At seven o’clock, despite entreaties and warnings, Creed mounted his mule and set out for the Turrentine place.
“Don’t you trust nothin’ nor nobody over thar,” Nancy followed him out to the gate to reiterate. “Old Jephthah Turrentine’s as big a rascal as they’ is unhung. No—I wouldn’t trust Judith neither (hush now, Little Buck; you don’t know what granny’s a-talkin’ about); she’s apt to git some fool gal’s notion o’ being jealous o’ Huldy, or something like that, and see you killed as cheerful as I’d wring a chicken’s neck. (For the Lord’s sake, Doss, take these chil’en down to the spring branch; they mighty nigh run me crazy with they’ fussin’ an’ cryin’!) Don’t you trust none on ’em, boy.”
“Why, Aunt Nancy, I trust everybody on that whole place, excepting Blatchley Turrentine,” said Creed sturdily. “Even Andy and Jeff, if I had a chance to talk to them, could be got to see reason. They’re not the bloodthirsty crew you make them out. They’re good folks.”
She looked at him in exasperation, yet with a sort of reluctant approval and admiration.
“Well,” she sighed, as she saw him mount and start, “mebbe yo’ safer goin’ right smack into the lion’s den, like Dan’el, than you would be to sneak up.”
Summer was at full tide, and the world had been new washed last night. Scents of mint and pennyroyal rose up under his mule’s slow pacing feet. The meadow that stretched beyond Nancy’s cabin was a green sea, with flower foam of white weed and dog-fennel; and the fence row was a long breaker with surf of elder blossom, the garden a tangle of bean-vine arbours. The corn patch rustled valiantly; the pastures were streaked with pale yellow primroses; and Bob Whites ran through the young crops, calling.
Creed rode forward. A gay wind was abroad under the blue sky. Every tiniest leaf that danced and flirted on its slender stem sent back gleams of the morning sunlight from its wet, glistening surface. The woods were full of bird songs, and the myriad other lesser voices of a midsummer morning sounded clear and distinct upon the vast, enfolding silence of the mountains.
It seemed beyond reason out in that gay July sunshine that anything dark or tragic could happen to one. But after all man cannot be so different from Nature which produces him, and the night before had given them a passionate, brief, destructive thunder-storm. Creed noted the ravages of it here and there; the broken boughs, the levelled or uprooted herbage, the washed and riven soil, as his mule moved soberly along.
At the Turrentine cabin all was quiet. The young men of the house had been out the entire night before guarding the trails that Creed Bonbright should not leave the mountains secretly. A good deal of moonshine whiskey went to this night guarding, particularly when there was the excuse of a shower to call for it, and the watchers of the trails now lay in their beds making up arrears of sleep. Jephthah stood looking out of his own cabin door when, about fifteen minutes ahead of Creed, Taylor Stribling tethered his half-broken little filly in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, and ran across the grassy side yard.
“Bonbright’s out an’ a-headin’ this way!” he volleyed in a hoarse whisper as he approached the head of the clan.