He approached it slowly, knowing not whether to bless it or to curse it, to hold it sacred or to hate it. Then he saw on one of the arm bones, the unmistakable mark of a bullet, and he knew; it was the mark of the bullet that poor old Grandpap Singleton had fired that long gone day in Devil's Gate to save his, Wolfe's, life. The bones were those of Cat-Eye Mayfield.
The realization clenched Wolfe's fists iron hard, sent him as white as a man in the grip of certain death. He would stone the accursed thing—he would crush to bits all that was left of that most unspeakable of wretches.
No, he wouldn't. He would do as Tot would have him do if she could know; this had been the motto, the balance-wheel, the guiding light of his seven years in exile. With his hands he made a hole in the soft black earth at the cliff's base, and buried the skeleton. When it was done, he felt glad that he had obeyed the finer impulse. And it was a consolation to know that Mayfield had been cheated of the last mean part of his triumph.
Wolfe looked up and down the river's banks for the other skeleton, and didn't find it. When one has drained the iron chalice, Fate is very apt to be merciful!
The little cabin was much dilapidated. Half the stone-and-clay chimney had tumbled down before the eternal onslaughts of wind and rain; a storm had carried away a fourth of the split-board roof. Ferns and rattleweed grew over the doorstep as though trying to bar the way to feet that might profane. Wolfe crossed the feeble green barrier, and entered his holies of holies, the place that had seen enacted his life's one perfect chapter. The interior was damp and musty and mildewed. The rafters were lined with the tiny homes of mudwasps. A copperhead lay coiled comfortably in the little pit where they had kept their savings hidden; he killed the snake with one shot from his revolver and threw it out.
There were a few mementoes of the gloriously happy days. A rusted table knife, a rusted spoon, a broken dish, two mother-of-pearl buttons, a rusted wire hairpin, a rotting mealbag window-curtain that Tot's own fingers had hemmed. He fondled them for a little while, a sort of Pagan worship in his eyes; then he put them down on the mildewed table and went out and sat in the lush grass beside the bluish-black lake for a long time. The milestones of his life trooped back to him there, passed before him one by one, like soldiers in review.
Two days and two nights he spent there in the silence.
He set out for Wolfe's Basin at daybreak of a fine morning. Yellowhammers and squirrels were making love and quarreling everywhere in the forest about him. Bright-winged butterflies were busily sipping honey from the tiny blossoms of the rattleweed; wild bees were humming about the pink-eyed bloom of the ivy and the white and waxen cups of the laurel flowers. It was springtime for every living thing on earth but him.
After walking hard all that day and all the next and one hour more, he reached the rugged, pine-fringed crest of a mountain that he believed to be his home mountain, the Big Blackfern. He strained his eyes to the westward, trying to make out in the darkness the shape of bald and majestic Picketts Dome above the Lost Trail. He saw dimly a peak that he believed to be Picketts Dome.
