The bushwhackers & other stories

by Charles Egbert Craddock

“It war a powerful job ter saw it,” said the miller.

The jaws of the teamster closed with a snap. He had nothing more to say. He, too, was roused to the gospel of action. The miller should not saw more than he would haul. Thus it was that the next day found him with his strong mule team at sunrise, the first great lengths of the boles on the wagon, making his way along the steep ascents of Jolton’s Ridge.

And again Mark looked on drearily. He could do naught—he and Cockleburr. Cockleburr was hardly broken to the saddle, wild and restive, and it would have been the sacrifice of a day’s labor, even if the offer of such unlikely aid would have been accepted, to hitch the colt in for the hauling of this heavy lumber, such earnest, hearty work as the big mules were straining every muscle to accomplish. He was too poor, he felt, with a bitter sigh. He could do naught—naught. True, he armed himself with an axe, and went ahead of the toiling mules, now and then cutting down a sapling which grew in the midst of the unfrequented bridle-path, and which was not quite slight enough to bend beneath the wagon as did most of such obstructions, or widening the way where the clustering underbrush threatened a stoppage of the team. So much more, under the coercion of the little preacher’s sermon, he had wanted to do, that he hardly cared for the “Holped me powerful, Mark,” of the teamster’s thanks, when they had reached the destination of the lumber—the secluded nook where the little mountain graveyard nestled in the heart of the great range—the site chosen by the neighbors for the erection of their beloved church. Beloved before one of the bowlders that made the piers of its foundation was selected from the rocky hillside, where the currents of forgotten, long ebbed-away torrents had stranded them, where the detrition of the rain and the sand had molded them, the powers of nature thus beginning the building of the church-house to the glory of God in times so long gone past that man has no record of its spaces. Beloved before one of the great logs was lifted upon another to build the walls, within which should be crystallized the worship of congregations, the prayers of the righteous that should avail much. Beloved before one of the puncheons was laid of the floor, consecrated with the hope that many a sinner should tread them on the way to salvation. Beloved with the pride of a worthy achievement and the satisfaction of a cherished duty honestly discharged, before a blow was struck or a nail driven.

And here Mark, earnestly seeking his opportunity to share the work, found a field of usefulness. No great skill, one may be sure, prevailed in the methods of the humble handicraftsmen of the gorge—all untrained to the mechanical arts, and each a jack-of-all-trades, as occasion in his lowly needs or opportunity might offer. Mark had a sort of knack of deftness, a quick and exact eye, both suppleness and strength, and thus he was something more than a mere botch of an amateur workman. His enthusiasm blossomed forth. He, too, might serve the great cause. He, too, might give of the work of his hands.

At it he was, hammer and nails, from morning till night, and he rejoiced when the others living at a distance and having their firesides to provide for, left him here late alone building the temple of God in the wilderness. He would ever and anon glance out through the interstices of the unchinked log walls at the great sun going down over the valley behind the purple mountains of the west, and lending him an extra beam to drive another nail, after one might think it time to be dark and still; and vouchsafing yet another ray, as though loath to quit this work, lingering at the threshold of the day, although the splendors of another hemisphere awaited its illumination, and many a rich Southern scene that the sun is wont to love; and still sending a gleam, high aslant, that one more nail might be driven; and at last the red suffusion of certain farewell, wherein was enough light for the young man to catch up his tools and set out swiftly and joyously down the side of Jolton’s Ridge.

And always was he first at the tryst to greet the sun—standing in the unfinished building, his hammer in his hand, his hat on the back of his head, and looking through the gap of the range to watch the great disk when it would rise over the Carolina Mountains, with its broad, prophetic effulgence falling over the lowly mounds in the graveyard, as if one might say, “Behold! the dispersal of night, the return of light, the earnest of the Day to come.” Long before the other laborers on the church reached the building Mark had listened to the echoes keeping tally with the strokes of his hammer, had heard the earth shake, the clangor and clash of the distant train on the rails, the shriek of the whistle as the locomotive rushed upon the bridge above that deep chasm, the sinister hollow roar of the wheels, and the deep, thunderous reverberation of the rocks. Thus he noted the passage of the early trains—the freight first, and after an hour’s interval the passenger train; then a silence, as if primeval, would settle down upon the world, broken only by the strokes of the hammer, until at last some neighbor, with his own tools in hand, would come in.

None of them realized how much of the work Mark had done. Each looked only at the result, knowing it to be the aggregated industry and leisure of the neighbors, laboring as best they might and as opportunity offered. This was no hindrance to Mark’s satisfaction. He had wanted to help, not to make a parade of his help, or to have what he had done appreciated. He thought the little preacher, the “skimpy saint,” as his unfriends called him, had a definite idea of what he had done. In the stress of this man’s lofty ideals he could compromise with little that failed to reach them. He was forever stretching onward and upward. But Mark noted a kindling in his intent eye one day, while “the chinking” was being put in, the small diagonal slats between the logs of the wall on which the clay of the “daubing” was to be plastered. “Did you do all this side?” he had asked.

As Mark answered “Yes,” he felt his heart swell with responsive pride to win even this infrequent look of approval, and he went on to claim more. “Don’t tell nobody,” he said, glancing up from his kneeling posture by the side of the wall. “But I done that corner, too, over thar by the door. Old Joel Ruggles done it fust, but the old man’s eyesight’s dim, an’ his hand onstiddy, an’ ’twar all crooked an’ onreg’lar, so unbeknown ter him I kem hyar early one day an’ did it over,—though he don’t know it,—so ez ’twould be ekal—all of a piece.”