“Well, madam,” said the politician, “I have been about right smart in the mountains, and I have partaken of the cheer around many a hearth-stone, but this is the first time I have ever been invited to look down the muzzle of a rifle.”
She winced visibly at this reflection upon her hospitality, as she knelt on the hearth, slipping the knife under the baking pones on the hoe, and turning them with a dexterous flip.
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” continued Harshaw. “I have never heard of anybody but law-breakers giving themselves to such practices,—moonshiners and the like.”
The woman suddenly lifted her face, her dismayed jaw falling at the significant word. Harshaw could have laughed aloud. The simple little riddle was guessed. And yet the situation was all the graver for him. There was a step outside; the door opened for only a narrow space; darkness had fallen; the room was illumined by the flaring flames darting up the chimney; he knew that he was scrutinized sharply from without, and now and then he heard the sound of voices in low conference.
It was well, doubtless, that the secret petitions he preferred to the powers of the earth and the air for the utter confusion and the eternal destruction of the mountain hunters who had made so slight and ineffective a search for him—or perhaps none at all—could not be realized, or his misfortune might have engendered far-reaching and divergent calamity, disproportionate in all eyes save his own.
He knew now that he had stumbled upon a gang of moonshiners, and had been taken for a revenue spy, or a straggler from a raiding party. How to escape with this impression paramount, or indeed how to escape at all, was a question that bristled with portentous dubitation. He was content to pretermit it in the guarded watchfulness that absorbed his every faculty, as one by one the men strode in to the number of four or five, each casting upon him a keen look, supplementing the survey through the door.
One of them he suddenly recognized. “I have seen you before,” he said, with a jolly intonation. “This is Sam Marvin, ain’t it?”
The owner of the name was discomfited when confronted with it, and seeing this, Harshaw was sorry that he had, with the politician’s instinct, made a point of remembering it.
He could with difficulty eat, despite the fatigues of the day, but he sat down among them with a hearty show of appetite and with his wonted bluff manner. His sharpened attention took cognizance of many details which under ordinary circumstances he would not have noticed. He could have sworn to every one of the rough faces—and right welcome would have been the opportunity—grouped about the table. The men ate in a business-like, capacious fashion, especially one lean, lank fellow, with unkempt black hair and a thin face, the chin decorated with what is known as a goatee. Notwithstanding their roughness they were not altogether unkind. Philetus could not complain of disregarded pleas as he begged from chair to chair, under the firm impression that there was something choice in the menu not included in the contents of the pan placed for him on a bench, which should serve as table, while he was to be seated on an inverted noggin. And the dogs spent the time of the family meal alternately in a petrified expectancy and sudden elastic bounds to catch the bits flung liberally over the shoulders.
When the repast, conducted chiefly in silence, was concluded, the group reassembled about the hearth-stone, the pipes were lighted, and conversation again became practicable. It required some strong control of his faculties to bear himself as an honored guest instead of a suspected informer, trapped, but Harshaw managed to support much of his wonted manner as he lighted a pipe that he had in his pocket and pulled it into a strong glow. Nevertheless, he was beset with a realization of how easy it would be for them to rid themselves of him without a possibility that his fate would excite suspicion. As he looked into the flaming coals of the fire, his quickened imagination could picture a man lying lifeless at the foot of a great wall of rocks,—lying motionless where he had fallen, but with an averted face,—and another vista in which his horse, with an empty saddle, with pistols in the holster, cropped the grass on a slope. He thought of it often afterward,—the man lying lifeless beneath the crags, with a face he did not see! This was the doom that persistently forced itself upon him as most obviously, most insistently, his; naught else could so readily release these desperadoes from the peril that threatened them. He began to remember various stories of Marvin’s old encounters with the “revenuers:” on one occasion shots had been exchanged; one or more of the posse had been killed; he could not remember accurately, but he thought this was accredited to Jeb Peake,—“hongry Jeb,” who could, according to the popular account of him, “chaw up five men of his weight at a mouthful an’ beg for more.” They had much at stake; perhaps, as they looked into the fire with that slow, ruminative gaze, they also saw a picture,—a halter wavering in the wind. The room alternately flared and faded as the flames rose and fell. It bore traces of renovation: the door was new, the floor patched. He made a rough guess that Marvin had taken possession of one of the long-deserted huts seen at intervals in the mountains. Raindrops presently pattered on the roof; then ceased, as if waiting breathlessly for some mandate; and again a fusillade; and anon torrents. The melancholy elements in the wild wastes without seemed not uncheerful companions in lieu of the saturnine group about the fire. Alack, for liberty, the familiar thing! Harshaw sought to reassure himself, noting their kindness to the idiot and to the little child. Philetus climbed over their feet, and made demands, of a frequency appalling to a mind less repetitious than the one encased in the downy yellow head, to be ridden on their great miry boots.