The Code of the Mountains

by Charles Neville Buck

Suddenly the full significance of the boy's declaration that he would accomplish his end if he had to "ride through hell on hossback" came to her.

She had started out by hating Newt. Of late, she had felt that deep sympathy for him which is the borderland of affection. She had resolved on reclaiming him. Now, again, she hated him.

Fifteen minutes after she had started, she was riding away from the stile of Jim Spooner's house on a borrowed mule. The short cut she contemplated taking required a mule. There were fords where a horse, with its less steady footing, would have probably hurled her to death. There were washed out trails where the ride would be in the nature of tightrope walking. But these things did not deter Minerva Rawlins. She was a mountain woman with a mission to perform.

As she rode away from the stile, she heard a deep mellow note, which was not loud, but which she knew would carry for miles—the note of a fox horn. It was once the signal of the moss-troopers. It had rung over the heather and gorse in Scotland hundreds of years ago. To-day it would ring as truly over the Cumberland ridges where these belated Scotch high-landers lived the old life in the old, unalleviated way.

She leaned forward in her saddle, lashing her mule with a hickory branch, and listened, and at last her lips curved in a momentary smile of satisfaction. Far ahead of her, more faintly and more distantly, she heard it again. The message was being relayed.

But in that long, hard ride, with the forests tuneful in their color and their unspeakable beauty, yet eloquent in their silences, she had ample opportunity for reflection, and as she reflected, the bitterness oozed out of her heart, and in its place came compassion.

Now, she realized that she was not fighting only to save the life of the man whom she had idealized, who to her was the one knightly person she had ever known; but, also, to save from himself the boy with the black obsession.

At first, Newt had seemed only a murder-driven miscreant whose aims she must thwart. Now, she saw him from a different angle. He was the victim of the false order, which those men and women at the school sought to amend. She, also, was seeking to amend it, but while she must give battle to Newt Spooner and defeat his purpose, she could do so with the realization that his guilt was only the guilt of a sort of lunacy, for which he was scarcely responsible.

His was one idea. He was a prison-reformed man, which is often to say an embittered man.

Of course, she knew that, when he learned what she had done, Newt would believe that the one friend he had ever known had become his irretrievable enemy. Of course, in honesty, if he did not learn it from another source, she must herself tell him what part she had played in this day's happenings. That she would do, and in the end perhaps he would thank her.