XXX.
He did not maintain this sedulous semblance of calmness as he galloped the wild young horse along the mountain slopes in the mist. His eyes burned; his teeth were fiercely set; sometimes he lifted his right hand and shook it clenched as if he held his vengeance within his grasp and would not lightly let it go. Over and again he cried aloud a curse upon the man he hated, and then he would fall to muttering his grudges, all unforgotten, all registered indelibly in his mind despite its facile laxity, despite its fickle traits. He reviewed the events since the morning that Alethea had stood by the judge’s desk, and he laid down his pen to gaze, to the afternoon when, amongst the blossoms and the sunshine and the birds, they had talked together, and she had asked a futile thing, doubtless to beguile the hour, and he had warned her solemnly.
“I ain’t goin’ ter North Car’liny, an’ leave ’em hyar tergether,” he declared vehemently. “I’ll meet up with him somewhar this side o’ the Craig house. I’ll dare him ter fight, an’ ef he don’t kill me I’ll kill him, an’ kiss the hand that does the deed!”
The mists shivered to listen; the rocks repeated the threat, and again in hesitant dread, and still once more a word in an awed and tremulous staccato. On and on he went,—never abating speed, flying over the broken ground; deaf to the sound of horn and hounds borne fitfully from the slopes below on some hardly perceptible current of the air, and again dying to the dumbness of the shrouded woods; blind to the burly apparition of a bear trotting out of the clouds and in again, although the horse reared and pawed the air; callous to the keen chill of the torrent, swollen out of its banks with the spring rains till it surged about his limbs as he forded through. Over and again the mountain water-courses intercepted his path, but only once his attention was attracted to his surroundings, and this was because there seemed here a check upon his progress, and he must needs take heed of his way. The stream known as Gran’dad’s creek showed in the thickening mist a turbulent volume, a swollen breadth, covering rocks and brush and gullies, and washing the boles of trees far from its normal channel; he hardly knew where he might safely take the ford. Now the water elusively glimmered, swift, foaming, full of enormous bowlders, and with trees standing in its midst; and as he went down to the verge in a cleft of the rock the vapors closed again, and it seemed to recede into invisibility. The horse had become restive. He resisted and snorted, and finally deliberately faced about, as he was recklessly urged to enter the stream. He was forced again to the margin, when suddenly Mink thought he was dreaming. The fluctuating vapors parted once more, and in the rifts he saw on the opposite bank the man he sought. He stood in numb surprise; a strange overwhelming sense of hatred possessed him with the image thus palpably presented; he quivered with a recollection of all his wrongs. This was no dream. It was Gwinnan returning from the moonshiners’ house. He rose from his stirrups and waved his hand with a smile. Mink heard his ringing halloo. Then Gwinnan pressed his roan colt down to the margin of the water and took the ford.
“Saved us wettin’ our feet agin, Grasshopper,” Mink observed. He was very distinct as he sat on the bareback stray; his feet dangling without stirrups, his big wool hat, his flaunting auburn hair, his keen, clear-cut face, all definitely painted on the opaque white background of the mist; a bole was barely outlined here and there behind him, or a towering crag, as if there were other elements of the picture merely sketched in. More than once Gwinnan lifted his grave eyes toward him. But when the mist came between them, surging in a great cloudy volume, Mink drew the pistol from his pocket.
“Ye don’t kerry straight. I ’member yer tricks. I reckon he hev got a six-shooter, but I’ll resk ye, ennyhows. I’ll wait till he kems across an’ then dare him to fight.”
As he waited it might have seemed that he was the only human creature in the world, so desolately vacant were the barren mists, so unresponsive to the sense of the landscape that they hid, so null, so silent, save for the river, forever flowing on like life, resistless as eternity. The interval was long to his impatience,—so long that, alarmed at last lest his revenge be snatched from him by some mischance, at this supreme moment when it had seemed the fierce joy he had craved was vouchsafed, he hastily rode along the clifty bank above the tumultuous current. Once more the mist lifted. Suddenly he saw the roan colt, his full eyes starting from his head, his scream almost human in its frantic terror, pawing the cliffs, to the base of which the encroaching waters had risen; finding no footing, no shallows, only the forbidding inaccessibilities of the rocks. The saddle was vacant. The rider had been swept away by the wanton vagaries of the current.
The young mountaineer stared stolidly and uncomprehendingly for a moment. In a sort of daze he dismounted from his horse. He hardly realized what had happened, until, as he climbed deftly down among the splintered crags, lithe, agile, sure-footed as a deer, he saw clinging to a bramble growing from a fissure, and supported on a ledge of the rock, the unconscious figure familiar to his dream of vengeance. It was forestalled! The wild freak of the mountain torrent had given him his heart’s desire, and yet his hands were clean. The wolves, the wild dogs, and the vultures would not leave the man to creep away were there yet life left in him.
And there was life. He noted the convulsive fluttering of breath, the trembling clutch of the fingers; for the nerves remembered the saving boughs that the senses had forgotten.
As Mink stood looking down he suddenly lifted his head with a quick start, as if a word had been spoken to him from out the silence. Why this gratuity of pity, this surging fellow-feeling, this clamorous instinct to aid? Was a hand held out to him in his hour of need? Nay, he might have known rescue and release, his future might now be fair and free, but for the device of this man who had bestirred himself to thwart the friendly mob. Was not his hope attained, his prayer? Here was a sublimated revenge. His enemy would die at his feet, and yet his hands were clean.
And at this moment he was muttering, “I’ll be bound ef he hed a leetle wild-cat whiskey now ’twould save his life ez respons’ble ez ef ’twar ez legal ez the taxed corn-juice.”
He stood thinking for a moment. There was Marvin’s still at the Craig house, as Alethea had said, two miles away; the man would be dead of exhaustion before help could come thence. But not a quarter of a mile below, on one of the divergent ridges of Thunderhead, was Bylor’s home. Mink started with affright. The old man was a candidate for office. The certainty of arrest awaited him there, whatever his mission. It was a decision swift as an impulse. It meant twenty years’ imprisonment at hard labor, and he realized it as he sprang upon the bare back of his horse.
“I reckon I kin make a break an’ run, or tunnel out, or suthin’,” he said, with his preposterous hopefulness; “leastwise, I can’t leave him thar ter die that-a-way, half drownded and harried ter death by wolves an’ painters an’ buzzards. Ef the darned critter,” he cried out, in a renewal of despair, “would hev jes’ stood up an’ been shot like healthy folks!”
Mink never reached his destination.
It was not held to be a strange nor an unjustifiable action that young Bylor was led to do. He said afterward that that day, as he made his way home in the midst of the clouds that begirt the mountain, he was affrighted to behold again, evolved from their expressionless monotony, the equestrian figure of the mystic herder that rides on Thunderhead. His nerves were shaken, for before that morning he had seen the “harnt,” and at close quarters. He noted the wildly beckoning hand vague in the mist; he heard, or thought he heard, a shrill, insistent hail; he quickened his pace, pursued by the thunderous hoofs of the spectral steed, riding him down, as he feared. He faced about in desperate terror and fired his rifle.
Then he knew what he had done, for the rider lurched from the horse and fell, and the animal dashed past him, running at full speed. It was Mink Lorey whom he found upon the ground,—strong enough only to gasp out his errand; and though Bylor rose instantly to obey his behest and go to succor Gwinnan, Mink was dead before he left.
No great loss, the country-side said, and indeed it was suspected for a time that Gwinnan’s straits had resulted from Mink’s wanton mischief. When the facts became known, one or two reflective souls—recognizing in his deed that universal vital element of better possibilities astir within him insistently militant, enlisting every sterling trait common to humanity—were moved to say that he was not all mink.
No one in the mountains, however, fully appreciated the impulse that had controlled him except Alethea. To her it served as a sacred apotheosis, and she adored his memory for what he might have been, and forgot what he was. Often, when the spring bloomed, or the summer was flushing with the wild roses and the roseate dawns and the red sunset-tides, she hearkened to the mocking-bird’s singing, thrice—thrice the mystic strain, and she was wont to go and search for her lover at their tryst among the crags. And when she would come back, her face so full of peace, her eyes softly luminous, her drawling formula, “Jest been talkin’ with Reuben ’mongst the rocks,” pervaded with tranquil joy, her step-mother and Mrs. Jessup would whisper apart and look askance upon her, and start at any sudden jar or sound, as if it were instinct with her spectre lover’s freakish presence.
And so, patient drudge though she was, they listened to Mrs. Purvine’s eager insistence to have her bide in the cove; and although she went to live with this cheery soul, it was with tears and sighs and sadness to leave the clifty gorges that he haunted.
But she found the mocking-bird singing there, thrice, thrice the mystic strain, amongst the rocky banks of the Scolacutta River. And so she smiled again.
Except for this delusion she gave little indication of the unsettling of her mind. She was placidly happy with her aunt, though the two women were much alone, for Jerry Price presently married Sophy Griff. He became the sole dependence of the miller and his grandchildren, but a measure of Mrs. Purvine’s jaunty prosperity seemed to follow him. Old Griff’s little log cabin took on a more pretentious guise, and there was a slipshod thrift within. Jerry lifted the mill-stones and rebuilt the mill, and the whir began anew as if it had never left off; and the old miller sat without the door, and listened, and grew garrulous and cheerful and dusty with meal and flour, and brightened into some faint reflection of his old imperative self. Tad never reappeared from the moonshiners’ lair, and they still successfully elude the law.
The failure to secure their testimony proved no disaster to Gwinnan, as the chancellor held that a duel is a matter of deliberate and formal arrangement between men who recognize both the nature of the proceeding and the law infringed.
Nevertheless, Gwinnan was not satisfied. He had never regarded the matter as a duel; he had forgotten even the circumstances. Once brought forcibly to his mind, he dissented from the decision of the case, which he had watched more as if from the bench than from the bar. He resigned when reinstated.
The relinquishment of his ambition was very bitter to him. He had infused into it much of the essence of his identity; it had amply promised the end for which he had rejoiced to labor; it had borne a lofty and isolated existence. And yet, as he brooded on his despoiled life, his trained mind, applied to moral discernment, could but perceive at length that it had been sheerly a technical excellence toward which he had bent his energies, a selfish end he had held in view. Without a high ennobling purpose, without a dominate hope to dispense benefit, his unsanctified ambition had only lured with a wish to rise, and despite the heights to which it had attained it had been held to earth by its own inherent weight.
Works of Fiction.
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