XV.
The accuracy of Felix Guthrie's oft-vaunted aim was attested by two ghastly objects that had exhaled life and found their doom in Crazy Zeb's cell. In the presence of these dumb witnesses of the struggle, lying surrounded by the charred and cold remnants of the fire, and scattered hay and corn which the vanished horses had left, and shadowed by the gloomy gray walls with their sinister resonance, the place seemed charged with the tragedies of its associations, frightful to contemplate, ill to linger about, and far removed from any possible conjunction with the idea of mirth and the festivities which a greasy, thickened pack of cards strewed about the two bodies, and a flask, broken by its fall on the rock, but still containing whiskey, might betoken. The chilly vault opened upon the serene splendors of the infinitely pellucid sunshine that glowed to midsummer warmth. Had ever the sky worn so dense, so keen, so clear a blue? It discredited the azure of the far western mountains, and marked how the material, even attenuated by distance to the guise of the veriest vapor, fails of the true ethereal tint of the ambient spaces of the air. The birds sang from the sun-flooded trees just beneath the cliff—so limpidly sweet the tones!—and within were two men dead in their sins, in this drear place that had known woe.
Death is not easily predicable of those of a common household, and in this scantily populated region the sense of community is close. There were some involuntary exclamations from the posse upon the recognition of the malefactors, implying a sense of catastrophe and regret; especially for one of them, a young man with the down on his lips, his face and posture contorted with the agony long endured while he had lain here deserted in the darkness of the night, lighted only by the mystic moon, beside the stark figure of his comrade, who had been shot through the heart, dying in the space of a second.
"Lordy massy 'pon my soul, ef hyar ain't Benjy Swasey! What a turrible time he mus' hev hed afore he tuk off!" cried old Bakewell, his pallid face aquiver, and his voice faltering as he bent over the recumbent form.
The sight and the circumstance failed to affect the official nerve of the sheriff. "Now this is plumb satisfactory," he remarked. "I never expected ter see Buck Cheever in this fix. I 'lowed the devil takes too good care o' his own. It's mighty satisfactory. I hed planned," he added, as he looked about at the high roof and the inaccessible depths below, "that I'd blow up this place some with giant powder or sech; but I reckon I hed better let it be—it does lead the evil-doer ter sech a bad end!"
But the old man still leaned with a pitiful corrugated brow over the lifeless figure. Age had made his heart tender, and he chose to disregard the logic that spoke from the muzzles of Swasey's discharged pistols, one lying close by, and from Cheever's bloody knife still held in the stiffened clasp of the hand that had wielded it. "Fee," he said, tremulously, "ye shoot too straight."
And Guthrie, his hand meditatively laid on his chin, and his eyes staring absently forward as if they beheld more or less than was before them, replied, "That's a true word, I reckon."
The air freighted with tragedy, with all the ultimate anguish of life and sin and death, seemed to receive with a sort of shock the sheriff's gay rallying laughter as he clapped Guthrie's shoulder.
"Then, Fee, my fine young rooster, ef ye hedn't shot straight I'd be a-sendin' fur the coroner ter kem an' set on you!"
"'Pears ter me," said the blacksmith, who still had on his leather apron, having forgotten, in the excitement, to lay it aside, and gazing with dilated eyes at the blood stains on the rock floor—"'pears ter me he'd hev a mighty oneasy seat on Fee, dead or alive."
The sheriff's jaunty jubilance, in that the lawbreakers had been so smartly overtaken, attended him through the woods and down the road, as he cantered at the head of his posse, all armed and jingling with spurs—a cavalcade both imposing and awful to the few spectators which the sparsely populated country could muster, summoned out from the cabins by the sound of galloping horses and the loud-pitched talk. The elders stood and stared; tow-headed children, peeping through the lower rails of the fence, received a salutary impression, and beheld, as it were, the majesty of the law, materialized in this gallant style, riding forth to maintain its supremacy. Only the dogs were unreceptive to the subtler significance of the unwonted apparition, evidently accounting it merely a gang of men, and, according to the disposition of the individual animal, either accepting the fact quietly, with affably wagging tail, or plunging into the road in frenzied excitement, and with yelps and defiant barking pursuing the party out of sight of the house, then trotting home with a triumphant mien. The tragedy that the posse had found in Crazy Zeb's cell lingered still in the minds of two or three of the horsemen, their silence and gloomy, downcast faces betokening its influence; but the others instinctively sought to cast it off, and the effort was aided by the sunshine, the quick pace, the briskening wind, and the cheery companionship of the officer. He seemed to have no receptivity for the sorrowful aspects of the event, and his spirits showed no signs of flagging until he drew rein at the door-yard of one of the escaped robbers with whose names Guthrie had furnished him.
"'Ain't he got no sort'n men kin-folks?" he asked, his cheery, resonant voice hardly recognizable in the querulous whine with which he now spoke. "Lord have mercy on my soul! how am I a-goin' ter make out a-catechisin' the man's wife an' mother 'bout'n him! Git off'n yer horse thar, Jim. 'Light, I tell ye, an' kem along in the house with me ter holp bolster me up."
In several of these doomed households the forlorn women, in their grief and despair, turned fierce and wielded a biting tongue; and as the hapless officer showed an infinite capacity for anxious deprecation, their guarded sarcasms waxed to a vindictive temerity. Among them he was greatly harassed, and more than once he was violently threatened. Indeed, one old crone rose tremulously up in the chimney-corner as he sat before the fire, after searching the premises, keenly questioning the younger members of the family, and with her tremulous, aged palm she smote him twice in the face. He sat quite still, although the color mounted to the roots of his hair, while her children in frantic fear besought her to desist.
"Lord knows, Mis' Derridge," he said, looking meekly at her, "I'd be willin' fur ye ter take a hickory sprout an' gin me a reg'lar whalin' ef 'twould mend the matter enny, or make yer son Josiah a diff'ent man from what he hev turned out. I reckon ye oughter hev gin him a tap or two more'n ye done. But ef it eases yer feelin's ter pitch inter me, jes' pitch in, an' welcome! I don't wonder at ye, nuther."
She stared at him irresolutely from out her bleared eyes, then burst into that weeping so terrible to witness in the aged, bewailing that she had ever lived to see the day, and calling futilely on Heaven to turn the time back that she might be dead ten years ago, and upbraiding the earth that so long it had grudged her a grave.
The officer found it hard after this scene to lay hold on his own bold identity again, and he had naught to say when he got on his horse and rode away. It became possible to reassert himself and his office only when he chanced upon a household where there were men and boys. There he raged around in fine style, and frowned and swore and threatened, every creature trembling before the very sound of his voice. Thus he made restitution in some sort to the terrors of the law, defrauded by his former weakness of their wonted fierce effectiveness.
The afternoon was on the wane, and no captures had been made; the cavalcade was about turning from the door of a house—it was the last to be visited, the most distant of all—a poor place, perched high up on the rugged slope of the mountain, with a vast forest below it and on either hand, from the midst of which it looked upon a splendid affluent territory seeming infinite in extent. Peak and range, valley and river, were all in the sunset tints—purple and saffron and a suffusive blood-red flush, all softened and commingled by the haze; and above, the rich yellow lucency of the crystalline skies. A lateral spur was in the immediate foreground, high, steep, and heavily wooded, the monotony of the deep, restful green of its slopes broken here and there by vertical lines of gleaming white, betokening the trunks of the beech-trees amidst the dark preponderance of walnut and pine; more than one hung, all bleached and leafless, head downward, half uprooted, for thus the wind, past this long time, left trace of its fury. A stream—a native mountaineer, wild and free and strong—took its way down the gorge between the spur and the mountain from which it shot forth. From the door-yard might be had a view of a section of its course, the water flowing in smooth scroll-like swirls from the centre to the bank, and thence out again, the idea of a certain symmetry of the current thus suggested in linear grace—all crystal clear, now a jade-like green, and again the brownish yellow of a topaz, save where the rapids flung up a sudden commotion of white foam that seemed all alive, as if some submerged amphibian gambollings made the depths joyous. The crags stood out distinct on either hand, with here and there a flower sweetly smiling in a niche, like some unexpected tenderness in a savage heart. All was very fresh, very keenly and clearly colored; the weeds, rank and high, sent up a rich aromatic odor.
The officer, for years a farmer, and alive to all weather signs, hardly needed a second glance at the clear tint of the vigorous mould of the door-yard beneath his feet to know that it had rained here lately. "The drought in town ain't bruk yit," he said, half enviously—a mere habit, for he had now no crops to suffer from stress of weather. Here there had been copious storms, with thunder and lightning, gracious to the corn and the cotton, and not disdaining the humbler growths of the wayside, the spontaneous joyance of nature. The torrents had fallen in a decisive rhythm; the ground was beaten hard; the rails of the fence looked dark and clean; the wasp nests and the cobwebs were torn away—alack for the patient weavings!—the roof of the little cabin was still sleek, and shining. As he turned on his heel he marked how the new-built hay-stacks were already weathering, all streaked with brown.
He had searched the little barn whose roof showed behind the hay-stacks, but as he glanced toward it, in the mere relapse of bucolic sentiment, he became vaguely aware of an intent watchfulness in the lantern-jawed and haggard woman of the house, who had followed him and his party to the fence, in hospitality, it might seem, or to see them safely off the place. The reflection of her look—it was but a look, and he did not realize it then; he remembered it afterward—was in the eyes of a tallow-faced, shock-headed girl of ten. His own eyes paused in disparagement upon her; the hem of her cotton dress was tattered out and hung down about her bare ankles, all stained with red clay mud. There were straws clinging to her attire, and here and there in her tousled red hair. He was no precisian, to be sure, but her unkempt aspect grated upon him; these were truly shiftless folks, and had a full measure of his contempt, which he felt they richly merited; and so he turned once more to the fence, facing the great yellow sky, and the purple and amber and red flushed world stretching so far below. A little clatter at the bars where the posse prepared to mount and ride away was pronounced in the deep evening stillness; the cry of a homeward-bound hawk drifted down as with the sunset on his swift wings he swept above the abysses of the valley; and then the sheriff, stepping over the lower rail, the others lying on the ground, paused suddenly, his hand upon the fence, his face lifted. A strange new sound was on the air, a raucous voice muttering incoherently—muttering a few words, then sinking to silence.
Carew looked quickly at the woman. Her face had stiffened; it hardly seemed alive; it was as inanimate as a mask, some doleful caricature of humanity and sorrow, forlornly unmoving, with no trace of beauty or intelligence to hallow it; she might seem to have no endowment in common with others of her kind, save the capacity to suffer. The child's face reflected hers as in a mirror. The same feeble, pitiable affectation of surprise was on each when the sheriff exclaimed, suddenly, "What's that?"
The men outside of the fence paused in the instant, as if a sudden petrifaction had fallen upon the group—one was arrested in the moment of tightening a saddle-girth; another was poised midway, one foot in the stirrup, the other just lifted from the ground; two or three, already mounted, sat like equestrian statues, their figures in high-relief against the broad fields of the western sky above the mountain-tops. Once a horse bent down his head and tossed it aloft and pawed the ground; and again the silence was unbroken, till there arose anew that strangely keyed, incoherent babbling. There was an abrupt rush in the direction whence the sound came, for it was distinct this time. The forlorn woman and girl were soon distanced, as they followed upon the strides of the stalwart sheriff. He ran fast and lightly, with an agility which his wonted pompous strut hardly promised. He was at the barn door and half-way up the ladder leading into the loft before his slower comrades could cross the yard. When they reached the barn the woman was standing in the space below the loft, her face set, her eyes restless and dilated; her self-control gave way at last to a sudden trivial irritation, incongruous with the despair and grief in her fixed lineaments.
"Quit taggin' arter me!" she cried out, huskily, to the tattered little girl, who, in tears and trembling with wild fright, hung upon her skirts.
The sheriff at the head of the ladder seemed, impossibly enough, to be tearing down the wall of the building. He had a hatchet in one hand; he used the handle of his pistol for a wedge, and presently the men, peering up into the dusky shadow, understood that he was plucking down the boards of a partition that, flimsy as it was, had seemed to them the outer wall when they had searched the place. Within was a space only two feet wide perhaps, but as long as the gable end. Upon a heap of straw lay a man, wounded, fevered, wild with delirium. He had no sense of danger; he could realize no calamity of capture; his hot, rolling, bloodshot eyes conveyed no correlative impression to his disordered brain of the figures he beheld before him. He talked on, unnoting the cluster of men as they pressed about him in the dust that rose from the riven boards, and gazed down wide-eyed at him. The only light came in through the crevices of roof and wall, but these were many. It served amply for his recognition, if more evidence had been needed than the fact of his home and the careful concealment, and it showed the attitudes of his captors as they looked around the thrice-searched place—at the hay that they had tossed about, the piles of corn they had rolled down, the odds and ends of plough gear and broken household utensils in one corner that they had ransacked. More than one commented, with a sort of extorted admiration, upon the craft that had so nearly foiled them. The triumphant figure of the sheriff was the focus of the shadowy group, easily differentiated by his air of arrogantly pluming himself; one might hardly have noticed the frowzy shock of hair and the pale face of the little girl protruding through the aperture in the floor, for she had climbed the ladder, and with a decapitated effect gazed around from the level of the puncheons.
It was a forlorn illustration of the universal affections of our common human nature that this apparition should be potent to annul the mists of a wavering mind, and to summon right reason in delirium. The thick-tongued, inarticulate muttering ceased for a moment; a dazed smile of recognition was on the unkempt, bearded face of the wounded man.
"Bet on Maggie!" he said, quite plainly. "She kin climb like a cat. She kin drive a nail like a man! Takes a heap ter git ahead o' Maggie!"
And then his head began to loll from shoulder to shoulder, and the look of recognition was gone from his face. He was now and again lifting his hands as if in argument or entreaty, and once more muttering with a thick, inarticulate tongue.
The sheriff glanced at a twisted nail in his hand, then down at the decapitated Maggie.
"Did you holp do this hyar job?" he asked.
The child hesitated; the law seemed on her track. "I druv the top nails," she piped out at last. Then, with a whimper, "Mam couldn't climb along the beam fur head-swimmin', so I clomb the beam an druv the top nails," she concluded, with a weak, quavering whine.
He looked down with a tolerant eye at the unprepossessing countenance. "Smart gal!" he exclaimed, unexpectedly; "a mighty smart gal! An' a good one too, I'll be bound! Ye jes' run down yander ter the house, sissy, an' fix the bed fur yer dad, fur we air goin' ter fetch him down right now."
She stared at him with dumb amazement for a moment, then turning her little body about with agility, her tousled shock of hair and her pallid little face vanished from the opening in the floor.
The appearance there of an armed party of rescuers could hardly have been more unwelcome, and the sheriff breathed freely when she was at last gone.
He lifted his head presently, glancing questioningly about the darkening place, for the irregular spaces of the crevices gave now only a dim fragmentary glimmer. He turned, as if with a sudden thought, took his way down the ladder and stood in the door, slipping the pistol into his pocket, and looking out with a lowering, disaffected eye. In that short interval within the barn all the world had changed; the flaring sky had faded, and was of a dull gray tint, too pallid to furnish relief to the coming of the stars, which were only visible here and there in a vague scintillation, colorless too. The gloom of the darkling mountains oppressed the spirit, something so immeasurably mournful was in their sombre, silent, brooding immensity. The indubitable night lay on the undistinguishable valley as if the darkness rose from the earth rather than came from the sky; only about the summits the day seemed to tarry. Many a vibrant note was tuning in the woods; for the nocturnal insects, and the frogs by the water-side, and vague, sibilant, undiscriminated sounds, joined in a twanging, melancholy chorus that somehow accented the loneliness.
"Waal, night hev overtook us," the sheriff remarked to Felix Guthrie, who had joined him at the door. Then, with gathering acerbity, "'Pears like ter me ef Providence lays ez much work on a man ez I hev got ter do, he ought ter hev daylight enough left him ter git through with it, or else hev a moon allowed him ter work by."
Guthrie said nothing, but stood solemnly watching the darkening face of the landscape.
"We air roosted up hyar fur all night, Fee," Carew continued, in a tone that was a querulous demand for sympathy. "We could sca'cely make out ter git up that thar outdacious, steep, rocky road in the daytime; ef we war ter try it in the pitch-dark with a bed-ridden prisoner, the whole posse, prisoner an 'all, would bodaciously roll over the rocks into some o' them gorges ez look ter be deep ez hell!" He paused for a moment, his light-gray eyes narrowing. "I could spare the posse toler'ble well, but I could in no wise git along 'thout the prisoner." A secret twinkling that lighted his eyes seemed communicated in some sort to his lips, which twitched suddenly, as if suppressing a laugh.
Fee Guthrie's face wore no responsive gleam. He stood gruffly silent for a time, his gaze fixed uncomprehendingly upon the sheriff. "Air thar ennything ter hender yer stayin' all night?" he asked at last.
The officer hesitated, then moved nearer, and laid his hand confidentially upon his companion's shoulder, among the ends of his flaunting, tawny curls.
"Fee," he said, lowering his voice, and with a very definite accession of gravity and anxiety, "I hev made a mistake—a large-sized one—about the build o' that man Shattuck."
Guthrie's immobile, unfriendly face changed suddenly. There was a slight quiver upon it, which passed in an instant, leaving it softened and wistful and anxious. He knew naught of the officer's suspicions touching Shattuck; he only knew that this man had lingered without the window to hear Letitia sing, while he waited for the moon to rise in the great rocky gorge of the river. It seemed to Guthrie that the very suggestion of her name would have a power over him, that it would stir him if he were dead, if he shared the long death in which the Little People lay and waited for their summons to rise again. And somehow the thought of them, silent, motionless, undisturbed in their long, long abeyance, brought a qualm of remorse. "I ought not ter hev gin my cornsent ter open one of thar coffins," he reflected, his lips moving unconsciously with the unspoken words. "My head won't rest no easier in the grave fur hevin' stirred his'n, an' jes' fur Shattuck's cur'osity, ef the truth war knowed; 'the hist'ry o' the kentry'"—he remembered the words with a sneer—"air nowhar." "This hyar Shattuck air a mighty takin' man," he said aloud, suddenly. The sheriff cocked his head with keen attention. "Nowise good-lookin', special, but saaft-spoken. Folks like him mighty well; he pulls the wool over everybody's eyes."
He again remembered his threat for the man who should come between him and Letitia; he had unwittingly spoken it to Shattuck himself, but it was well that he was warned.
"Waal, Fee, I ain't wantin' ter arrest him too suddint—unless I hed more grounds for suspicion agin him; but this hyar thing is murder, man, murder! An' 'twon't do fur ennybody ez hed enny part in sech ter get away. He sent Stephen Yates on a fool pretensified yerrand the night the man war waylaid an' kilt, an' ye seen Steve 'mongst the gang in Crazy Zeb's cell."
"How d'ye know ez the gang hed ennything ter do with that job? Mought hev been other folks," Guthrie demanded, the cause of justice urgently constraining him.
"Don't know it; that's jes' the reason I oughter keep an eye, a sorter watch, on Shattuck, an' not arrest him 'thout he war tryin' ter clear the kentry. I oughter hev lef' a man ter look arter him."
Guthrie said nothing. He seemed to silently revolve this view.
"Would you-uns ondertake ter keep him under watch till I git back ter-morrow?" Carew moved his hand caressingly on Guthrie's shoulder amongst his long, wind-stirred hair. "I couldn't git down the mountain in the dark, specially lumbered up with that man, ez 'pears ter be dyin'—ye shoot mighty straight, Fee!—an' I 'lowed ye be 'feared o' nuthin, an' air a mighty fine rider, an' yer horse air sure-footed. Ye mought walk ef ye warn't willin' ter try it mounted. Wouldn't ye obleege me, Fee?"
Guthrie's dark eyes, with their suggestions of implacability, were turned reflectively upon him. The dying light did not so much as suggest their color, but their lustre was visible in the dusk, and their expression was unannulled.
"I hain't got no nose fur game," he replied at last. "Ye can't hunt folks down with me."
The sheriff's hand suddenly weighed heavily on his shoulder. "What be ye a-talkin' 'bout, boy?" he said, imperiously. "I require yer assistance in the name o' the law! I war jes' a-perlitin' aroun', and axin' like a favior, fur the name o' the thing. I hev got a right ter yer help."
"Make yer right good"—Felix Guthrie had faced round, his indomitable eye bright and clear in the dusk, where all else was blurred—"ef ye kin. Thar's no law ever made ez kin turn me inter a spy ter lead a man ter the gallus or shet a prison door on him. Make yer right good, why don't ye?"
The strong vitality of the sheriff's self-confidence, the belligerent faith in his own prowess—an essential concomitant of his physique and bold spirit—tempted him sorely. The occasion was propitious, for a collision on such a scale was a rare opportunity to his bridled pugnacity, and with his posse at his back the consequences of defeat were infinitely reduced. The realization that Guthrie defied his power, even thus supported, cried aloud for due recognition, but gentler counsels prevailed in that stormy half-second while his broad chest heaved and his eyes flashed. His prospects as a candidate hampered him. Mutiny in the forces of so popular a man as he affected to be was an incongruity of insistent significance to the returns of the midsummer election.
"No, no, Fee; suit yerse'f," he said, smothering his feelings with a very pretty show of geniality, which, however it might fail to impose on Guthrie, ostensibly filled the breach. "I ain't a-goin' ter make my right good by requirin' a man ter resk his life 'mongst them slippery gorges on a night ez dark ez the grave itself. Naw; ef ye don't want ter go, ye don't need ter, though ye mought be some perliter-spoken 'bout'n it. Some o' the t'others mought take a notion ter volunteer, even though they ain't so well used ter the mountings ez you-uns be, through livin' up on the side o' the mounting; an' that horse o' Cheever's air plumb used ter sech roads through travellin' on 'em every day or so. But jes' ez ye choose—I ain't keerin'."
He strode forward to a group of men collected in the door-yard, and, standing with an arm about the shoulders of two of them, engaged in a low-voiced colloquy. The subject was presumably the despatching of an envoy to keep Shattuck under surveillance, and, with his reasons for the keenest interest in aught that touched this stranger, Guthrie with intent eyes gazed at them. Naught could be divined from their inexpressive attitudes; their low tones baffled his hungry ears. The excitements of the day had in a measure withdrawn his mind from his own antagonisms to Shattuck, his fear of being supplanted, his sense of injury because of the silence with which Shattuck had received his confidence, making no sign to divulge an inimical interest. Shattuck would, however, soon enough be dealt with, he reflected. And then he found, in a sort of dull surprise, that he could take no pleasure in the thought of the calamities impending for his rival, because, he reasoned, they were not in direct retribution for his own wrongs.
"I'd hev liked ter hev talked ter him one more time fust," he said, mentally revolving words bitterly eloquent with anger.
Pleasure? Nay, he deprecated the coming events. "Tawm C'rew air a mighty smart man—in his own opinion," he said, still scornfully gazing at the friendly pose of the important sheriff, which had all the values of the infrequent unbending of a very great man. "He oughter know ez Shattuck never hed no hand in sech ez murder an' thievery, an'"—with a sudden after-thought—"he would know it, too, ef he hed ever seen him."
There was a sudden strange stir at his heart. He had felt it once before, when the reproachful praise of shooting too straight had first fallen upon his ear. On a rude litter four men were bearing out from the barn door and carrying across the yard the recumbent figure of Bob Millroy, looking in the drear light of the dusk like death itself, so still he lay, suggestively stark, but with a ceaseless monotonous mutter, as if he had conveyed beyond death some feeble distraught capacity of speech. The uncomprehended words had a weird effect, and the groups of men grew silent as the litter was borne past. The sheriff followed it into the house, where with his own hands he kindled a fire on the hearth, that forthwith gave light and cheer, and converted the poor place from the aspect of a hovel to that of a home; he recommended that the patient—for thus he called him, rather than the prisoner—should be fed with chicken broth, and suggested that as all the poultry had gone to roost, Maggie would find a fat young pullet an easy capture. He saw that Millroy was comfortably ensconced in bed, with his wounds newly dressed, at which process Carew presided with ex cathedra utterances and a dignity bespeaking the experience of a medical expert. The restless head soon ceased to roll, the thick tongue grew silent, and the prisoner sank into slumber that seemed deep and restful.
Maggie had deftly seconded the officer's efforts, and was as helpful as a woman. But the wife held back, sullen and suspicious, speaking only when she was spoken to, and moving reluctantly in obedience to a direct command. More than once she fixed a surly, mutinous gaze upon the sheriff; and when the babble of delirium was still at last, and the room seemed full of homely comfort, the fire-light flickering on wall and ceiling, she could hold her peace no longer.
"Ye air a faithful servant of the devil," she said. "Look ter him fur yer thanks—ye'll git none from me. I know ye air a-doin' all this jes' ter git Bob well enough ter jail or hang him. He's yer sheep ter lead ter slarter."
"Lawdy mighty, Mis' Millroy!" exclaimed the officer, "what air ye a-talkin' 'bout? Ye dun'no' whether Bob hev done ennything ter be jailed or hung fur. Ef ye do, ye know more'n I do. All I know is that Fee Guthrie reported gittin' in a fight with a gang o' fellers, an' he shot sev'ral an' the res' run. I 'lowed I had better look 'em up an' see what sorter account they could give o' tharse'fs, ez thar hev been crimes commit in the county. Naw'm; ye hev got ter git through with a jury, an' a pack o' lawyers, an' a deal o' palaver, 'fore I take the trouble ter make up my mind. Law's mighty scientific nowadays. Ye hev got ter prove a thing on a man 'fore I'll go lookin' inter the hemp market. An' Bob hain't proved nuthin' 'ceptin' that Fee Guthrie shoots straight, ez he hev hed the name o' doin' from a boy."
He looked anxiously at his interlocutor, whom he had more bestirred himself to disarm than if she could have wielded a ballot in his behalf. She gave no overt sign of being placated, but there was something in her face which reassured him, and he observed that when the child came and leaned against her knee, she did not irritably repulse her as heretofore.
"She's a good child, Maggie air," he observed, contemplating her, remembering the little creature's eager help.
The child's small friendly gray eyes were fixed intelligently upon him as he sat resting a moment on the opposite side of the hearth; the flickering fire-light showed her shock of tousled red hair and threw her magnified shadow on the wall. The shutters of the low, broad window stood open to the fresh balsamic mountain air, revealing the myriads of scintillating stars in the dark moonless concave above the western ranges; the greenish-white clusters of an elder-blossom, growing close outside in a clump of weeds, looked in and nodded, as if in greeting to those within.
"An' she's a mighty smart leetle gal too," he added.
"Yes," her mother drawled, disparagingly, "but so turrible ugly. I hain't never tuk no comfort in her. But Bob, he 'lows he kin put up with her looks mighty easy."
"Waal, the bes'-lookin' gals ain't always pritty whenst little," said the sheriff, optimistically.
His plastic countenance took on a sudden absorption in graver matters, and he arose and strode to the middle of the room, stooping to glance out of the window, as if to exert some slight surveillance upon the members of his posse without.
The door-yard was all illumined. A fire of pine knots and hickory logs flared in its midst. Around it were grouped the figures of the night-bound posse, making what cheer they could for themselves. Spurred and booted and armed, they had a reminiscent suggestion for the sheriff, who had been a soldier and could look down the vistas of memory, where many a bivouac fire was still ablaze. The familiar features of the place seemed now and again to advance, then to shrink away askance amongst the shadows, as the yellow and red flames rose and fell with a genial crackling sound pleasant to hear. The rail fence showed with a parallel line of zigzag shadows; the ash-hopper, the beehives all awry, the haystack, were distinct; and the roof of the barn looked over them all, the window-shutter of the loft flaring wide, revealing the stores of hay whereon the visitors were to sleep; through the open door below their horses were visible, some stalled and at the mangers, but one or two lying on the straw. Quite outside stood another—a sleek, clay-bank creature—so still that, with the copperish hue and the lustre of the fire, he looked like some gigantic bronze. Around all the dark forest gloomed. Sometimes the flames were tossed so high, with a flickering radiance so bright, that the outline of a mountain would show against that dark, cloudless, starlit sky; and once were discovered mists in the valley—silent, white, secret, swift—journeying on their unimagined ways under cover of the night. The fire-lit figures sprawling about the logs wore merry, bearded faces, and jests and stories were afoot. Amongst the men were certain canine shapes, seeming to listen and to share the mirth; a trifle ill at ease, they now and again made a sniffing circuit of the guests, wondering, doubtless, where poor Bob Millroy was, and that upon them alone should devolve the entertainment of so many strangers.
The sheriff had a keen eye; one glance at the group and he went forward to the window, leaning his palms on the sill. The rank weeds below glowed in the fire-light; the elder-bloom breathed dew and fragrance in his face. He gave a low whistle, which a dog heard first, and turned its head, its ears cocked alertly, but nevertheless sat still, loath to leave the merry company. A second summons and one of the men sprang up, and approached the window.
"Whar's Felix Guthrie?" demanded the officer.
The fire-light showed a surprised glance from under the brim of his interlocutor's old slouched hat. "Why, I thunk ye sent him on some yerrand. He saddled his beastis an' put out long ago fur down the mounting. An' I axed him ef he warn't afeard o' the gorges. An' he 'lowed he war 'bleeged ter go."
The officer in his turn stared. "That's all right. I didn't know whether he hed gone," he said at last, with an airy wave of the hand. He turned within, smiling. "Fee air like the man in the Bible ez say, 'I go not,' an' goes," he muttered to himself, in triumphant satisfaction.
The sheriff found it a long night. The voices gradually dwindled until only a fragmentary, low-toned colloquy could be heard beside the fire outside, so had the number of renegades to the loft of the barn increased; and when at last the drowsy converse was hushed, the impetuous flare had died away; no fluctuating glimpses of the landscape embellished the darkness; the fire had sunk to a mere mass of vermilion embers amidst the utter gloom which it did not illumine. A wind after a time arose, and hearing it astir in the valley, the sheriff, in his frequent stridings to and fro in the little cabin, bethought himself of the menace of scattered coals to the hay and straw, and now and again looked out of the window to see how the gray ash was overlapping this smouldering mass, that had spent its energies in those wild, upspringing, tumultuous flames, and had burned out to the ground. More than once he mended the fire on the hearth-stone within, merely that he might have the company of the flicker on the wall; but it, too, was drowsy, and often sent up sluggish columns of smoke in lieu of blaze, and he seemed to himself the only creature alive and awake in all the spread of mountain and valley. He had contrived to keep his vigil alone. He had given a special promise that he would call the prisoner's wife at twelve o'clock to watch the latter half of the night. By no means reluctant, exhausted with the excitements of the evening superimposed upon the work and cares of the day, she and Maggie had climbed the ladder to the roof-room, and had left the officer in undisturbed possession below.
After a while he lighted a tallow dip, and surveyed the haggard face of the patient, as he still chose euphemistically to call the prisoner. The feeble glimmer illumined the room in pallid and melancholy guise, instead of with the hilarity and glow and bright good-will which the sulking fire had shown earlier in the evening. A great, distorted silhouette of his own head appeared upon the wall, leaning ogreishly over the pillow. He noted these things in the midnight. His hand on the round knob of the bedstead seemed to stealthily grasp a club. The forlorn face of the recumbent man added its significance to the shadow. A more sinister and threatening picture it was hardly possible to imagine, and after gazing at it with gruff disfavor, Carew shifted his position, and once more looked anxiously at the haggard face on the pillow. It bore certain tokens which in his ignorance he fancied were characteristic of the facies hippocratica; from time to time, as he lighted the candle anew, he noted them again, and his own face seemed to reflect them in a sort of dismay and terror. Once, as he struck the candle sharply downward to extinguish the flame, he apostrophized the patient out of the sudden darkness:
"Ef ye don't git sensible enough ter talk sorter straight afore ye take off from hyar fur good an' all, I dun'no' how in kingdom come I be a-goin' ter find out whar it war ez ye hid that plunder—ef ever ye did hide it."
He walked back to the hearth, where the gray smoke, itself barely visible, rose in a strong, steady column, now and then darting out a tiny scintillating tongue of white flame; he threw himself again into the rickety chair, his anxious eyes on the fire. A black cat, crouched upon the hearth, commented hospitably upon his proximity by a loud purring as she alternately opened and shut her witch-like yellow eyes. She recalled to his mind many a homely fireside fable of witchcraft that held in permanent solution the terrors of his childhood which the wisdom of later years might vainly strive to precipitate and repudiate. He looked at her askance while she peacefully slept, and the wind went heavily by the window as with the tread of a thousand men. He himself was never so consciously vigilant. It seemed as if he had never slept. He could hardly realize the fatigue, the drowsiness, with which he had struggled in the earlier portion of the night. Not a stir escaped his attention from the bed where the wounded man lay, whether in the soft recuperation of slumber, or the heavy stupors that so nearly simulate death itself, his ignorance could not determine. Once, as the flame flared white from out the gray smoke, he looked to see if the hands were plucking at the coverlet, a sign familiar to him of the approaching doom. And then, as the dull, dense, unillumined column of vapor streaming up the chimney benighted the room, he heard, with his keen senses all tense, the howl of a wolf on a far-away summit.
"So durned onlucky!" a thick voice said, suddenly, as it were in his ear.
Carew gave a galvanic start that jarred his whole frame, and he had a momentary impression that he had been dreaming. As he turned his head he heard the wind surging in the infinite leafage of the vast mountain wilderness. But within all was still save the slowly ascending column of gray smoke, and all was silent—not the chirping of a cricket, not the gnawing of a mouse—till abruptly, from out the semi-obscurity of the room, the thick, unnatural voice came again, came from the pillow where the restless head was rolling once more.
The sheriff drew a long breath of relief, raucously cleared his throat, and stretched out his stalwart, booted legs comfortably upon the hearth. Then he once more turned his face toward the bed, for, whether because of the pervasive quiet or the absence of other distractions, the utterances of delirium that had hitherto seemed incoherent and mere mouthings were now comprehensible—the words, although but half formed and thickly spoken, having become articulate.
"Durned onlucky," the voice said, over and over again, with falling inflections infinitely disconsolate.
A smile was on the officer's face. In the absence of other entertainment, these queer unauthorized gyrations of the powers of speech, all astir without the concurrence of the brain, promised to relieve somewhat the tedium.
"Onlucky! I b'lieve ye!" he commented, with a laugh. "Onlucky fur true—fur you!"
"So durned onlucky," the weird voice rose louder.
Then it fell to silence which was so long continued that the officer relapsed into a reverie, and once more eyed the veiled fire.
"Dun'no' nuthin' 'bout them Leetle People," the voice droned.
Once more Tom Carew lifted his head with a renewed interest; he felt as if long ago, in some previous state of existence, he had heard of those strange extinct folk; and then he recalled their more immediate mention—for the first time that he could remember—at the blacksmith's shop to-day, and their connection with the name of Shattuck. He sat with a half-scornful, half-doubting smile upon his face, that bespoke, nevertheless, an intent attention, and the influence of the fascination which the supernatural exerts; his hands were in his pockets, his hat on the back of his head, his long legs stretched out, his whole relaxed attitude implying a burly comfort.
"Buried jes' two feet deep; shows how small they actially war," said the thick voice, "them Stranger People."
The face of the sheriff, revealed in one of the lashing thongs of flame, had a breathless wonder upon it. "Durned ef it don't!" he muttered, in the accents of amazed conviction. And again he lent his ear to the delirious exclamations as the fevered brain retraced some scene present once more to its distortions.
"Naw, Buck, naw," Millroy cried out, with sudden vehemence. "'Twarn't me ez told. An' Steve Yates couldn't hev gin the word ter Shattuck. Nobody knowed but ye and me. Ye oughtn't ter hev shot at Shattuck. It air so durned onlucky ter shoot nigh a graveyard. Ah! ah! ah-h!" The voice rose suddenly to a hoarse scream, and he tossed uneasily from side to side.
The sheriff sat motionless, and albeit he had assumed the functions of nurse as well as watcher, offered no assistance or alleviation to the sufferer, but with a puzzled face meditated for a time on this unexpected collocation of names; then scratched his head with an air of final and perplexed defeat as he listened to the groans of the wounded man gradually dying away to silence.
He waited expectantly, but naught broke the stillness save the wind outside in the immensity of the night and the wilderness. "I wish ter God ye'd talk sense," he adjured the patient, disconsolately.
Then he fell to thoughtfully eying the fire, the simple elements of his interest in the disconnected monologue merged into anxiety and perplexity and baffled speculation. The veiled flame still tended sluggishly upward; he heard the sobbing of the sap oozing out at the ends of the logs. "This wood is mighty green," he observed, disparagingly, "an' post oak, too, I b'lieve. 'Tain't fitten ter make a fire out'n."
A vague stir was on the roof—pattering drops; slow, discontinued presently, and discursively falling again. The little cabin was on the very verge of a rain cloud. In the valley the rhythmic beat of the downfall upon the tree-tops came muffled to his ears, and he noted the intermittent sound of the wind dying away and rising fitfully and farther off. All at once his attention was deflected from the outer world.
"The Leetle People revealed the secret, Buck. Lay it at thar door," cried the weird voice of delirium.
Carew drew his sprawling members into a tense attitude, a hand on either knee, his head thrust forward, his eyes distended, staring into the gloom, his lower jaw falling.
"Thar warn't room enough fur the bones an' the jug an' the plunder too. An' that thar one o' the Leetle People's harnts hev sot out ter walk, ez sure ez ye air born—no room sca'cely bein' lef' in his grave. So durned onlucky ter meddle with the Leetle People's graves! So durned onlucky, to be sure!"
The officer sat as if turned to stone, breathless, motionless, staring fixedly into the dusky room, and seeing nothing that was before him—only the goal which he had sought—while the fevered head still rolled back and forth on the pillow, the delirious voice repeating, with every inflection of dull despair: "So durned onlucky! So onlucky, to be sure!"
How long the sheriff sat there, unconsciously striving to realize the situation, the significance of this strange discovery, he did not know. It was with a distinct effort of the mind at last that he sought to pull himself together and turn to the consequent step. He felt as if he were dreaming even after he was on his feet, and he paused irresolutely in the middle of the floor, and looked expectantly toward the bed, where the wounded man's head still restlessly rolled as he muttered: "So durned onlucky! So onlucky, to be sure!" But if Bob Millroy should talk all night he could add naught of importance to what the sheriff already knew.
"No use a-listening ter him jabber now," he said.
A sudden look of thought smote his face; his eyes narrowed, his teeth closed firmly, as he revolved the idea in his mind, and he turned abruptly to the window. The blasts had closed the batten shutter fast, and he shook it smartly before it would open in his hand. The slow wheeling of its edges against the sky revealed a change since last he had looked out. The stars still scintillated above in the clear spaces of the zenith, but a rain-cloud hung in the south, bulging low over the ranges, its blackness differing vastly in tone from the limpid darkness where the night was clear and serene. One summit below it was distinctly defined; there it had betaken a dusky brown color, and about its lower verge a fringe of fine straight lines of rain was suggested; a moon—a belated, waning moon—was rising in the melancholy dead hour of the night, its distorted, mist-barred disk showing between the bare eastern peaks, which were all silvered and clearly outlined above the massive wooded slopes darkling below. It shone full in the officer's eyes as for a moment he steadfastly gazed upon it. Then he laid his hand upon the window-sill and lightly sprang upon the ground below. The next moment he was standing in the door of the barn, and his stentorian halloo had roused all the slumbering mountaineers amongst the hay, and hailed the echoes in many a rocky gorge far away.