When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry

by Charles Neville Buck

"I don't know yit," he savagely announced. "I don't know yit fer sure whose a-goin' ter need punishment, but I've called on my kinsmen ter gather—an' when I knows the truth we'll be ready to deal hit out full measure."

"Ther days of feuds is past, son. Fer God's sake don't be ther backwardest man in all this evil-ridden country—you thet should be the forwardest."

But Bear Cat's hands, clenched into fists, were raised high above his head.

"My paw's in jail," he ripped out. "I hed ter go over thar ter hide out in Virginny. Ef them things hadn't come ter pass mebby I mout hev saved Blossom from her tribulation." Suddenly he fell silent. In the dim light the preacher saw his face alter to the ugly set of a gargoyle and his body come to such sudden rigidity as paralysis might have brought.

"God Almighty in heaven!" Turner exclaimed, then his words come racing in a torrent of frenzy. "I war a damn' fool not ter hev seed hit afore! Why air my paw in jail? Why did Kinnard Towers counsel me ter go ter Virginny an' hide out? Hit war because he war plannin' ter murder Jerry Henderson—an' he didn't dast do hit with us hyar! I knows now who needs killin' an' so holp me God, I hain't a goin' ter lay down ner sleep, ever again, until I kills him!" The eyes burned madly; the figure shook and he would have rushed off at the moment had not the preacher caught his arms and held them doggedly even though the infuriated young giant tossed him about in his efforts to free himself. Yet for all his thinness and age, Joel Fulkerson had power in his frame—and an unshakeable determination in his heart.

"Listen ter me," he pleaded. "I won't keep ye hyar long—an' ef ye don't listen now, ye won't never forgive yoreself hereafter.... Ye hain't got no cause ter misdoubt my loyalty.... I hain't never asked a favor of ye afore."

At any other time Turner would have acquiesced without debate and in a spirit of fairness, but now he was driven by all the furies of his blood. He had been through the icy chill of dull despair and then plunged into the blast furnace of red wrath. Upon some guilty agency reprisal must be wreaked—and as if with a revelation, he thought he saw the origin of the conspiracy which his father had long ago suspected.

He saw it so late because until now his mind had been too focused on effects to hark back to causes, and now that he did see it, unless he could be curbed, he would run amuck with the recklessness of a Mad Mullah.

"Let me go, damn ye," the young man almost shrieked as he tore himself loose from the restraining grasp, and flung the old preacher spinning to the side so that he fell to his knees, shaken. He clambered up slowly with a thin trickle of blood on his lips, where his teeth had cut them in the fall.

"Thet war a pity, Bear Cat," he said in a queer voice, though still unangered, wiping his mouth with his bony hand. "I'd thought thet we two—with a common sorrow between us——" There he broke off, and the boy stood for a breathing space, panting and smoldering. He could not come back to cold sanity at one step because he had been too far shaken from his balance—but as he watched the gray-haired man, to whom he had always looked up with veneration and love, standing there, hurt to the quick, and realized that upon that man he had laid violent hands, the crazy fire in his arteries began to cool into an unutterable mortification.