an' the two of 'em spent ther night thar all alone by tharselves. Hit didn't become gin'rally known till after he'd got away safe, but then ther gossips started in tongue-waggin'."
"Hold on, Lew! By God Almighty, ye've done said too much," Bear Cat broke out with a dangerous note of warning, his eyes narrowing into slits of menacing glitter.
The man from home hastily hedged his statement. "Hit warn't no fashion Blossom's fault. He'd done faithfully promised ter wed with her."
Bear Cat Stacy had risen eruptively out of his chair. He bent over the intervening table, resting on hands in which the knuckles stood out white. "Go on!" he commanded fiercely. "What next?"
"Thet's erbout all, save thet since thet time she's done been pinin' round like somebody sickenin' ter her death. Es fer ther preacher, he just clamps his mouth shet an' won't say nothin' at all. Howsoever, he looks like he'd done been stricken."
Bear Cat straightened up and passed a hand across his forehead. He was rocking unsteadily on his feet as he reached for his hat.
"Whar air ye a-goin', Bear Cat?" asked the kinsman, with a sudden fear for the consequences of his narrative.
"Whar am I 'goin'? God, He knows! Wharever Jerry Henderson's at,thar'swhar I'm 'goin'—an' no man hed better seek ter hinder me!"
CHAPTER XIV
Thepost-office at Possum Trot, which serves the dwellers along the waters of Skinflint, is housed in one corner of a shack store and the distribution of its mail is attended with a friendly informality.
Thus no suspicion was engendered when a neighbor of Joe Stacy's dropped in each day and regularly volunteered, with a spirit of neighborly accommodation, "I reckon ef thar's anything fer Joe Stacy or airy other folks dwellin' 'twixt hyar an' my house, I'll fotch hit over to 'em."
The post-master had no way of knowing that this person was an agent of Kinnard Towers or that, when one day he handed out a letter "backed" to Joe in the scrawl of Lone Stacy, it went not to its rightful recipient but to the Quarterhouse.
Jerry Henderson, in due time, stepped from his day coach at Marlin Town, equally innocent of suspicion, and was pleased to see emerging from the raw, twilight shadows, a man, unfamiliar of face, whose elbow cradled a repeating rifle.
"I reckon ye be Jerry Henderson, hain't ye?" inquired a suave and amicable voice, and with a nod Jerry replied, "Yes—and you are Joe Stacy?"
The man, slight but wiry and quick of movement, shook his head. "No—my name's John Blackwell. Joe, he couldn't hardly git hyar hisself, so he sent me in his stid but I reckon me an' ther boys kin put ye over ther route, withoutdeefault."
As if in corroboration of this assurance Jerry saw shadowy shapes materializing out of the empty darkness and as he mounted the extra horse provided for him he counted the armed figures swinging easily into their saddles. There were eight of them. His personal escort was larger than that with which Towers himself traveled abroad.
But when the cortège swung at length into an unfamiliar turning Jerry was startled and demanded sharply: "Why are we leaving the high road? This isn't the way to Lone Stacy's house."
The man who had met him bowed with a reassuring calmness.
"No, but Joe 'lowed hit would be safer an' handier, too, fer ye ter spend ther night at his house on Skinflint. Hit's nigher an' all these men air neighbors of his'n. Ter-morrow you kin fare on ter Little Slippery by daylight."
With an acquiescent nod, Henderson relapsed into silence and they rode in the starlight without sound save the thud of cuppy hooves on muddy byways, the straining creak of stirrup straps and a clinking of bit-rings.
Finally the cavalcade halted at a crossing where the shadows lay in sooty patches and its leader detached himself to engage in low-voiced converse with someone who seemed to have been suddenly created out of the pitchy thickness of the roadside.
Soon Blackwell rode back and, with entire seriousness, made a startling suggestion.
"Right down thar, in thet valley, Mr. Henderson—whar ye kin see a leetle speck of light—sets Kinnard Towers' Quarterhouse. Would hit pleasure ye ter stop off thar an' enjoy a small dram? Hit's a right-chillin' night."
The railroad's agent had never visited that place of whose ill repute he had heard such bizarre tales, but in all this high, wild country, he thought, there was no other spot of which it so well behooved his party to ride wide. John Blackwell was lighting his pipe just then and by the flare of the match Henderson studied the face for a glint of jesting, but the eyes were humorless and entirely sober.
"I think we'd better give the Quarterhouse as wide a berth as possible," he answered dryly.
"Hits fer you ter say, Mr. Henderson," was the quiet rejoinder. "But I'll give ye Joe Stacy's message. From what his brother writ him Joe concluded thet Lone warn't aimin' ter start no needless strife with Kinnard Towers, but he aimed ter make hit p'intedly cl'ar thet ther Stacys was detarmined ter pertect ye, an' thet ye'd done come back hyar plumb open an' upstandin'."
"That's true enough," assented Jerry. "I'm not trying to hide out, but I don't see any profit in walking into the lion's den."
The guide nodded sympathetically. He seemed imbued with the excellent military conception of obeying orders and proffering no gratuitous counsel.
"Joe 'lowed thet ef things looked favorable hit mout be a right-bold sort of thing an' a right wise one, too, to stop in thar as ye rid by. Hit's a public tavern—an' hit would prove thet ye're hyar, with a bodyguard, neither seekin' trouble ner fearin' hit."
"Why didn't you suggest this before, Mr. Blackwell?" inquired Henderson to whom the very effrontery of the plan carried an appeal.
"Joe didn't want me ter risk even namin' hit ter ye twell we knowed how ther land lay over thar," came the prompt and easy response. "Ye seed me talkin' with a man out front thar jest now, didn't ye? Wa'al thet war one of our boys, thet come direct from ther Quarterhouse, ter bear me ther tidin's. Thar hain't more'n a handful of men thar now—an' half of 'em's our friends. I reckon ye hain't in no great peril nohow so long as we're all tergither—an' full-armed."
Henderson felt that already his prestige had suffered from an appearance of flight. Here was an opportunity ready to hand for its complete rehabilitation. The bold course is always the best defense, and his decision was prompt.
"Come on then. Let's go in."
At the long rack in front of the frowning stockade, as they dismounted and hitched, were already tethered a half-dozen horses.
Bear Cat Stacy, impelled by Lew Turner's news, traveled in a fever of haste. He meant to go as straight as a hiving bee to Marlin and if need be to follow Henderson to the lowlands of Kentucky. Henderson had compromised Blossom, by the undeviating standards of mountain code, and he must come back and marry her even if he had to be dragged out of the most conspicuous place in Louisville itself. Casting all considerations of precaution and safety to the winds, the lover, whose devotion called for self-effacement, sought only the shortest way, and the shortest way led past the Quarterhouse.
When he was within a mile of the point where Towers' resort straddled the state line he met a mounted man with a lantern swinging at his pommel.
"I kain't tarry ter hev speech with ye, Sim," he said shortly, "I'm in hot haste."
Yet as the other drawled a question, Bear Cat did tarry and a cold moisture dewed his temples.
"Did ye know thet yore friend, Jerry Henderson, hed done come back?" inquired Sim, and Turner's limbs trembled, then grew stiff as saddle leather.
"Come back! When did he come? Whar is he now?" The questions tumbled upon each other with a mounting vibrance of impetuosity.
"I war a-ridin' inter the road outen a side path a leetle spell back when I heered hosses an' so I drawed up ter let 'em go by," the chance traveler informed him. "I reckon they didn't hardly discern me. I hadn't lit my lantern then, but one of 'em lighted his pipe with a match an' Ireecognized two faces. One was Mr. Henderson's an' one was Sam Carlyle's. I seed sev'ral rifles acrost ther saddles, too."
"Which way war they ridin'?"
"'Peared like most likely they war makin' fer ther Quarterhouse."
"I'm obleeged ter ye." And Bear Cat was gone again into the darkness.
When he had turned the first bend his walk broke into a run. His mind was racing, too. So Henderson had not only come back, but come back with a reversed allegiance. He was riding with a Towers bodyguard and bound for a Towers stronghold! The name of Sam Carlyle indicated that as definitely as if it had been the name of Black Tom Carmichael. In one way this dropping of all friendly pretense by Jerry made his own task clearer and easier—but it was the most hazardous thing he had ever undertaken. Single handed, he must go into the place where bloodshed was no novelty and take Henderson away, and he went at a run.
Presumably, Jerry Henderson would not stop long in the bar-room, but would be conducted to the presence of Kinnard Towers, and, with all his haste, Bear Cat's speed seemed to himself desperately slow.
He and his father had protected this ingrate against Towers' wrath, he bitterly reflected, and this was their requital. Their guest had used that hospitality to steal the love of Blossom and then to discard her. He had deceived her, compromised her, promised her marriage and fled in the face of danger. Lew Turner had said: "She's been pinin' round like somebody sickenin' ter her death!" That was what her full trust had come to—and if she had trusted that far her trust might have gone farther! Then finally from the secure distance of the city Henderson had made his terms with Kinnard Towers!
Now Blossom was going to be married—a heart-racking groan rumbled in his throat. Blossom's wedding! How he had dreamed of it from his first days of callow love-thoughts! He had fed his imagination upon pictures of the house he had meant to build for her down there by the river! To his nostrils now seemed to come the sweet fragrance of freshly hewn timbers and sawed lumber; incense of home-making! A hundred times he had visualized himself—the ceremony over—riding proudly with his bride on a pillion behind him, as the mountain groom had always brought his bride, from her father's house to his own—and her own!
Now her honor required that an unwilling husband should be brought to her—her honor and her heart's bruised wish—and he, who had planned it all differently, must see the matter accomplished—to-night!
Henderson and his guard had strolled with a fine assumption of carelessness into the barn-like resort and, as the handful of loiterers there recognized them, an abrupt silence fell and glasses, half-raised, were held for a moment poised.
From a huge hearth-cavern at one end of the room leaped the ruddy illumination of burning logs and fagots in the flaming proportions of a bonfire. Wreaths of blue and brown smoke floated in foggy streamers between the dark walls and up to the cobwebbed rafters. The lamps guttered and flared against their tin reflectors, reeking with an oily stench in the stagnation of the unaltered air.
Along one end of the place went the bar, backed by its shelves of bottles and thick glassware, and in each side wall gaped a door—one for each state. Besides a few hickory-withed chairs there were several even ruder tables and benches, riven with axe and adze out of wide logs, and supported by such legs as those of a butcher's block. But these furnishings were all near the walls—and the whole center area of the floor, with its white-painted boundary line, was as unencumbered as a deck cleared for action.
The momentary surprise which greeted the newcomers was for the most part fictitious—and carefully rehearsed, but of this Jerry Henderson had no knowledge.
He walked to the bar, followed by one or two of his guardians, and extended a general invitation. "Gentlemen, it's my treat. What will you-all have?"
After the glasses had been filled and drained, Henderson went over and stood for a while in the grateful warmth of the booming hearth. He was looking on at this picture with its savor of medievalism—the ensemble that called to mind a Hogarth prim, but soon he nodded to his guide who slouched not far from his elbow.
"I reckon we'd better fare on, Mr. Blackwell," he suggested evenly. "We've still got a journey ahead of us."
Blackwell seemed less impressed with the immediate urgency.
"Thar hain't no tormentin' haste," he demurred. "We're all right stiff-j'inted from ridin'. We mout as well limber up a leetle mite afore we starts out ergin."
Jerry's eyes clouded. He would have preferred finding a spirit of readier obedience in his body-guard, but it was best to accept the situation with philosophy. Accordingly he turned again to the bar, though this time he made only a pretense of drinking. Fresh arrivals had begun drifting in and the place now held more than a score. Among them were already several whose voices were thickening or growing shrill, according to their individual fashions of becoming drunk.
Jerry sought to reassure himself against the disquieting birth of suspicion, yet when he heard one of the newcomers address Blackwell as Sam instead of John, an ugly apprehension settled upon him and this foreboding was not allayed as he caught the response in a low and savage growl: "Shet up, ye fool!"
The temper of the motley outfit was rapidly growing boisterous, though he himself seemed ignored until, in turning, he accidently jostled a man whom he had never seen before to-night, and that individual wheeled on him with an abusive truculence. Henderson's gorge rose, but his realization was now fully awake to the requirement of self-control, so with a good-natured retort he moved away.
Beckoning peremptorily to Blackwell, he started at a deliberate pace toward the door, but before he reached it, the staggering figure of the quarrelsome unknown overtook him and lurched drunkenly against him. Then Henderson felt a stunning blow in the face, and under its unexpected force he reeled back against the wall.
He was no longer in doubt. He had been beguiled here to be made the victim of what should appear an accidental encounter, and all that remained now was to sell his life at as punitive a rate as possible.
As he reached under his coat for the automatic pistol which was his sole remaining dependence, he caught in a sidewise glimpse the face of Sam Carlyle alias John Blackwell. It wore a sardonic smile and its lips opened like a trap to shout in a staccato abandonment of disguise. "Git him, boys!Githim!"
It was palpably enough a signal for which they had been waiting, like the pack-master's horn casting loose his hounds. Instantly the place burst into an eruption of confused and frenzied tumult. Henderson had a momentary sense of unshaven faces with lips drawn over wolfish fangs, of the pungent reek of gunpowder in his nostrils and, in his ears, the cracking of pistol reports—as yet sounding only in demonstration.
With a few steps more they would be swarming upon him, as a pack piles upon its defenseless quarry. But his own weapon spat doggedly, too, and for the brevity of an instant the rush wavered.
His assailants were crowding each other so hamperingly that the fusillade from the front was wild and, at first, ineffective. Those at the fore, cooled by a resolute reception and the sight of one of their number going down, with a snarl of pain, pressed forcibly back.
For the space of one quick breath, they afforded their victim a reprieve. He was groping, with his left hand outstretched, against the wall toward the nearby door, when he felt that arm grow numb and drop limp at his side. Through his left shoulder darted a sensation hardly recognized as pain.
The two doors had not been closed. It was unnecessary. Before the victim should reach either he would be riddled, and even if he gained one he would fall before he could mount and ride away. Since they had him at their mercy they could afford to toy with him.
No one saw the figure that had materialized on the threshold to which all the backs of the yelping crowd were turned. It had come unannounced from the outer darkness. It stood for a moment looking on and in that moment understood the only thing necessary to comprehend: that the man who must be married to-night, was being prematurely assassinated.