When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry

by Charles Neville Buck

Yet all this was the sheerest sort of rumor. No man had proof that a Towers rifle had killed Turner—the man to whom his clan had looked for leadership. No man had seen the body which his family was said to be holding for that dramatic consignment to the earth.

But in part the report found fulfilment. On Sunday afternoon Blossom leaned over the quilt-covered figure of her dying husband to realize that he was no longer dying but dead.

"Speak ter me, Jerry," she cried as she dug her nails into her palms. "Speak ter me—jest one time more."

She sought to call out to her father, but her lips refused the service, and as she came to her feet she stretched out her hands and crumpled, insensible, to the floor.

Brother Fulkerson went that afternoon to the saw-mill at the back of Uncle Israel's store and stood by as the storekeeper himself sawed planks and knocked together the crude box which must serve Jerry Henderson as a casket. Later across the counter he bought some yards of coarse cloth cut from a bolt of black calico, which was to be his daughter's pathetic attempt at mourning dress.

The afternoon of the funeral was unspeakably sullen and dismal. Clouds of leaden dreariness hung to the bristling mountains, themselves as gray as slate. Cold skies promised snow and through the bleak nakedness of the forest whined the dirge-like complaint of a gusty wind.

To the unkempt place of briar-choked and sunken graves, crawled a dingy procession.

Blossom would have preferred going with her dead unattended save by her father, but that mountain usage forebade. A wedding or a funeral could not be so monopolized in a land where there is frugally little to break daily monotony. This funeral above all others, belonged in part to the public, made pregnant with interest by the story that two bodies instead of one would be laid to rest. The question of how Bear Cat Stacy had come to his death would be answered over his open grave, and men would know at the falling of the last clod whether they should return quietly to their homes or prepare for the sterner task of reprisal.

Kinnard Towers must know, too, what happened there, and must know it speedily, though to go himself or to send one of his recognized lieutenants was beyond the question. Yet his plans were carefully laid. Those few nondescripts who bore the repute of being Stacy sympathizers, while in fact they were Towers informers, were to be present; and along the miles of "slavish roughs" between Quarterhouse and burial-ground, like runners in a relay race, were other heralds. When the news began to come from the place it would travel fast. Sitting grimly behind the closed stockade of the Quarterhouse and surrounded now not only by a body-guard but by some scores of fighting men, the old intriguer anxiously awaited the outcome.

Long before the hour for the services had arrived men, as drab and neutral in color as the sodden skies, and women wrapped in shawls of red and blue, began to gather from hither and yon over roads mired to the prohibition even of "jolt-wagons." They came on foot or on muddied mules and horses with briar-tangled manes and tails—and having arrived, they waited, shuffling their weary feet against frost-bite and eddying in restless currents.