The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

Related, somehow, to this fancy, one slight detail of the man's dress caught the Duke's attention. It was a thick, conical, lead bullet strung through the middle on a buckskin string that was looped around the woolen brace above the trousers button. The bullet was as big as that of the old English Snyder, and would easily weigh five hundred grains. It was snubbed off at the end and ridged at the base with concentric rings cut into the lead. The Duke's interest lifted into a query.

"What sort of bullet is that?" he said.

The mountaineer ran his big thumb over the deep ridges. "Hit's a Minie ball," he answered.

The Duke was certain that some history attached to this piece of lead. "May I inquire," he said, "where you got it?"

The man's face relaxed into a smile. "Well, stranger," he answered, "I shot that air ball into a man onct when I was a young feller, an' then I cut it out of him."

The smile, the gentle, drawling tone, clashed with the brutal inference. The Duke probed for the story, and with difficulty he got it, in fragments, in detached detail, in its own barbaric color. Not because the man wished to tell it, but because, under the Duke's skillful handling, he was somehow not able to prevent it. It was a Homeric fragment, with the great, bloody, smoking war between the American States for a background. A story, big with passion, savage, virile, hot with life.

A Northern general was marching desperately across the South. With money he had hired a native out of the mountains to conduct him. The man was a neighbor to this circuit rider, one who knew the wilderness as the bear knew it. In terror, the authorities of the State had sent a messenger to this youthful hermit priest, bidding him stop the renegade before he got down from his cabin to the Federal camp, and, without a word, the circuit rider had taken down his rifle from the wooden pegs, and gone out into the wilderness. From that morning, gray, chill, three hours before the dawn, the story was a thing savage and hideous. At daybreak the circuit rider, leaning on his rifle, two hundred yards from the other's cabin, called him to the door, explained what he had come to do, and gave him an hour of grace. Within that hour, the renegade—a man, too, courageous and desperate—fired his cabin, and walked with his rifle over his shoulder, across his little clearing, into the opposite border of the forest. Then for three endless days and nights, they hunted each other through this wilderness, now one, and now the other, escaping death by some incredible instinct, or some narrow, thrilling margin that left the breath of the bullet on his face. Below the Northern general waited with his army, and the militia of the State waited, too, hanging on his flanks.

Then, finally, on the morning of the fourth day at sunrise, the circuit rider, trailing his man all night, stopping behind a ledge of stone, by chance, as the sun struck down the face of the mountain, saw the other seated in the fork of a great pine, watching back over his trail for his enemy that followed. With deliberate and deadly care the circuit rider shot him. The man fell hanging across the limb, and his enemy climbed the tree and descended with the body in his arms. The bullet had struck the bone near the point of the jaw, ripped up the cheek and followed the bone around the head, under the skin to the spine. Sitting on the earth the mountaineer cut the bullet out, bandaged the wound with the rags of his shirt, and taking the man in his arms walked down the mountain into his enemies' camp; walked through it unmolested, carrying his bloody burden to the commanding officer's tent door. There he laid the man down on the ground, hideously wounded, looked the officer steadily in the face, and spoke his word of comment.

"General," he said, "heah's your renegade. He hain't as purty as he was."

The Duke of Dorset looked up at the mountain, from which they had descended. The story of that tragedy, pieced together out of these fragments, thrilled him like a Saga. He could see the army waiting below, idle in its camp, while this death struggle went silently on, in the great, smoky wilderness above it. He followed, with every detail, vividly, these two desperate men, stalking one another with every trick, every cunning, every artifice. With unending patience, their eyes narrowed to slits, their ears straining, noiseless, tireless, ghastly with fatigue; eating as they crept, sleeping as they crept, mad, desperate, hideous, moving with the lust of death!