XXX.
He did not maintain this sedulous semblance of calmness as he galloped the wild young horse along the mountain slopes in the mist. His eyes burned; his teeth were fiercely set; sometimes he lifted his right hand and shook it clenched as if he held his vengeance within his grasp and would not lightly let it go. Over and again he cried aloud a curse upon the man he hated, and then he would fall to muttering his grudges, all unforgotten, all registered indelibly in his mind despite its facile laxity, despite its fickle traits. He reviewed the events since the morning that Alethea had stood by the judge’s desk, and he laid down his pen to gaze, to the afternoon when, amongst the blossoms and the sunshine and the birds, they had talked together, and she had asked a futile thing, doubtless to beguile the hour, and he had warned her solemnly.
“I ain’t goin’ ter North Car’liny, an’ leave ’em hyar tergether,” he declared vehemently. “I’ll meet up with him somewhar this side o’ the Craig house. I’ll dare him ter fight, an’ ef he don’t kill me I’ll kill him, an’ kiss the hand that does the deed!”
The mists shivered to listen; the rocks repeated the threat, and again in hesitant dread, and still once more a word in an awed and tremulous staccato. On and on he went,—never abating speed, flying over the broken ground; deaf to the sound of horn and hounds borne fitfully from the slopes below on some hardly perceptible current of the air, and again dying to the dumbness of the shrouded woods; blind to the burly apparition of a bear trotting out of the clouds and in again, although the horse reared and pawed the air; callous to the keen chill of the torrent, swollen out of its banks with the spring rains till it surged about his limbs as he forded through. Over and again the mountain water-courses intercepted his path, but only once his attention was attracted to his surroundings, and this was because there seemed here a check upon his progress, and he must needs take heed of his way. The stream known as Gran’dad’s creek showed in the thickening mist a turbulent volume, a swollen breadth, covering rocks and brush and gullies, and washing the boles of trees far from its normal channel; he hardly knew where he might safely take the ford. Now the water elusively glimmered, swift, foaming, full of enormous bowlders, and with trees standing in its midst; and as he went down to the verge in a cleft of the rock the vapors closed again, and it seemed to recede into invisibility. The horse had become restive. He resisted and snorted, and finally deliberately faced about, as he was recklessly urged to enter the stream. He was forced again to the margin, when suddenly Mink thought he was dreaming. The fluctuating vapors parted once more, and in the rifts he saw on the opposite bank the man he sought. He stood in numb surprise; a strange overwhelming sense of hatred possessed him with the image thus palpably presented; he quivered with a recollection of all his wrongs. This was no dream. It was Gwinnan returning from the moonshiners’ house. He rose from his stirrups and waved his hand with a smile. Mink heard his ringing halloo. Then Gwinnan pressed his roan colt down to the margin of the water and took the ford.
“Saved us wettin’ our feet agin, Grasshopper,” Mink observed. He was very distinct as he sat on the bareback stray; his feet dangling without stirrups, his big wool hat, his flaunting auburn hair, his keen, clear-cut face, all definitely painted on the opaque white background of the mist; a bole was barely outlined here and there behind him, or a towering crag, as if there were other elements of the picture merely sketched in. More than once Gwinnan lifted his grave eyes toward him. But when the mist came between them, surging in a great cloudy volume, Mink drew the pistol from his pocket.
“Ye don’t kerry straight. I ’member yer tricks. I reckon he hev got a six-shooter, but I’ll resk ye, ennyhows. I’ll wait till he kems across an’ then dare him to fight.”
As he waited it might have seemed that he was the only human creature in the world, so desolately vacant were the barren mists, so unresponsive to the sense of the landscape that they hid, so null, so silent, save for the river, forever flowing on like life, resistless as eternity. The interval was long to his impatience,—so long that, alarmed at last lest his revenge be snatched from him by some mischance, at this supreme moment when it had seemed the fierce joy he had craved was vouchsafed, he hastily rode along the clifty bank above the tumultuous current. Once more the mist lifted. Suddenly he saw the roan colt, his full eyes starting from his head, his scream almost human in its frantic terror, pawing the cliffs, to the base of which the encroaching waters had risen; finding no footing, no shallows, only the forbidding inaccessibilities of the rocks. The saddle was vacant. The rider had been swept away by the wanton vagaries of the current.
The young mountaineer stared stolidly and uncomprehendingly for a moment. In a sort of daze he dismounted from his horse. He hardly realized what had happened, until, as he climbed deftly down among the splintered crags, lithe, agile, sure-footed as a deer, he saw clinging to a bramble growing from a fissure, and supported on a ledge of the rock, the unconscious figure familiar to his dream of vengeance. It was forestalled! The wild freak of the mountain torrent had given him his heart’s desire, and yet his hands were clean. The wolves, the wild dogs, and the vultures would not leave the man to creep away were there yet life left in him.
And there was life. He noted the convulsive fluttering of breath, the trembling clutch of the fingers; for the nerves remembered the saving boughs that the senses had forgotten.