“Why don’t you-uns let him know yerse’f?” demanded Haines shortly.
“Waal, I be a-settin’ up nights with my sick nephews: three o’ them chil’n down with the measles, an’ my sister an’ brother-in-law bein’ so slack-twisted I be ’feared they’d gin ’em the wrong med’cine ef I warn’t thar ter gin d’rections.” His eye brightened as he noted Haines reaching forward for the end of the stick and slowly drawing the bundle toward him.
It is admitted that a leopard cannot change his spots, and, without fear of successful contradiction, one may venture to add to the illustrations of immutability that a coward cannot change his temperament. Now the fact that Peter Knowles was a coward had been evinced by his conduct on several occasions within the observation of his compatriots. His craft, however, had served to adduce mitigating circumstances, and so consigned the matter to oblivion that it did not once occur to Haines that it was fear which had evolved the subterfuge of enlisting his well-known enthusiasm for religion and right, and his natural antagonism against the juggler, in the Master’s service. On the one hand, Knowles dreaded being called to account for whatever else might be found unconsumed by the lime in the grotto, did he disclose naught of his discovery. On the other hand, the character of informer is very unpopular in the mountains, owing to the revelations of moonshining often elicited by the rewards offered for the detection of the infringement of the revenue laws. Persons of this class indeed sometimes receive a recompense in another metal, which, if not so satisfactory as current coin, is more conclusive and lasting. It was the recollection of leaden tribute of this sort, should the matter prove explicable, or the man escape, or the countryside resent the appeal to the law, which induced Peter Knowles to desire to shift upon Haines the active responsibility of giving information: his jealousy in love might be considered a motive adequate to bring upon him all the retributions of the recoil of the scheme if aimed amiss.
Knowles watched the young man narrowly and with a glittering eye as, with a trembling hand and a look averse, Haines began to untie the cord which held the package together.
“He killed the man, Owen, ez sure ez ye air livin’, an’ flunged his bones in the quicklime, an’ now he flunged in his clothes,” Knowles was saying as the bundle gave loose in the handling.
Drawing back with a sense of suffocation as a cloud of minute particles of quicklime rose from the folds of the material, Owen Haines nevertheless recognized upon the instant the garments which the juggler himself had worn when he first came to the Cove, the unaccustomed fashion of which had riveted the young mountaineer’s attention for the time at the “show” at the church-house.
With a certain complex duality of emotion, he experienced a sense of dismay to note how his heart sank with the extinguishment of his hope that the man might prove a criminal and that this discovery might rid the country of him. How ill he had wished him! Not only that the fierce blast of the law might consume him, but, reaching back into the past, that he might have wrought evil enough to justify it and make the retribution sure! With a pang as of sustaining loss he gasped, “Why, these hyar gyarmints air his own wear. I hev viewed him in ’em many a time whenst he fust kem ter the Cove!”
Knowles glared at him in startled doubt, and slowly turned over one of the pointed russet shoes. “He hed ’em on the night he gin the show in the Cove,” said Haines.
“I seen him that night,” said Knowles conclusively. “He hed on no sech cur’ous clothes ez them, else I’d hev remarked ’em, sure!”
“Ye ’lowed ’twar night an’ by the flicker o’ the fire, an’ ye war in a cornsider’ble o’ a jigget ’bout’n yer lime.”