“I hev axed ye time an’ agin, Sam Marvin, whar Tad be. Ef ye don’t tell, I’ll be bound ter b’lieve ye moonshiners hev done suthin’ awful ter him.”
They were about to depart on their journey. Already Serena was on her uneasy bed of corn in the ear. But the pullet’s life had been made up chiefly of rough jouncing, and never having heard of a wagon with springs, she was in a measure incapable of appreciating her deprivation. She had wrapped a quilt of many colors about her shoulders, for the evening air was chill, and she looked out of the opening in the back of the canvas-covered wagon in grotesque variegation. Mrs. Marvin was climbing upon the wheel to her seat on the board in front. The moonshiner stood by the head of one of the mules, busy arranging the simple tackling. He looked with a sneer at Alethea over the beast’s neck.
“An’ I hev tole ye, Lethe Sayles, ez I dunno whar Tad be now. I’m a mighty smart man, sure enough, but ’twould take a smarter one ’n me ter say whar Tad be now, an’ what he be a-doin’.”
He looked at his wife with a grin. She laughed aloud in tuneless scorn. The girl, gazing out of the back of the wagon as it jolted off, echoed the derision in a shrill key. And as the clumsy vehicle went creaking down the precipitous slope, beyond which could be seen only the flaming base of the opposite mountain, all luridly aflare in the windy dusk, they seemed to Alethea as if they were descending into Tophet itself.
XVIII.
For a long time that night Alethea sat on the cabin porch in Wild-Cat Hollow, absently watching the limited landscape seen through the narrow gap of the minor ridges superimposed upon the great mountain. The sky was dark but for the light that came from the earth. The flames were out of sight behind the intervening ranges. Weird fluctuating gleams, however, trembled over the cove below, and summoned from the darkness that stately file of peaks stretching away along the sole vista vouchsafed to the Hollow. Sometimes the illumination was a dull red suffusion, merging in the distance into melancholy gradations of tawny yellow and indeterminate brown, and so to densest gloom. Again it was golden, vivid, fibrous, divergent, like the segment of a halo about some miraculous presence, whose gracious splendor was only thus suggested to the debarred in Wild-Cat Hollow. The legions of the smoke were loosed: down in the cove, always passing in endless ranks what way the wind might will; along the mountain side, marshaled in fantasies reflecting from the fires subtle intimations of color,—of blue and red and purple; deploying upward, interposing between the constellations, that seemed themselves upon the march. There were clouds in the sky; the night was chill. Alethea gathered her shawl over her head. Now and then Tige, who sat beside her, wheezed and glanced over his shoulder at the door ajar, as if to urge her to go in. Sometimes he ran thither himself, looking backward to see if she would follow him. Then, as she continued motionless, he would come and sit beside her, with a plaintive whine of resignation. Tige was pensive and humble to-night, and was making an edifying show of repentance. On the homeward walk he had been disposed to follow the example of the moonshiner’s dogs and harass the coon, thereby becoming acquainted with the teeth of the smiling creature, and incurring Alethea’s rebukes and displeasure.
It was a cheerful scene within, glimpsed through the half-open door, contrasting with the wild, dark world without, and its strange glares and fluctuating glooms and far-off stars and vast admeasurements of loneliness. The old woman knitted and nodded in her rocking-chair; Jessup and Mr. Sayles smoked their pipes, and ever and anon the old man began anew to detail—the pipe-stem between his teeth—the legends that his grandfather had learned from the Indians of the hidden silver mines in these mountains, found long ago, and visited stealthily, the secret of the locality dying with its discoverer, who thus carried out of the world more than he brought with him. Their eyes gloated on the fire as they talked, seeing more than the leaping yellow flames or the white heats of the coals below. It might seem as if the craving for precious metal is a natural appetite, since these men that knew naught of the world, of the influence of wealth, of its powers, of its infinite divergences, should be a-hungered for it in their primitive fastnesses, and dream of it by night.
“On the top of the Big Smoky Mountings, on a spot whar ye kin see the Tennessee River in three places at once,” said the old man, repeating the formula of the tradition.
Jessup puffed his pipe a moment in silence, watching the wreathing smoke. “I know twenty sech spots,” he said presently.