II.
A chimney, half of stone, half of clay and stick, stood starkly up in the gray rain and the swooping, shifting gray fog. It marked the site of a cabin burned long ago, and in such melancholy wise as it might it told of the home that had been. Now and again far-away lightning flashed on its fireless hearth; a vacant bird's-nest in a cranny duplicated the suggestions of desertion; the cold mist crept in and curled up out of the smokeless flue with a mockery of semblance. The fire that had wrought its devastating will in the black midnight in the deep wilderness, so far from rescue or succor, had swiftly burned out its quick fury, and was sated with the humble household belongings. The barn, rickety, weather-beaten, deserted, and vacant, still remained,—of the fashion common to the region, with a loft above, and an open wagonway between the two compartments below,—and it was here that the inquest was held. It was near the scene of the tragedy, and occasionally a man would detach himself from the slow, dawdling, depressed-looking group of mountaineers who loitered in the open space beneath the loft, and traverse the scant distance down the bridle-path to gaze at the spot where the stranger's body had lain, whence it had been conveyed to the nearest shelter at hand, the old barn, where the coroner's jury were even now engaged in their deliberations. Sometimes, another, versed in all the current rumors, would follow to point out to the new-comer the details, show how the rain had washed the blood away, and fearfully mark the tokens of frantic clutches at the trees as the man had been torn from his horse. The animal had vanished utterly; even the prints of his hoofs were soon obliterated by the torrents and the ever-widening puddles. And thus had arisen the suspicion of ambush and foul play, and the implication of the mysterious gang of horse-thieves, whose rumored exploits seemed hardly so fabulous with the disappearance of the animal and the violent death of the rider in evidence. The locality offered no other suggestion, and it was but a brief interval before the way would be retraced by the awe-stricken observer, noting with a deep interest impossible hitherto all the environment: the stark chimney of the vanished house, monumental in the weed-grown waste; the dripping forest; the roof of the barn, sleek and shining, and with rain pouring down the slant of its clapboards and splashing from its eaves; the groups of horses hitched to the scraggy apple-trees of the deserted homestead; and here and there the white canvas cover of an ox-wagon, with its yoke of steers standing with low-hung heads in the downpour. The pallid circling mists enveloped the world, and limited the outlook to a periphery of scant fifty paces; occasionally becoming tenuous, as if to suggest the dark looming of the mountain across the narrow valley, and the precipice close at hand behind the building, then once more intervening, white and dense of texture, forming a background which imparted a singular distinctness to the figures grouped in the open space of the barn beneath the shadowy loft.
The greater number of the gathering had been summoned hither by a sheer curiosity as coercive as a subpoena, but sundry of the group were witnesses, reluctant, anxious, with a vague terror of the law, and an ignorant sense of an impending implication that set both craft and veracity at defiance. They held their heads down ponderingly, as they stood; perhaps rehearsing mentally the details of their meagre knowledge of the event, or perhaps canvassing the aspect of certain points which might impute to them blame or arouse suspicion, and endeavoring to compass shifty evasions, to transform or suppress them in their forthcoming testimony. At random, one might have differentiated the witnesses from the mass of the ordinary mountaineer type by the absorbed eye, or the meditative moving lip unconsciously forming unspoken words, or the fallen dismayed jaw as of the victim of circumstantial evidence. It was a strange chance, the death that had met this casual wayfarer at their very doors, and one might not know how the coroner would interpret it. His power to commit a suspect added to his terrors, and gave to the capable, astute official a mundane formidableness that overtopped the charnel-house flavor of his more habitual duties. He was visible through the unchinked logs of the little room where the inquest was in progress, barely spacious enough to contain the bier, the jury, and the witness under examination; and yet so great was the sound of the rain outside and the stir of the assemblage that little or naught was overheard without.
Now and again the waiting witnesses looked with doubt and curiosity and suspicion at a new-comer, with an obvious disposition to hope and believe that others knew more of the matter than they, and thus were more liable to accusation. Occasionally, a low-toned, husky query would be met by a curt rejoinder suggesting a cautious reticence and a rising enmity, blockading all investigation save the obligatory inquisition of a coroner's jury. An object of ever-recurrent scrutiny was a stranger in the vicinity, who had been subpoenaed also. The facial effect of culture and sophistication was illustrated in his inexpressive, controlled, masklike countenance. He was generally known as the "valley man with the lung complaint," who had built a cabin on the mountain during the summer, banished hither by the advice of his physician for the value to the lungs of the soft, healing air. He wore a brown derby hat, a fawn-colored suit, and a brown overcoat, with the collar upturned. He was blond and young, and so impassive was his sober, decorous aspect that the aptest detective could have discerned naught of significance as he stood, quite silent and composed, in the centre of the place where it was dry, exempt from the gusts of rain that the wind now and again flung in spray upon the outermost members of the group, one hand in the pocket of his trousers, the other toying with a cigar which so far he held unlighted.
Of the two women present, one, seated upon the beam of a broken plough, refuse of the agricultural industry long ago collapsed here, was calmly smoking her pipe,—a wrinkled, unimpressed personality, who had seen many years, and whose manner might imply that all these chances of life and death came in the gross, and that existence was a medley at best. The other, a witness, was young. More than once the "valley man" cast a covert glance at her as, clad in a brown homespun dress, she leaned against the log wall, her face, which was very pale, half turned toward it, as if to hide the features already much obscured by the white sunbonnet drawn far over it. One arm was lifted, and her hand was passed between the unchinked logs in a convulsive grasp upon them. Her figure was tall and slender, and expressive in its rigid constraint; it was an attitude of despair, of repulsion, of fear. It might have implied grief, or remorse, or anxiety. Often the eyes of the prescient victims of circumstantial evidence rested dubiously upon her. To the great majority of men, the presence of women in affairs of business is an intrusive evil of times out of joint. Now, since matters of life and liberty were in the balance, the primitive denizens of Witch-Face Mountain felt that the admission of Narcissa Hanway's testimony to consideration and credibility evinced an essential defect in the law of the land, and the fallibility of all human reasoning. What distorted impression might not so appalling an event make upon one so young, so feminine, so inexperienced! What exaggerated wild thing might she not say, unintentionally inculpating half Witch-Face Mountain in robbery and murder!
Constant Hite, as he bluffly entered the passageway, his head up, his eyes wide and bright, his vigorous step elastic and light, gave no token of the spiritual war he had waged as he came. Already he felt in great jeopardy. On account of his illicit vocation he could ill abide the scrutiny of the law. With scant proof, he argued, a moonshiner might be suspected of highway robbery and murder. As he had journeyed hither with the constable and his fellows, who conserved the air of disinterested spectators, but who he knew had been summoned to aid the officer in case he should evade or delay, when he would have been forthwith arrested, he had been sorely tempted to deny having ever seen the stranger, in whose company he had spent an hour or so of the previous day. He had been able to put the lie from him with a normal moral impulse. He did not appreciate the turpitude of perjury. He esteemed it only a natural lie invested with pomp and circumstance; and the New Testament on which he should be sworn meant no more to his unlettered conscience than the horn-book, since he knew as little of its contents. But a lie is a skulking thing, and he had scant affinity with it.
He thought, with a sort of numb wonderment, that it was strange he should feel no more compassion for the object stretched out here, dumb, dead, bruised, and bloody, which so short a space since he had seen full of life and interest, animated by a genial courtesy and graced with learning and subtle insight; now so unknowing, so unlettered, so blind! Whither went this ethereal investiture of life?—for it was not mere being; one might exist hardily enough without it. Did the darkness close over it, too, or was it not the germ of the soul, the budding of that wider knowledge and finer aspiration to flower hereafter in rarer air? He did not know; he only vaguely cared, and he reproached himself dully that he cared no more. For he—his life was threatened! With the renewal of the thought he experienced a certain animosity toward the man that he should not have known enough to take better care of himself. Why must he needs die here, in this horrible unexplained way, and leave other men, chance associates, to risk stretching hemp for murder? He felt his strong life beating in his throat almost to suffocation at the mere suggestion. Again the lie tempted him, to be again withstood; and as he strode into the room upon the calling of his name, he saw how futile, how flimsy, was every device, for, fluttering in the coroner's hand, he recognized the sketch of the "Witch-Face" which the dead man had made, and the masterly drawing of his own imposing figure in the foreground. He had forgotten it utterly for the time being. In the surprise and confusion that had beset him, it had not occurred to him to speculate how he had chanced to be subpoenaed, how the idea could have occurred to the coroner that he knew aught of the stranger. As he stood against the batten door, the pale light from the interstices of the unchinked logs, all the grayer because it alternated with the sombre timbers, falling upon his face and figure, his hat upturned in front, revealing his brow with a forelock of straight black hair, his brilliant dark eyes, and his distinctly cut definite features, the sketch-book was swiftly passed from one to another of the jury, reluctantly relinquished here and there, and more than once eliciting half-smothered exclamations of delighted wonder from the unsophisticated mountaineers, as they glanced back and forth from the man leaning against the door to the counterfeit presentment on the paper.
Constant Hite experienced a glow of vicarious pride as he remembered the satisfaction that the artist had taken in the sketch, and he wished that that still thing on the bier could know how his work, most wonderful it seemed, was appreciated. And then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he realized that it was this which had entrapped him; this bit of paper had brought him into fear and trouble and risk of his life. The man might be of the revenue force. He might have encountered other moonshiners, and thus have come to his violent death. If this were his vocation, it brought Hite into dark suspicion by virtue of the fact, known to a few of the neighborhood, that he himself was a distiller of brush whiskey. No one else had seen the stranger till the finding of the body. He gathered this from the trend of the inquiry after the formal preliminary queries. The seven men, as they sat together on a bench made by passing a plank between the logs of the wall diagonally across the corner of the room, chewed meditatively their quids of tobacco, and now and then spat profusely on the ground, their faces growing more perplexed and graver as the examination progressed.
When Hite disclosed the circumstance that on the previous day he had encountered a "stranger man" near the "Witch-Face," there was a palpable sensation among them. They glanced at one another meaningly, and a sudden irritation was perceptible in the coroner's manner as he sat in a rickety chair near the improvised bier. He was a citizen of the valley region, a trifle more sophisticated than the jury, and disposed to seriously deprecate the introduction of any morbid or superstitious element into so grave a matter. He had a bald head, a lean face, the bones very clearly defined about the temple and cheek and jaw, a scanty grizzled beard; and he was dressed somewhat farmer fashion, in blue jeans, with his boots drawn high over his trousers, but with a stiffly starched white shirt,—the collar and cravat in evidence, the cuffs, however, vanished up the big sleeves of his coat.
"The exact place of the meeting is not material," he said frowningly.
But Hite's mercurial interest in the drawing had revived anew.
"Thar she be," he exclaimed, so suddenly that the jury started with a common impulse, "the ole witch-face,"—he pointed at the sketch in the coroner's hand,—"a mite ter the east an' a leetle south in the pictur', ez nat'ral ez life!"
One of the jurymen asked to see the sketch again. Evidently, in the hasty delineation of the contours of the slope they had not noticed the gigantic grimacing countenance which they all knew so well; the picturesque figure of the mountaineer in the foreground had so impressed the stranger that it was much more nearly complete than the landscape, being definite in every detail, and fully shaded. The book was handed along the row of men, each recognizing the semblance, once pointed out, with a touch of dismayed surprise that alarmed the coroner for the sanity of the verdict; his rational estimate rated spells and bewitchments and omens as far less plausible agencies in disaster than horse-thieves, highwaymen, and moonshiners.
"Look at the face of the deceased," he said, with a sort of spare enunciation, coercive somehow in its inexpressiveness. "Ye are sure ye never viewed that man afore yestiddy?"
"I hev said so an' swore it," said Hite, a trifle nettled.
"Ye rode in comp'ny a hour or mo' an' never asked his name?"
"I never axed him no questions, nor he me," replied Hite, "'ceptin' 'bout'n the witch-face. He was powerful streck by that. An' I tole him 't war a onlucky day."
The jury, a dreary row of unkempt heads, and bearded anxious faces, and crouching shoulders askew, cleared their throats, and two uncrossed and recrossed their legs, the plank seat creaking ominously with the motion under their combined weight. A shade of disappointment was settling on the coroner's face. This was slight information indeed from the only person who had seen the man alive. There was silence for a moment. The splashing of the rain on the roof became drearily audible in the interval. The stir of the group in the space outside was asserted anew, with their low-toned fitful converse; a black-and-white ox in the weed-grown garden emitted a deep, depressed low of remonstrance against the rain, and the irking of the yoke, and the herbage just beyond his reach. The jurymen might see him through the logs, and now and again one of them mechanically ducked his head to look out upon the dismal aspect of the chimney and orchard, round which so many horses and wagons had not gathered since the daughter of the house was long ago married here. There was a sprinkle of gray in his hair, and he remembered the jollities of the wedding,—incongruous recollection,—and once more he looked at the stark figure, its face covered with a white cloth, which had been done in a sentiment of atonement for the unseemly publicity of its fate.
In sparsely settled communities, death, being rare, retains much of the terror which custom lessens in the dense crowds of cities. There death is met at every corner. It goes on 'Change. It sits upon the bench. It is chronicled in the columns of every newspaper. Daily its bells toll. Its melancholy pageantry traverses the streets of wealthy quarters, and it stalks abroad hourly in the slums, and few there are who gaze after it. But here it comes so seldom that its dread features are not made smug by familiarity. When Hite was told to look again at the face and see if memory might not have played him false, to make sure he had never seen the man before yesterday, he hesitated, and advanced with such reluctance, and started back, dropping the cloth, with such swift repulsion, that the coroner, habituated to such matters, gazed at him with a doubtful scrutiny.
"Oh, he looked nowise like that," he exclaimed in a raised, nervous voice that caught the attention of the crowd outside, and resulted in a sudden cessation of stir and colloquy, "though it's him, sure enough! And," with a burst of regret, "he war a mighty pleasant man!"
The coroner, intentionally taking him at a disadvantage, asked abruptly, "What do you work at mostly?"
Hite turned shortly from the bier. "I farms some," he hesitated; "dad bein' mos'ly out o' the field, nowadays, agin' so constant."
"What do you work at mostly?" reiterated the official.
Hite divined his suspicion. Some flying rumor had doubtless come to his ears, how credible, how unimpugnable, the moonshiner could not tell. Nevertheless, his loyalty to that secret vocation of his had become a part of his nature, so continuous were its demands upon his courage, his strategy, his foresight, his industry. It was tantamount to his instinct of self-defense. He held his head down, with his excited dark eyes looking up from under his brows at the coroner. But he would not speak. He would admit naught of what was evidently known.
"Warn't ye afeard he might be a revenuer?" suggested the officer.
"I never war afeard, so ter say, o' one man at a time," Hite ventured.
"Didn't ye think he might take a notion that you were a moonshiner?"
"He never showed no suspicion o' me, noways," replied Hite warily. "We rid tergether free an' favored. He 'peared a powerful book-l'arned man,—like no revenuer ever I see."
"Where did you part company?"
Hite sought to identify the spot by description; and then he was allowed to pass out, his spirits flagging with the ordeal, and with the knowledge that his connection with the manufacture of brush whiskey was suspected by the coroner's jury, suggesting an adequate motive on his part for waylaying a stranger supposed to be of the revenue force. He felt the dash of the rain in his face as he stood aside to make way for the "valley man with the lung complaint," who was passing into the restricted apartment; and despite his whirl of anxiety and excitement and regret and resentment, he noted with a touch of surprise the cool unconcern of the man's face and manner, albeit duly grave and adjusted to the decorums of the melancholy occasion.
He was sworn, and gave his name as Alan Selwyn. The jury listened with interest to his fluent account of his occupation in the valley, which had been mercantile, of his temporary residence here for a bronchial affection; and when he was asked to identify the man who had so mysteriously come to his death, they marked his quick, easy stride as he crossed the room, with his hat in his hand, and his unmoved countenance as he looked fixedly down into the face of the dead. He remained a longer interval than was usual with the witnesses, as if to make sure. Then, still quite businesslike and brisk, he stated that he could not identify him, having certainly never seen him before.
"The only papers which he had on him," said the coroner, watching the effect of his words, "were two letters addressed to you."
The young man started in palpable surprise. As he looked at the exterior of the letters, which were stamped and postmarked, he observed that they must have been taken out of the post-office at Sandford Cross-Roads, to expedite their delivery; the postmaster doubtless consenting to this request on the part of so reputable-looking a person or a possible acquaintance.
"Were you expecting a visitor?" asked the coroner.
"Not at all," responded the puzzled witness.
He was requested to open the letters, read and show them. But he waived this courtesy, asking the coroner to open and read them to the jury. They were of no moment, both on matters of casual business, and Mr. Alan Selwyn was dismissed; the coroner blandly regretting that, in view of his malady, he had been required to come out in so chilly a rain.
Notwithstanding his composure he was in some haste to be gone. He went quickly through the crowd, drawing down his hat over his brow, and deftly buttoning his overcoat across his chest and throat. He had reached his horse, and had placed one foot in the stirrup, when, chancing to glance back over his shoulder, he saw Narcissa Hanway's white, flowerlike face, her bonnet pushed far back on her tawny yellow hair, both arms outstretched in a gesture of negation and repulsion toward the apartment where the jury sat, while a dark-haired, slow man urged her forward, one hand on her shoulder, and the old mountain woman followed with insistence and encouragement. He hesitated for a moment; then putting spurs to his horse, he rode off swiftly through the slanting lines of rain.