She rose bustlingly to stir up the fire, that there might be light enough to make the requisite preparations. Alethea’s heart failed her when she thought of the tiny apartment partitioned off at the end of the porch, and beheld her aunt lighting a little tin lamp without a chimney at the fire. The mountain girl, with all the conservatism of her class, possessed the strength of prejudice against innovation which usually appertains to age. The characteristic of years seemed reversed as she looked on with reluctance, and the old woman flustered about, full of her experimental glories and her eager relish of a new fashion. “Ye kem along, child!” she exclaimed, her moon face wreathed with a toothless smile and the redolent emanations of the smoking and sputtering lamp. It was placed on a shelf in the little room, and as Alethea buttoned the door it gave out less light than a suffocating odor. It served, however, to reveal the timbers that formed the sides of the room, for it was built after the treasures of the post-office had been exhausted in the decoration of the main house. Upon them hung an array of Mrs. Purvine’s dresses, suspended by the neck, and suggesting the uncheerful idea of a row of executed women. The bed was high, huge with feathers and heaped with quilts. There were no means of ventilation, unless sundry cracks incident to mountain architecture might be relied upon. Alethea made haste to extinguish the lamp. When she had climbed the altitudes of the feather bed she could not sleep. The roof-room at home, with its windows and its sweeps of high air, was not so fine, it might be, but as she smothered by slow degrees she thought poorly of fashion. Her brain was hot with the anxious, strenuous thoughts that seethed through it. She was much less cheerful as the hours wore on. The recollections of the sad day bore heavily upon her spirit. Over and again Mink’s cruel words, the ridicule to which the lawyer had subjected her in her own estimation, the affront to her dignity,—she had no such fine name for it, she could only feel,—came back to her, and she could but marvel that the evening had passed so placidly; she wondered that she even lived, so acute were the pangs of her wounded pride. She had an ineffable repugnance to the idea of ever seeing Harshaw again; for herself alone, for her life, she felt, she would have made no further effort. “I’ll do it fur Reuben, though,” she said. The thought of him, too, was very bitter. Her wakeful eyes were hot, but they harbored no tears. Once she slipped down from the bed and unbuttoned the door, hoping to sleep with the influx of air. It came in fresh, sweet, full of the sense of dew. The night was not black; only a subdued gray shadow lay over all the land: how its passive, neutral aspect expressed the idea of rest! Looking out from the cavernous overhanging portal of the little porch, she could see the Great Smoky, darkly rising above the cove. She heard the stir of a bird roosting in an althea bush by the gate, and then a scuttling noise under the house. She had moved very softly, but the vigilant Towser bounded upon the porch. He knew her—for she spoke to him instantly—as well as he knew his name, but for some unexplained affectation of his nature he would not recognize her, and sat before her door and barked at her with a vehemence that made the roof ring, the sound reverberating from the mountains as if a troop of wolves were howling in the melancholy woods. Twice he tired of this pastime, and withdrew under the house, coming out once more to renew it. She shut the door, finally, and again and again he threw himself against it, at last lying down before it and growling at intervals. She fell asleep after a time, through sheer fatigue, regardless of the lack of air in the little dungeon; waking heavy-eyed and fagged in the morning, able to acquiesce only faintheartedly when Mrs. Purvine triumphantly saluted her: “Waal, Lethe, now nobody kin never say ez ye ain’t slep’ in the bedroom.”
All day she felt the effects of her vigil. She thought it was this which had touched her courage. She stood still with a quaking at her heart, when, climbing the Great Smoky, she reached the forks in the road where she should turn off to go to Sam Marvin’s house. There was no view of the valley. The woods were immeasurable about her, all splendid with the pomp and state of autumn. Those great trees, ablaze with color,—the flaming yellow of the hickory, the rich, dull purple of the sweet-gum, the crimson of the oaks,—reached up in endless arches above her head, all boldly painted against the blue sky. An incredible brilliancy of effect was afforded by the long vistas, free of undergrowth, and carpeted with the poly-tinted leaves. Among the boughs often the full purple clusters of the muscadines hung, the vines climbing to the tops of the trees, and then trailing over to the ground. As she stood she heard a creaking and straining of the strong cables,—a fox in their midst as they lay tangled upon the earth. She noted, too, the translucent red globes of the persimmon hanging upon trees denuded of all but a few yellow leaves.
She sat down on a log at the forks of the road, feeling greatly perturbed and anxious. To do what she proposed to do was to take her life in her hands. Not her step-mother alone, but Jacob Jessup, had warned her, and Jerry Price had repeated what they had said, almost in their very words. But they had only sought to curb her foolish tongue. They had never dreamed of the reckless temerity of going into the moonshiner’s den to defy him, proclaim herself the informer, and warn him to save himself. He had already threatened her; she remembered his stern, vehement face in the closing dusk. She wondered that her mind should balk from the decision so imperatively urged upon it. She seemed, as it were, to catch herself in lapses of attention. Often she looked, first at one, then at the other, of the roads,—neither visible for more than a few yards up the steep ascent,—as if she expected some diversion, some extraneous aid, in her dilemma, something to happen to decide it for her.
What, she said to herself, if never again she should behold this place? What if, in taking choice of the forks of the road, she should take a path she might never tread again?
And then she wondered that she should notice that the log on which she sat was a “lick log,” should speculate whether the cattle often came here for salt, should look idly into the cleft within it to see if perchance there were still salt there.
It would be safer, it might be better for all, to give her testimony if it should be called for, and leave Sam Marvin to the law. “I’m fairly feared o’ him, ennyways. I’m feared ter go thar an’ let him know that he’ll git fund out, mebbe, fur I’ll tell on him ef I’m summonsed ez a witness. My step-mother’s always sayin’ I’m a meddler, an’ mebbe I be.”
She listened to the sound of an outgushing roadside spring. She looked up at the new moon, which seemed to follow the lure of the wind beckoning in the trees. They shook their splendid plumes together like an assemblage of bowing courtiers, gayly bedight.
She remembered the “houseful,” the pinching poverty, the prison, the destruction of the still. She rose reluctantly and turned to the left. Her eyes were bright; her cheeks were flushed; her red lips parted. She listened intently from time to time: not a sound but her own slow, light footfall. She had thought to hear the dogs barking, for the place was now near at hand. When she saw a rail-fence terminating the vista her heart gave a great bound; she paused, looking at it with dilated eyes. Then she went on, up and up, till the house came in view,—a forlorn little cabin, with a clay and stick chimney, smokeless! She stared at it amazed. There was no creature in the hog-pen, which was large for the pretensions of the place,—the distillery refuse explained its phenomenal size, perhaps; the door of the house swung loose in the wind. There were several slats nailed across the entrance low down, evidently intended to keep certain vagrant juveniles from falling out of the door. No need for this now. The place was deserted. Alethea walked up to the fence,—the bars lay upon the ground,—and stepped over the slats into the empty room. The ashes had been dead for days in the deep chimney-place; a few rags in a corner fluttered in the drafts from crannies; the whole place had that indescribable mournfulness of a deserted human habitation that had so pathetically appealed to her in the little house at Boke’s Spring. Here it pierced her heart. It was from fear of her that they had fled,—and whither? A poor home at best, where could they find another? She need not have quaked, she said to herself; they had not sought to still her tongue, lest it should wag against them. They had uprooted their home, and had withdrawn themselves alike from the informer and the law that threatened them. The tears sprang into her eyes. She deprecated their bitter feeling, their saddened lives, their deserted hearth-stone. And yet it was all wrong that they should distill the brush whiskey, and could she say she was to blame?
A faint scratching sound struck her attention. It came from behind the closed door of the shed-room. She stood listening for a moment, unable to account for it. Then she went forward and unlatched the door.
A starved cat, emaciated and forlorn to the last degree, forgotten in the removal, shut by some accident into the room, crept quivering out. It went through the dumb show of mewing; it could not walk; its bones almost pierced its skin. Its plight served to approximate the date of the flitting. It had been there for days, weeks perhaps.