When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry

by Charles Neville Buck

He spat at a toad which blinked beadily up at him and then, rising from his cramped posture, he commented, "I hain't plumb dead sartin yet, but I aims ter be afore sun-up ter-morrer."

Bear Cat Stacy might have crossed the ridge that afternoon by a less devious route than the one he followed. In so doing he would have saved much weariness of leg and ache of burdened shoulder, but Ratler Webb's summing up had been correct, and though honest corn may follow the highways, sprouted grain must go by blinder trails.

When he reached the backbone of the heights, he eased the jute sack from his shoulders to the ground and stretched the cramp out of his arms. Sweat dripped from his face and streamed down the brown throat where his coarse shirt stood open. He had carried a dead weight of seventy pounds across a mountain, and must carry back another as heavy.

Now he wiped his forehead with his shirt-sleeve and stood looking away with a sudden distraction of dreaminess. A few more steps would take him again into the steamy swelter of woods where no breath of breeze stirred the still leafage, and even in the open spaces the afternoon was torridly hot. But here he could sweep with his eyes league upon league of a vast panorama where sky and peak mingled in a glory of purple haze. Unaccountably the whole beauty of it smote him with a sense of undefined appreciation and grateful wonderment. The cramp of heart was eased and the groping voices of imagination seemed for the time no longer tortured nightmares of complaint.

There was no one here to censor his fantasies and out of the gray eyes went their veiling sullenness and out of the lips their taut grimness. Into eyes and lips alike came something else—something touched with the zealousness of aspiration.

"Hit's right over thar!" he murmured aloud but in a voice low pitched and caressing of tone. "I've got ter get me money enough ter buy thet farm offen Kinnard Towers."

He was looking down upon a point far below him where through a cleared space flashed the shimmer of flowing water, and where in a small pocket of acreage, the bottom ground rolled in gracious amenability to the plow and harrow.

Again he nodded, and since he was quite alone he laughed aloud.

"She 'lows thet's ther place whar she wants ter live at," he added to himself, "an' I aims ter satisfy her."

So after all some of his day-dreams were tangible!