When they had been on the road for three hours Bear Cat and Sanders, by a common impulse, strained their ears through what had been silence, except for the wail of the high-riding breeze among the pine crests.
Now faint, and far away, hardly more than a hint of sound, they could hear something else, and it lifted Turner out of his reek of nightmare and semi-delirium so that his eyes cleared and his head came up. It was as though a bugle had sounded a note of martial encouragement through the mists of despair.
Joe Sanders spoke shortly, half to his companion and half to himself.
"Hit kinderly seems like Dog Tate's rousin' em up. I reckon ther war's on now all right an' it's liable ter be unshirted hell."
Blossom had been sitting until late that evening with her hands lying listlessly in her lap and her eyes staringly fixed on the blaze of her hearth. Their amber pools were darkened with jaded misery and her cheeks were pale. Their graciousness of youthful curve had been somewhat flattened, as her whole life had been flattened. Only her hair, awakened into halo-brightness by the blaze of the logs, spoke of that old vividness of color that had been a sort of delicate gorgeousness and even that nimbus had the suggestion of the glow about the head of a saint who has achieved sanctity through suffering.
"He swore he aimed ter come back ter me right soon," she repeated to herself. "I wouldn't have him imperil himself—but he mout have writ me a letter." Her instinct told her what had happened with a fulness of realization from which there was no escape. It was only because she had pretended her Cinderella dream to be a fact, that she had not all along recognized it for an impossible fairy tale. The Jerry Henderson who had promised her marriage was only a temporary Jerry: a man swept off his feet by the stress and freshet of crisis. The mountain blood in his veins had welled up to flood tide and swept away the dams of his superimposed cultivation. He had relapsed into her life—for a little while—just as his ardent tongue had relapsed into her uncouth vernacular.
Now the more permanent Jerry, awakened by his return to city conditions, was standing aloof, regarding that experience with self-contemptuous regret: thinking of it as a lapse into savagery. It had been an impetuous thing of the flesh to which his mind denied permanent sanction. The dream was over now—but she could not forget it.
Her fingers twisted themselves tightly together and she rose and leaned wearily against the mantel-shelf. As her eyes, clouded with misery, traveled about the tidy room, its every note spoke of Bear Cat Stacy. He had fashioned, for her comfort, all the furnishings that made it a place different from the rooms of other mountain cabins.
On the Pelion of her own misery she heaped the Ossa of self-condemnation. She saw again the stricken look in Turner's eyes as he had set out for Virginia after hearing the news that had cut the foundation from under all his own life-dream. She remembered, too, the gentleness with which, placing thought of her above self, he had made his renunciation.