She listened as they talked, thinking that Sam Marvin’s home, miles away, would presently be in danger, if they were right as to the location of the fire. The cruel flames would complete the desolation she had wrought. Her conscience winced always at the recollection of its bare, denuded plight. Some small reparation was suggested in the idea that she might save it; she might go thither now and fire the dead leaves on the slopes below. Above there was a desolate, barren stretch of rocks, covering many acres, which the flames could hardly overleap. There was no wind, but a slight stir was now in the air. Its current was down the mountain.
She set out, Tige and the coon with her: the wild thing ambling demurely along with all the decorum of cultivated manners; the domestic animal barking and leaping before her in mad ecstasy for the simple privilege of the excursion. The cub looked after them from the doorway, whined, and crept within to the fire.
As she went she was vividly reminded of the day when she had journeyed thither before, although the woods had then worn the rich guise of autumn, and they were now austere and bleak and silent, and shrouded in the white smoke. She even noted the lick-log at the forks of the road, where she had sat and trembled and debated within herself. She wondered if what she had said in the court-room would pursue the moonshiner in his hiding place. Would it harm him? Had she done right or wrong?
Still walking on up the steep slant to the moonshiner’s house, seeing only a yard or two before her, she at last came upon the fence. She paused and leaned upon the rails, and looked about her. The corn-field comprised more acreage than is usual in mountain agriculture. The destination of the crop was not the limited legitimate market of the region. It was planted for use in the still. She experienced another pang when she realized that it too was a grievous loss; for Sam Marvin had been forced to leave the fruit of his industry when it stood immature. Now, early in December, the full crisp ears leaned heavily from the sere stalk. She wondered that the abandoned crop, a fine one, had not been plundered. Then she bethought herself how deep in the wilderness it stood secluded. All at once she heard a rustling among the corn. Her first thought was the bear. In amaze she discerned a wagon looming hard by in the smoke. Then the indistinct figures of a man, a woman, and a half-grown girl came slowly down the turn row. To judge from their gestures, they were gathering the corn.
XVII.
Alethea stood motionless for some little time, still leaning on the fence. A stalk of golden-rod, brown and withered, its glory departed, touched the rails now and then. Its slight, infrequent swaying was the only intimation of wind, except that the encompassing smoke, filling the vast spaces between heaven and earth, shifted occasionally, the dense convolutions silently merging into new combinations of ill-defined shapes,—colorless phantasmagoria, dimly looming. It might have seemed as if all the world had faded out, leaving only these blurred suggestions of unrecognized forms, like the vestiges of forgotten æons.
Even the harvesters did not maintain always a human aspect. Through the haze they were grotesque, distorted, gigantic; their hands vaguely visible, now lifted, now falling, in their deliberate but ceaseless work. They looked like vagrants from that eccentric populace of dreams, given over to abnormal, inconsequent gestures, to shifting similitudes, to preposterous conditions and facile metamorphoses of identity. Alethea felt a strange doubt, in recognizing Sam Marvin, whether it were indeed the moonshiner whom she saw.
An insistent silence possessed the air, broken only by the rustle of the crisp husks as the three dim figures pulled the corn. Suddenly there sounded a mad, scuttling rush, shrill canine yelps, and a series of nimble shadows vaulted over the fence. The coon ran up a tree, while the moonshiner’s dogs ranged themselves beneath it, with upturned heads askew, and gloating, baffled eyes, and moans of melancholy frustration, punctuated ever and anon with yaps of more poignant realization of the coon’s inaccessibility. Tige, irresolute, showed fight at first to the strangers; then he too sat down, and with quivering fore-paws and wagging tail wheezed and yelped at his fireside companion, as if he had no personal acquaintance with the raccoon, had held with him no relations of enforced amity, and could not wait one moment to crunch his bones.
The half-grown girl, desisting from her work, turned her head in the direction of the noise, and caught a glimpse of Alethea. She had an excited eye, high cheek-bones, and a thin, prominent nose. Her face looked peculiarly sharp inside her flabby sun-bonnet. She was at the “growing age,” and her frock was consequently short for the bare, sun-embrowned legs which protruded from it. Her bare feet were long and bony. She seemed to be growing lengthwise only, for her shoulders were narrow, her arms slim. She had a callow, half-fledged look, not unlike a Shanghai pullet. Her manner was abrupt and fluttered, and her voice high and shrill.