The Escape of Mr. Trimm / His Plight and other Plights

by Irvin S. Cobb

Take Anse Dugmore now. He had a short-waisted, thin body and abnormally long, thin legs, like the shadow a man casts at sunup. He didn't have that steel-gray eye of which we so often read. His eyes weren't of any particular color, and he had a straggly mustache of sandy red and no chin worth mentioning; but he could shoot off a squirrel's head, or a man's, at the distance of a considerable number of yards.

Until he was past thirty he played merely an incidental part in the tribal war that had raged up and down Yellow Banks Creek and its principal tributary, the Pigeon Roost, since long before the Big War. He was getting out timber to be floated down the river on the spring rise when word came to him of an ambuscade that made him the head of his immediate clan and the upholder of his family's honor.

“Yore paw an' yore two brothers was laywaid this mawnin' comin' 'long Yaller Banks togither,” was the message brought by a breathless bearer of news. “The wimmenfolks air totin' 'em home now. Talt, he ain't dead yit.”

From a dry spot behind a log Anse lifted his rifle and started over the ridge with the long, shambling gait of the born hill-climber that eats up the miles. For this emergency he had been schooled years back when he sat by a wood fire in a cabin of split boards and listened to his crippled-up father reciting the saga of the feud, with the tally of this one killed and that one maimed; for this he had been schooled when he practised with rifle and revolver until, even as a boy, his aim had become as near an infallible thing as anything human gets to be; for this he had been schooled still more when he rode, armed and watchful, to church or court or election. Its coming found him ready.

Two days he ranged the ridges, watching his chance. The Tranthams were hard to find. They were barricaded in their log-walled strongholds, well guarded in anticipation of expected reprisals, and prepared in due season to come forth and prove by a dozen witnesses, or two dozen if so many should be needed to establish the alibi, that they had no hand in the massacre of the Dugmores.

But two days and nights of still-hunting, of patiently lying in wait behind brush fences, of noiseless, pussy-footed patrolling in likely places, brought the survivor of the decimated Dugmores his chance. He caught Pegleg Trantham riding down Red Bird Creek on a mare-mule. Pegleg was only a distant connection of the main strain of the enemy. It was probable that he had no part in the latest murdering; perhaps doubtful that he had any prior knowledge of the plot. But by his name and his blood-tie he was a Trantham, which was enough.

A writer of the Western school would have found little in this encounter that was really worth while to write about. Above the place of the meeting rose the flank of the mountain, scarred with washes and scantily clothed with stunted trees, so that in patches the soil showed through like the hide of a mangy hound. The creek was swollen by the April rains and ran bank-full through raw, red walls. Old Pegleg came cantering along with his rifle balanced on the sliding withers of his mare-mule, for he rode without a saddle. He was an oldish man and fat for a mountaineer. A ten-year-old nephew rode behind him, with his short arms encircling his uncle's paunch. The old man wore a dirty white shirt with a tabbed bosom; a single shiny white china button held the neckband together at the back. Below the button the shirt billowed open, showing his naked back. His wooden leg stuck straight out to the side, its worn brass tip carrying a blob of red mud, and his good leg dangled down straight, with the trousers hitched half-way up the bare shank and a soiled white-yarn sock falling down into the wrinkled and gaping top of an ancient congress gaiter.

From out of the woods came Anse Dugmore, bareheaded, crusted to his knees with dried mud and wet from the rain that had been dripping down since daybreak. A purpose showed in all the lines of his slouchy frame.

Pegleg jerked his rifle up, but he was hampered by the boy's arms about his middle and by his insecure perch upon the peaks of the slab-sided mule. The man afoot fired before the mounted enemy could swing his gunbarrel into line. The bullet ripped away the lower part of Pegleg's face and grazed the cheek of the crouching youngster behind him. The white-eyed nephew slid head first off the buck-jumping mule and instantly scuttled on all fours into the underbrush. The rifle dropped out of Trantham's hands and he lurched forward on the mule's neck, grabbing out with blind, groping motions. Dugmore stepped two paces forward to free his eyes of the smoke, which eddied back from his gunmuzzle into his face, and fired twice rapidly. The mule was bouncing up and down, sideways, in a mild panic. Pegleg rolled off her, as inert as a sack of grits, and lay face upward in the path, with his arms wide outspread on the mud. The mule galloped off in a restrained and dignified style until she was a hundred yards away, and then, having snorted the smells of burnt powder and fresh blood out of her nostrils, she fell to cropping the young leaves off the wayside bushes, mouthing the tender green shoots on her heavy iron bit contentedly.

For a long minute Anse Dugmore stood in the narrow footpath, listening. Then he slid three new shells into his rifle, and slipping down the bank he crossed the creek on a jam of driftwood and, avoiding the roads that followed the little watercourse, made over the shoulder of the mountain for his cabin, two miles down on the opposite side. When he was gone from sight the nephew of the dead Trantham rolled out of his hiding place and fled up the road, holding one hand to his wounded cheek and whimpering. Presently a gaunt, half-wild boar pig, with his spine arched like the mountains, came sniffing slowly down the hill, pausing frequently to cock his wedge-shaped head aloft and fix a hostile eye on two turkey buzzards that began to swing in narrowing circles over one particular spot on the bank of the creek.