Old Jephthah was winding the clock when the door—which he had closed some time ago after the last retiring guests—flung violently open, Andy paused, flying foot on the threshold, and gasped out hoarsely,
“Pap—Creed Bonbright’s killed Blatch and got away from us!”
The Lusk girls had staid to help Judith clear up, intending to remain over night unless Andy and Jeff returned in time to take them home. The three young women working at the table lifted pale faces; Pendrilla let fall the plate in her hand and broke it. Unconscious of the fact, she stood staring with open mouth at the fragments by her feet. Jephthah took one more turn mechanically, then withdrew the key and laid it down.
“Whar at?” he inquired briefly.
“Up on our place,” said Wade who now appeared at the boy’s side. “Bonbright throwed him over Foeman’s Bluff.”
“How come it?” queried the head of the tribe.
“They was a fussin’,” began Andy, but his father interrupted him in a curious tone.
“Foeman’s Bluff,” he repeated. “What tuck Bonbright thar at this time o’ night?”
“That’s what I say,” panted Jim Cal’s voice in the darkness outside. He had come straight from the still instead of going with Jeff and the others to search; and for all his flesh he had overtaken his brothers. But there was none now to demand sardonically why he fled the seat of war and ran to the paternal shelter for re-enforcements. “Ef folks go nosin’ around whar they ain’t wanted, sometimes they git what they don’t like,” he concluded.
Judith, very pale, had parted her lips to utter words of indignant defence, and denial of this broad imputation, but before she could speak Huldah Spiller irrupted into the room, her red curls flying, her bodice clutched about her in such a fashion as to suggest she had been undressing when the news reached her.
The mountain woman with temperament is reduced to the outlets of such occasions as these, or revival seasons and funerals; and Huldah Spiller, having abandoned the protesting Iley with her babies, whom the mother could not leave alone, meant to make the most of the occasion.
“You-all ain’t got no right to talk the way you do about Creed,” the red-haired girl burst out. “Him and me’s been friends ever sence I went to Hepzibah, and there ain’t a better man walks the earth. Ef he done anything to Blatch hit was becaze Blatch laywayed him an’ jumped on him, an’ he had to. Oh, Lord!” and she began to weep, “I wish’t my daddy was here—I jest wish Pap Spiller was here. Pore Creed! Ef you-all git yo’ hands on him, mad thisaway, the Lord knows what will be did!”
Jephthah regarded his postulant daughter-in-law from under lowered, bushy brows.
“Kin you make her hush?” he inquired of Wade.
“I ain’t got no interest in makin’ her hush nor makin’ her holler,” returned Wade contemptuously. Dishonoured before his clan, his male dignity sadly shorn, his woman shrieking out the wrongs and excellences of another man—and that man a young and well-favoured enemy—his bitterness may be forgiven.
“Fetch the lantern,” ordered Jephthah briefly. “We-all have got to git over thar and see to this business.”
“Well, I’ll hush—but I’m goin’ along,” volleyed Huldah.
“Le’s us go too, Jude,” pleaded Cliantha Lusk in a trembling whisper. “I’m scared to be left here in the house with the men all gone. He might take a notion to come and raid the place and kill us. They do thataway in feud times. My gran’ mammy——”
“Do hush!” choked Judith. But she hurried out in the wake of the departing men, Cliantha clinging to one arm, Pendrilla to the other.
They left the doors open, the candles flaring, and nobody to guard but the toothless old hound who slept and snored on the chip pile.
The journey to Foeman’s Bluff, following the flicker of the lantern in Wade’s hand, with the voices of the men coming back to her, hoarse, fragmentary, ejaculatory, reciting Creed’s offences asseverating that they had expected nothing else, was like a nightmare to Judith. When Cliantha screamed and clung to her and said she thought she saw Creed Bonbright in the bushes by the path-side, Judith shook her off angrily, but let the clamouring little thing creep back and make her peace.
“I forgot about you and Blatch—Oh, po’ Judy!” moaned Cliantha. “Ef hit was me goin’ to s’arch for the murdered body of my true love I don’t know as I could put foot befo’ foot!”
“The trail’s mighty narrow here—I’ll go in front,” said Judith. She freed herself, and thereafter walked alone with bent head.
As they descended into the hollow Andy began to hoo-ee; and finally he was answered from the neighbourhood of the bluff. Up this they climbed, since on this side they were cut off from the region below it by an impassable gulley. Halting on the top and looking down, they could see a lantern moving about and catch faint sound of the men’s voices.
“Who’s down thar?” Jephthah’s big rolling bass sent out the call. There was an ominous hesitation before Jeff’s perturbed tones replied,
“Hit’s me, pap, me an’ Buck Shalliday an’ Taylor Stribling.”
Andy found a tall tree at the bluffs edge, and began to descend through its branches with the swiftness and agility of a monkey.
“How is he—is he alive?”
The old man put the query at the edge of the gulf, stooping, peering over. Jim Cal sat down suddenly and began wiping his forehead. The moonlight showed his round face very pale under its beaded sweat.
“Andy’ll git hisself killed!” whimpered Pendrilla.
And Huldah broke into loud hysteric weeping, on the tide of which “Creed—Pap Spiller—Blatch Turrentine” were cast up now and again.
“Hush, cain’t ye?” demanded Jephthah, angrily; “I cain’t hear one word they answer me down thar. Hello, boys. Is he livin’?”
Andy had evidently reached the searchers at the foot of the cliff. Loud, confused voices came up to those above. Finally,
“W’y, Pap, we ain’t never found him,” Jeff called.
“Ye what?” demanded the father incredulously.
“We ain’t—never—found him,” reiterated Jeff doggedly.
The old man drew back sharply with a look of swift anger in his face.
“Well, ef ye hain’t found him by now ye better quit lookin’, hadn’t ye?” he suggested as he straightened to his full height and turned his back.
“Creed Bonbright’s jest about been here an’ hid the body, that’s what he’s done,” Taylor Stribling clamoured after him in futile explanation. But the old man gave no heed. Lantern in hand, he was already addressing himself to a careful examination of the scene of the struggle. The torn vines where Creed had fallen through the fissure instantly caught his eye.
“Come up here, you-all!” he turned and shouted toward the gulf. He swung his lantern far out over the crevice. “Look at that,” he said quietly. “Thar’s whar yo’ man got away from ye.” He handed the lantern to Wade, and swung himself lightly down where Creed had fallen.
“Better let me go, Pap,” said Wade, and Judith mutely stared after the old man as he disappeared into the dark.
For fifteen minutes or more the watchers on the cliff waited and trembled, straining ears and eyes. In that time they were joined by those from the foot of the bluff, all but Stribling, who, the boys said, had “gone on home.” Then they heard sounds of clambering in the cleft, and the old man’s face appeared in the well of inky shadow, pale, the black eyes burning, the great black beard flowing backward to join the darkness behind him. Wade held his lantern high. It lit a circle of faces on which terror, anger, and distress wrought. Judith could scarcely look at her uncle, and a great trembling shook her limbs, so that she laid hold of a little sapling by which she stood, and closed her eyes.
“Well,” said the old man on a falling note, and his voice sounded hollowly from the cleft, “well, I reckon this does settle it—whether Blatch is hurt or no. How many of ye was a-workin’ in the still to-night?”
“I was,” quavered Jim Cal; “me and Taylor Stribling and Buck Shalliday. Blatch had left a run o’ whiskey that had to be worked off, and when he didn’t come I turned in to ’tend to it—why, Pap?”
“Ef Bonbright wanted to find out about the still he shore made it, that’s all,” answered Jephthah. “Ye can see right into it from whar he went. Ef you-all boys wants to stay out o’ the penitentiary I reckon Creed Bonbright’s got to leave the Turkey Tracks mighty sudden,” and he swung himself heavily to the level of the cliff.
“That’s what I say,” whispered Jim Cal, pasty pale and quivering. “We’ve got it to do.”
Old Jephthah looked darkly upon his sons.
“Well, settle it amongst ye, how an’ when. I’ll neither meddle nor make in this business. I don’t know how all o’ this come about, nor what you-all an’ Blatch Turrentine air up to. You’ve made an outsider o’ me, an’ an outsider I’ll stay. Ef ye won’t tell me the truth, don’t tell me no lies. Come on, gals.”
He strode into the homeward trail, the four girls falling in behind his tall figure. Judith was sick with misery and uncertainty; the Lusk girls looked back timidly at Andy and Jeff; even Huldah was mute.
Five o’clock Friday morning found Creed, pale, hollow-eyed, a strip of Nancy’s home-made sticking plaster over the cut on brow and cheek, but otherwise composed and as usual, at the pine table in his little shack, working over the references which applied to the case he was to try that morning. But an hour later brought old Keziah Provine to the door to borrow the threading of a needle with white thread.
“I hearn they had an interruption,” she began, pushing in past Nancy and the two children, “but thar—you kin hear anything these days and times. They most gen’ally does find trouble at these here play-parties, that’s why I’m sot agin ’em.”
Poor old soul, it was not on account of her rheumatic legs, her toothless jaws, nor her half-blind eyes that she objected to play-parties, of course.
“I got no use for ’em,” she pursued truthfully, “specially when they’re started up too close to a blockade still. They named it to me that Creed had done killed one of the Turrentine boys—is that so?”
“No,” returned Nancy stoutly. “By the best of what I kin git out o’ Creed, him and Blatch was walkin’ along, an’ Blatch missed his footin’ and fell off o’ Foeman’s Bluff. Creed tried to he’p him, an’ fell an’ got scratched some. I reckon the Turrentines’ll tell it different, but that’s what I make out from what Creed says.”
“Lord, how folks will lie!” admired Keziah, piously. “Now they tell that Blatch was not only killed up, but that some one—Creed, or some o’ them that follers him—tuck the body away befo’ they could git to it. They say they was blood all over the bushes, an’ a great drug place whar Blatch had been toted off. One feller named a half-dug hole sorter like a grave; but thar! I never went over to see for myse’f, an’ ye cain’t believe the half o’ what ye hear.”
“Well, I’d say not,” snapped Nancy. “Not ef hit was sech a pack o’ lies as that.”
Thread in hand old Keziah lingered till Arley Kittridge came with his mother’s baking-pan and request for a little risin’. Arley it seemed had been commissioned to find out what he could on behalf of the Kittridge family. And so it went till breakfast-time.
How these things travel in a neighbourhood where there is no telephone, postman, milkman, nor morning paper, and where the distances are considerable, is one of the mysteries of the mountains—yet travel they do, and when time came for court to open Creed found that he had a crowd which would at any other juncture have been highly gratifying.
Every man that came in glanced first at the cut on his cheek, swiftly noted the pale face, sunken, purple-rimmed eyes, the scratched hands, then looked hastily away. Several made proffers of an alliance with him, being at outs with the Turrentines. All reiterated the story of the missing body.
“You done exactly right,” old Tubal Kittridge told him. “With a man like Blatchley Turrentine, hit’s hit first or git hit. I wonder he ever let ye git as far as Foeman’s Bluff; but if you made good use o’ yo’ time, I reckon you found out what you aimed to,” and he winked laboriously at poor Creed’s crimsoning countenance.
“I wasn’t trying to find out anything, Mr. Kittridge. Blatch forced the quarrel upon me. I was on my way home at the time.”
“Well, a lee-tle out of yo’ way, wasn’t ye?” objected Kittridge, slightly offended at not being offered Bonbright’s confidence.
The case on the docket, one that had interested Creed deeply, being the curious matter of a mountain creek which in the spring storms had changed its direction, scoured off a good field and flung it to the opposite side of the road, thus giving it to a new owner, dragged wearily. Who cared about the question of a few rods of mountain land, even if it had raised good tobacco, when the slayer of one of the bullies of the neighbourhood sat before them—a man who had not only killed his victim but had, within fifteen minutes, hidden all traces of the body—and the opening of a new feud was taking place before their eyes?
At noon Creed, in despair, adjourned his court, setting a new date for trial, explaining that this Turrentine matter ought to be looked into, and he believed it was not a proper day for him to be otherwise engaged. Then he sought old Tubal Kittridge.
“There’s something I want you to do for me,” he said.
“Shore—shore; anything in the world,” Kittridge agreed eagerly.
“Aunt Nancy won’t hear of my going over to the Turrentines’,” hesitated Creed. “I looked for them to be here—some of them—long before this.”
“Huh-uh; ah, Law, no—they won’t come in the daytime,” smiled Kittridge.
Creed looked annoyed.
“They will be welcome, whenever they come,” he asserted. “What I want you to do is to go to Jephthah Turrentine and say to him that I thought I ought to go over, and that I’ll do so now if he wants me to—or I’ll meet him here at the office, or anywhere he says.”
“Huh-uh—uh!” Old Tubal shook his head, his eyes closed in quite an ecstasy of negation. “You cain’t git Jep Turrentine in the trap as easy as all that,” he said half contemptuously. “Why, he’d know what you was at a leetle too quick.”
Bonbright looked helpless indignation for a moment, then thought better of it and repeated:
“I want you to go and tell him that I’m right here, ready to answer for anything I’ve done, and that I would like to talk to him about it. Will you do it?”
“Oh,—all right,” agreed Kittridge in an offended tone. “There’s plenty would stand by ye; there’s plenty that would like to see the Turrentines run out of the country; but if ye want to fix it some new-fangled way I reckon you’ll have to.” And to himself he muttered as he took the road homeward, “I say go to the Turrentines with sech word at that! That boy must think I’m as big a fool as he is.”
At the Turrentine home life dragged on strangely. Jephthah in his own cabin, busied himself overhauling some harness. The boys had been across at the old place, presumably making a thorough inspection of the scene of the trouble. Judith went mechanically about her tasks, cooking and serving the meals, setting the house in order. Only once did she rouse somewhat, and that was when Huldah Spiller flounced in and flung herself tempestuously down in a chair.
“How you come on, Judy?” inquired the red-haired damsel.
“About as usual,” returned Judith coldly, and would fain have added, “none the better for seeing you.”
“I jest had to run over and see how you was standin’ it,” Huldah pursued vivaciously. “I cried all night—didn’t you?”
“What for?” inquired Judith angrily.
“Oh—I don’t know. I’m jest thataway. Git me started an’ thar’s no stoppin’ me. But then I’ve knowed Creed so mighty long—him an’ me was powerful good friends, and my feelin’s is more tenderer than some folks’s anyhow.”
“Huldy,” said Judith in a tone so rigidly controlled that it made the other jump, “ef you’ll jest walk yo’self out of here I’ll be obliged to you. I’ve stood all I can. I don’t want to say anything plumb bad to you, but ef you set thar an’ talk to me like that for another minute I will.”
“Oh, you po’ thing!” cried Huldah, jumping to her feet. “I declare to goodness I forgot all about you an’ Blatch. Here I’ve been carryin’ on over Creed Bonbright—and you mighty near a widder. You po’ thing!”
Judith faced around with such blazing eyes from the biscuits she was moulding that Huldah beat a hasty retreat, dodged out of the door, and ran up the slope. At Jim Cal’s cabin she paused and looked about her uncertainly. Iley had the toothache, and for various reasons was proving a poor audience for her younger sister’s conversation. The day had been a trying one to Huldah’s excited nerves, a sad anti-climax after the explosions of the night before. It was five o’clock. The men were all over at the old place. If she but had an excuse to follow them, now. Why, the whole top of the Bald above Foeman’s Bluff, and the broad shelf below it, were covered with huckleberry bushes! She put her head in at the door. Iley looked up from the hot brick which she was wrapping in a wet cloth with ten drops of turpentine on it preparatory to applying the same to her cheek above the swollen tooth.
“Ef you say ‘Creed Bonbright’—or ‘kill’—or ‘Blatch Turrentine,’—to me, I vow I’ll hit ye,” she warned shrilly. “I ain’t never raised hand on ye yet sence ye was a woman grown, but do it I will!”
“I wasn’t goin’ to say nothin’ about nothin’,” asserted Huldah sweepingly. “I was jest goin’ to ax did ye want any huckleberries, and git a pail to pick some.”
She sought out a small tin lard bucket as she spoke, and Iley’s silence presumably assenting, within twenty minutes was picking away eagerly on the Bald above the bluff.
Below her stretched meadows drunk with sun—breathless. A rain crow called from time to time “C-c-c-cow! cow! cow!” The air was still heavy with faint noon-day smells, the sky tarnished with heat.
“I wonder where in all creation them boys has got theirselves to,” she ruminated as she peered about, dragging green berries and leaves into her bucket, for which Mrs. Jim Cal would afterward no doubt scold her soundly. “’Pears to me like I hearn somebody talkin’ somewhars.”
She pushed cautiously down to the edge of the rocks where the bushes grew scatteringly, pretending to herself that she wanted a bit of wild geranium that flourished in a crevice far below the top. Setting down her pail she threw herself on her face, her arms over the edge, and reached. But the fingers hung suspended, opened in air, her mouth open too, and she listened greedily to faint sounds of men’s voices.
“I’ll bet it’s old Ab Foeman’s hideout that nobody but him and the Cherokees knowed of,” she muttered to herself. “Some one’s found it and—Lord, look at that!”
From the bushes below her, coming apparently out of the living rock itself, crept Andy, and then Jeff Turrentine. Now she could see the narrow, door-like opening of the cave which had given them up, and realised how, from below, it passed for a mere depression in the rock.
Huldah drew back silently, inch by inch, and instinctively pulled her black calico sunbonnet over her red curls as she crouched down among the huckleberry bushes. When she looked again Andy and Jeff had disappeared, but she could see the head and shoulders of a man who still lay at the cave’s mouth—and that man was Blatch Turrentine!
At first she shuddered, thinking that she had come upon the dead body; then she noted a tiny trail of smoke, and, by craning a little farther around, saw that Blatchley lay at ease with a pipe in his mouth, smoking.
“The triflin’, low-down, lyin’ hound!” she muttered to herself. “I’m a-goin’ this very minute and tell Creed Bonbright.”
She hesitated, glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the Turrentine cabin, then bent dubiously and set up her overturned bucket. Not a berry had spilled from it, yet the sight of its mishap gave her an idea. Quietly slipping through the bushes till she was far enough away to dare run, she hurried home to the cabin.
“Iley,” she gasped, as soon as she put her head in at the door, “I upsot my berry pail and lost most of the fruit. Can you make out with that?” and she set the little bucket on the table.
“I reckon I’ll have to, ef you’ve got so work-brickle ye won’t pick any more,” returned Iley.
“I would—I’d git ye all ye need,” protested Huldah with unexpected meekness, “but I’m jest obliged to go over to—” she had all but said Creed Bonbright’s, but she caught herself in time and concluded lamely. “I jest have obliged to run down to Clianthy Lusk’s and see can she let me have her crochet needle for to finish up my shawl.”
She delayed for no criticism or demur on Iley’s part, but was off with the last word, and once out of sight of Jim Cal’s cabin she took a short cut through the woods and ran; but in spite of her best efforts darkness began to gather before she won to the high road, for the evening had closed in early, thick and threatening; a mountain thunder-storm was brewing. Opposite a tempestuous, magnificent sunset, there had reared in the eastern sky a tremendous thunder-head, a palace of a thousand snowy domes, turning to gold, and then flushing from base to crown like a gigantic many-petalled rose. It swept steadily up and over, hiding the sky, and leaving the earth in almost complete darkness. There were low rolls of thunder, at first mellow and almost musical, crashing always louder and stronger as they came nearer. The wind thrashed and yelled through the tossing forest; and as she approached the Card cabin she heard the banging of barn shutters, the whipping of tree boughs against the windows. There were the first spears of rain flung at roof and door; and it was in the torrent itself which followed fast that Huldah beat upon that closed door, giving her name and demanding entrance. Within, Creed Bonbright sprang up from where he sat with a book in his hand, his eyes fixed on vacancy, and would have answered her, but Old Nancy put a hasty palm over his lips.
“Hush—for God’s sake,” she whispered.
They stood in the lighted cabin, all on foot by this time, and listened intently, tall Creed, the little grey-haired woman clinging to him and restraining him, Doss with his light eyes goggling, and Little Buck and Beezy hand in hand, studying their grandmother’s face, not their father’s.
“Who is it?” quavered Nancy. “I’m all alone in here, and I’m scared to let wayfarers in.”
“It’s me—Huldy Spiller—Aunt Nancy,” called back the voice in the rain.
“Well, I vow! You know how things air, Huldy—what do ye want, chile?”
“I want Creed Bonbright. I’ve got something to tell him.”
“Thar—ye see now,” breathed the old woman, turning toward Creed. Then she raised her voice.
“He ain’t here, honey,” she lied unhesitatingly.
“Why don’t ye go to his office—that’s whar he stays at.”
“Oh, for the Lord’s sake—Aunt Nancy!” came back the girl’s shrill, terrified tones. “I’ve done been to the office; I know in reason Creed ain’t there, or he’d a-answered me. Please let me in; I’m scared some of the Turrentines’ll come an’ ketch me.”
At this Creed strode to the door, Nancy dragging back on his arm and Buck and Beezy seconding her with all their small might, while Provine spluttered ineffectually in the background.
“Hit’s a lie,” hissed Nancy. “She’s a decoy. Ef you open that thar do’ with the light on ye, they’ll shoot ye over her shoulders. Hit was did to my man thataway in feud times. Don’t you open the do’ Creed.”
“Why, Aunt Nancy,” remonstrated Creed, almost smiling, “this isn’t like you. There’s nothing but a girl there in the rain. Keep out of range if you’re scared. I’m sure going to open that door.”
As he made ready to do so Nancy flew back to the table and blew out the light, and the next minute Huldah Spiller, dripping like a mermaid, was standing in the middle of the darkened room, and Doss Provine, breathing short, was barring the door behind her.
“Who’s here?” gasped the girl peering about the gloom. “What air you-all a-goin’ to do to me?”
Nancy relighted the lamp and set it on the table, and Huldah discovered with a long-drawn sobbing sigh of relief that there was no one save the immediate family present.
“I came quick as I could,” she began in the middle of her story, grasping Creed by the arm and shaking him in the violence of her emotion and insistence. “Blatch Turrentine’s alive. Andy and Jeff have got him hid out. I seed him myse’f with my own eyes, in a hideout thar below Foeman’s Bluff, not more’n a hour ago. I’ll bet he aims to layway you, ef he cain’t git ye hung for murderin’ of him. You got to git out o’ here. It was as much as my life was worth to come over and tell ye. I’m afraid to go back. I’m goin’ right on down to Hepzibah and stay thar.”
“Come up closeter to the fire,” commanded Nancy, who had watched the girl keenly throughout her recital. “Doss, put some sticks on and git a little blaze so she can dry herself. Huldy, you’re a good girl to come over and warn Creed—when was you aimin’ to go to Hepzibah?” She looked up from the hearth where she knelt with the frankest inquiring gaze.
“To-night—right now,” half whimpered Huldah. “I’m scared to go back. I’m scared to be here on the mountain at all.”
“And did ye aim to have Creed go along of ye?” old Nancy questioned mildly.
“Yes—yes—he’d better,” agreed Huldah hysterically. “Hit’s the onliest way for him now.”
Nancy caught Creed’s eye above the girl’s drenched head, and shook her own warningly. Leaving Doss to look after the newcomer, she drew the young justice into the kitchen.
“Whatever ye do,” she warned him hastily, “don’t you put out with that red-headed gal in the dark. Things may be adzackly as she says—looks to me like she thinks she’s a-speakin’ the truth; but then agin the Turrentines might a’ sent her for to draw you out. They wouldn’t like to shoot ye in my cabin, ’caze they know me and my kinfolks would be apt to raise a fuss; but halfway down the mountain with this sweetheart of Wade’s—huh-uh, boy; I reckon they could tell their own tale then, of how you come by yo’ death. Don’t you go with her.”
“I wasn’t aiming to, Aunt Nancy,” said Creed quietly. “As soon as I heard that Blatch Turrentine was alive, I intended to go right over and have a talk with old Jephthah. He’s a fair-minded man, and if he is informed that his nephew is living I think he and I can come to terms.”
“Fa’r-minded man!” echoed Nancy contemptuously. “Jephthah Turrentine a fa’r-minded man! Well, Creed, ef I hadn’t no better eye for a fat chicken than you have for a fa’r-minded man, you wouldn’t enjoy yo’ dinner at my table as well as you do. I say fa’r-minded! This thing has got into a feud, boy, and in a feud you cain’t trust nobody—nobody!”
Creed went back into the room, and Nancy reluctantly followed him. Huldah was getting dry and warm, and that fluent tongue of hers was impatiently silent. As soon as she saw the returning pair she began to repeat again the details of her information—how she had glimpsed the hidden man through the bushes, how she knew in reason he could be none other than Blatch. Nancy exchanged a glance of intelligence with Creed.
“Ye see!” she murmured, aside. “Ef she ain’t a decoy they’ve sont, she don’t know nothin’ for sartin.”
“I’m scared of all the Turrentines,” Huldah declared. “They’re awful folks. From the old man down to Jude, they scare me. I reckon Jude’s had a big hand in this,” she went on excitedly. “Her and Blatch is goin’ to wed shortly, and she’d be shore to know any meanness he was into. I’ll be glad to git shet of sech. When you’re ready to be a-steppin’ Creed, I am.”
She looked up at the young fellow with a sort of unwilling worship.
“I don’t aim to go with you, Huldah,” he said gently. “You love Wade Turrentine, and Wade loves you; you was to be wedded this fall. I don’t aim for any affairs of mine to part you two.”
The girl hung her head, painfully flushed, her eyes full of tears.
“I don’t care nothin’ about Wade,” she choked. “Him and me has——”
“I reckon you’ve quarrelled” said Creed, sympathetically. “That needn’t come to anything. I’m going over and talk to Jephthah Turrentine to-morrow morning, and I want you to come with me!”
“No,” said Huldah getting to her feet and looking strangely at him. “The rain’s about done now; the moon’ll be comin’ up in half a hour—I’m a-goin’ on down to Hepzibah, like I said I was. Ef Wade Turrentine wants me, he knows whar to come for me. Ef he thinks of me as he said he did the last time we had speech together—w’y, I never want to put eyes on his face again. Oh—Creed, I wish’t you’d come with me!”
“But it was me you quarrelled about,” remonstrated Bonbright with that sudden clear vision which ultra-spiritual natures often show, and that startling forthrightness of speech which amazes and daunts the mountaineer. “I’m the last man you ought to leave the mountain with, Huldah, if you want to make up with Wade.”
“How—how did you know?” whispered the girl, staring at him. “Well, anyhow, I ain’t never a-goin’ back thar.”
She could not be prevailed on to go to bed with Aunt Nancy, when Doss Provine and the children were asleep, and Creed had gone to his quarters in the little office building, but sat by the fire all night staring into the embers, occasionally stirring them or putting on a stick of wood. At the earliest grey of dawn she waked Nancy, bidding the elder woman fasten the door after her. Declining in strangely subdued fashion her hostess’s offer of hot coffee, she stepped noiselessly out and, with a swift look about, dived into the steep short-cut trail which led almost straight down the face of Big Turkey Track, from turn to turn of the main road.
A cloud clung to the Side; the foliage of only the foremost trees emerged from its blur, and these were dimmed and flatted as though a soft white veil were tangled among their leaves. Into this white mystery of dawn the girl had vanished.
Nancy looked curiously after her a moment, then glanced swiftly about as Huldah had done, her eyes dwelling long on Creed’s little shack, standing peaceful in the morning mists. Softly she turned back, and closed and barred the door.
At seven o’clock, despite entreaties and warnings, Creed mounted his mule and set out for the Turrentine place.
“Don’t you trust nothin’ nor nobody over thar,” Nancy followed him out to the gate to reiterate. “Old Jephthah Turrentine’s as big a rascal as they’ is unhung. No—I wouldn’t trust Judith neither (hush now, Little Buck; you don’t know what granny’s a-talkin’ about); she’s apt to git some fool gal’s notion o’ being jealous o’ Huldy, or something like that, and see you killed as cheerful as I’d wring a chicken’s neck. (For the Lord’s sake, Doss, take these chil’en down to the spring branch; they mighty nigh run me crazy with they’ fussin’ an’ cryin’!) Don’t you trust none on ’em, boy.”
“Why, Aunt Nancy, I trust everybody on that whole place, excepting Blatchley Turrentine,” said Creed sturdily. “Even Andy and Jeff, if I had a chance to talk to them, could be got to see reason. They’re not the bloodthirsty crew you make them out. They’re good folks.”
She looked at him in exasperation, yet with a sort of reluctant approval and admiration.
“Well,” she sighed, as she saw him mount and start, “mebbe yo’ safer goin’ right smack into the lion’s den, like Dan’el, than you would be to sneak up.”
Summer was at full tide, and the world had been new washed last night. Scents of mint and pennyroyal rose up under his mule’s slow pacing feet. The meadow that stretched beyond Nancy’s cabin was a green sea, with flower foam of white weed and dog-fennel; and the fence row was a long breaker with surf of elder blossom, the garden a tangle of bean-vine arbours. The corn patch rustled valiantly; the pastures were streaked with pale yellow primroses; and Bob Whites ran through the young crops, calling.
Creed rode forward. A gay wind was abroad under the blue sky. Every tiniest leaf that danced and flirted on its slender stem sent back gleams of the morning sunlight from its wet, glistening surface. The woods were full of bird songs, and the myriad other lesser voices of a midsummer morning sounded clear and distinct upon the vast, enfolding silence of the mountains.
It seemed beyond reason out in that gay July sunshine that anything dark or tragic could happen to one. But after all man cannot be so different from Nature which produces him, and the night before had given them a passionate, brief, destructive thunder-storm. Creed noted the ravages of it here and there; the broken boughs, the levelled or uprooted herbage, the washed and riven soil, as his mule moved soberly along.
At the Turrentine cabin all was quiet. The young men of the house had been out the entire night before guarding the trails that Creed Bonbright should not leave the mountains secretly. A good deal of moonshine whiskey went to this night guarding, particularly when there was the excuse of a shower to call for it, and the watchers of the trails now lay in their beds making up arrears of sleep. Jephthah stood looking out of his own cabin door when, about fifteen minutes ahead of Creed, Taylor Stribling tethered his half-broken little filly in the bushes at the edge of the clearing, and ran across the grassy side yard.
“Bonbright’s out an’ a-headin’ this way!” he volleyed in a hoarse whisper as he approached the head of the clan.
“Who’s with him?” asked Jephthah, turning methodically back into the room for the squirrel gun over the door.
“Nobody. He ain’t got no rifle. I reckon he’s packin’ a pistol, though, of course. Nancy Cyard bawled an’ took on considerable when he started. Shall I call the boys?”
“No,” returned Jephthah briefly, replacing the clean brown rifle on its fir pegs. “No, I don’t need nobody, and I don’t need Old Sister. I reckon I can deal with one young feller alone.”
He walked unhurriedly toward the main house. Stribling stood looking after him a moment, uncertainly. The spy’s errand was performed. He had now his dismissal; it would not do to be seen about the place at this time. He went reluctantly back to the waiting filly, mounted and turned her head toward a high point that commanded the big road for some distance. A little later Jephthah Turrentine sat in the open threshing-floor porch of the main house smoking, Judith within was busy looking over and washing a mess of Indian lettuce and sissles in a piggin, when Creed rode into the yard.
The ancient hound thumped twice with a languid tail on the floor; Judith, back in her kitchen, stayed her hand, and stared out at the newcomer with parted lips which the blood forsook; Jephthah’s inscrutable black eyes rose to Creed’s face and rested there; nothing but that aspect, pale, desolate, ravaged, the strip of plaster running from brow to cheek, marked the difference between this visit and any other.
Yet the old house seemed to crouch close, to regard him askance from under lowering eyes, as though through all its timbers ran the message that the enemy was here.
“Good morning,” he hailed.
“Howdy. ’Light—’light and come in,” Jephthah adjured him, without rising, “I’m proud to see ye.”
His own countenance was worn and haggard with sleeplessness and anxiety, but with the mountaineer’s dignified reticence he passively ignored the fact, assuming a detached manner of mild jocularity.
Creed, under inspection from six pairs of eyes, though there was only one individual visible to him, got from his mule, tethered the animal, and came and seated himself on the porch edge.
“Aunt Nancy didn’t want me to come over this morning,” he began with that directness which always amazed his Turkey Track neighbours and put them all astray as to the man, his real meaning and intentions.
“Well, now—didn’t she?” inquired the other innocently. “Hit was a fine mornin’ for a ride, too, and I ’low ye’ had yo’ reasons for comin’ in this direction—not but what we’re proud to see ye on business or on pleasure.”
“Are any of the boys about?” asked Creed, suddenly looking up.
“I don’t know adzackly whar the boys is at,” compromised Jephthah, soothing his conscience with the fiction that one might be lying in one bed and another in some place to him unknown. “Was there any particular one you wanted to see?”
“I was looking for Wade,” said Creed briefly, and a silent shock went through one of the men kneeling on the bed inside the log wall, peering through a chink at the visitor.
Judith could bear the strain no longer. Torn by diverse emotions, she snatched up a bucket, ran out of the back door and down to the spring. Returning with it, and her composure somewhat repaired, she dipped a cool and dripping gourdful, walked swiftly through the front room and stood abruptly before Creed, presenting it with almost no word of greeting, only the customary, “Would ye have a fresh drink?”
“Thank you,” said Creed taking the gourd from her hand and lifting his eyes to her face. He needed no prompting now; his own heart spoke very clearly; he knew as he looked at her that she was all the world to him—and that he was utterly lost and cut off from her.
Jephthah, on the porch, and those unseen eyes within, watched the two curiously, while Creed drank from the gourd, emptied out what water remained, and returned it to Judith, and she all the while regarded him with a burning gaze, finally bursting out:
“What do you want to see Wade about? Is it—is it Huldy?”
“Yes, Miss Judith, it’s Huldah,” Creed assented quietly.
“I don’t know as its worth while talkin’ to Wade about that thar gal,” put in Jephthah meditatively. “She sorter sidled off last night and left the place, and I think he feels kinder pestered and mad like. My boys is all mighty peaceful in their dispositions, but it ain’t the best to talk to any man when he’s had that which riles him.”
“Whar is Huldy Spiller?” demanded Judith standing straight and tall before the visitor, disdaining the indirection of her uncle’s methods. “Is she over at you-all’s?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to Wade about,” returned Creed evasively. “Huldah’s a good girl, and I’m sorry if he thinks—I’d hate to be the one that——”
For a moment Judith stared at him with incredulous anger, then she wheeled sharply, went into the house and shut the door. Creed turned appealingly to the older man. He had great faith in Jephthah Turrentine’s good sense and cool judgment. But the young justice showed in many ways less comprehension of these, his own people, than an outsider born and bred. Jephthah Turrentine was no longer to be reckoned with as a man—he was the head of a tribe, and that tribe was at war.
“I don’t know as that thar gal is worth namin’ at this time,” he vouchsafed, almost plaintively. “Ef she had taken Jim Cal’s Iley ’long with her, I could fergive the both of ’em and wish ye joy. As it is, she’s neither here nor thar. Ef you had nothin’ better to name to my son Wade, mebbe we’d as well talk of the craps, and about Steve Massengale settin’ out to run for the Legislature.”
Creed stood up, and in so doing let the little packet of papers he held in his hand drop unnoted to the grass. He scorned to make an appeal for himself, yet it seemed worth while to let his adversaries know that he was aware what they would be at.
“Who found Blatch Turrentine’s body and removed it?” he asked abruptly.
Blatch’s body,—unknown to his uncle and Judith—at that moment reposing comfortably upon a bed in the loft room adjoining the porch, heaved with noiseless chuckles.
Old Jephthah’s eyes narrowed. “We ’low that ye might answer that question for yo’self,” he said coolly. “Word goes that you’ve done hid the body, so murder couldn’t be proved.”
The visitor sighed. He was disappointed. He had hoped the old man might have admitted—to him—that Blatch had not been killed.
“Mr. Turrentine,” he began desperately, “I know what you people believe about me—but it isn’t true; I’m not a spy. When I came upon that still, I was running for my life. I never wanted to know anything about blockaded stills.”
“Ye talked sort o’ like ye did, here earlier in the evenin’,” said the old man, rearing himself erect in his chair, and glaring upon the fool who spoke out in broad daylight concerning such matters.
“I didn’t mean that personally,” protested Creed. “I wish to the Lord I didn’t know anything about it. I’m sorry it chanced that I looked in the cave there and saw your son——”
“You needn’t go into no particulars about whar you looked in, nor what you seed, nor call out no names of them you seed,” cut in the old man’s voice, low and menacing; and around the corner of the house Jim Cal, where he had stolen up to listen, trembled through all the soft bulk of his body like a jelly; and into his white face the angry blood rushed.
“Wish ye didn’t know nothin? Yes, and you’ll wish’t it wuss’n that befo’ yo’re done with it,” he muttered under his breath.
“I don’t intend to use that or any other information against a neighbour and a friend,” Creed went on doggedly. “But they can’t make me leave the Turkey Tracks. I’m here to stay. I came with a work to do, and I mean to do it or die trying.”
The old man’s head was sunk a bit on his breast, so that the great black beard rose up of itself and shadowed his lower face. “Mighty fine—mighty fine,” he murmured in its voluminous folds. “Ef they is one thing finer than doin’ what you set out to do, hit’s to die a-tryin’. The sort of sentiments you have on hand now is the kind I l’arned myself out of the blue-backed speller when I was a boy. I mind writin’ em out big an’ plain after the teacher’s copy.”
Creed looked about him for Judith. He had failed with the old man, but she would understand—she would know. His hungry heart counselled him that she was his best friend, and he glanced wistfully at the door through which she had vanished; but it remained obstinately closed as he made his farewells, got dispiritedly to his mule and away.
Judith watched his departure from an upper window, smitten to the heart by the drooping lines of the figure, the bend of the yellow head. Inexorably drawn she came down the steep stairs, checking, halting at every step, her breast heaving with the swift alternations of her mood. The door of the boys’ room swung wide; her swift glance descried Wade’s figure just vanishing into the grove at the edge of the clearing.
The tall, gaunt old man brooded in his chair, his black eyes fixed on vacancy, the pipe in his relaxed fingers dropped to his knee. Up toward the Jim Cal cabin Iley, one baby on her hip and two others clinging to her skirts, dodged behind a convenient smoke-house, and peered out anxiously.
Judith stepped noiselessly into the porch; the old man did not turn his head. Her quick eye noted the paper Creed had dropped. She stooped and picked it up unobserved, slipped into the kitchen, studying its lines of figures which meant nothing to her, caught up her sunbonnet and, glancing warily about, made an exit through the back door. She ran through a long grape-arbour where great wreathing arms of Virgin’s Bower aided to shut the green tunnel in from sight, then took a path where tall bushes screened her, making for the short cut which she guessed Creed would take.
Down the little dell through which she herself had ridden that first day with what wonderful thoughts of him in her heart, she got sight of him, going slowly, the lagging gait of the old mule seeming to speak his own depression. The trees were all vigorous young second growth here, and curtained the slopes with billows of green. The drying ground sent up a spicy mingling of odours—decaying pine needles, heart leaf, wintergreen berries, and the very soil itself.
Bumblebees shouldered each other clumsily about the heads of milk-weed blossoms. Cicada droned in long, loud crescendo and diminuendo under the hot sun of mid forenoon. A sensitive plant, or as Judith herself would have said, a “shame briar,” caught at her skirts as she hastened. Dipping deeper into the hollow, the man ahead, riding with his gaze upon the ground, became aware of the sound of running feet behind him, and then a voice which made his pulses leap called his name in suppressed, cautious tones. He looked back to see Judith hurrying after him, her cheeks aflame from running, the sunbonnet carried in her hand, and her dark locks freeing themselves in little moist tendrils about her brow where the tiny beads of perspiration gathered.
“You dropped this,” she panted, offering the paper when she came abreast of him.
For a moment she stood by the old mule’s shoulder looking up into the eyes of his rider. It was the reversal of that first day when Creed had stood so looking up at her. Some memory of it struggled in her, and appealed for his life, anyhow, from that fierce primitive jealousy which would have sacrificed the lover of the other woman.
“I—I knowed the paper wasn’t likely anything you needed,” she told him. “I jest had to have speech with you alone. I want to warn you. The boys is out after you. They ain’t no hope, ef the Turrentines gits after you. Likely we’re both watched right now. You’ll have to leave the mountains.”
Creed got quickly from the mule and stood facing her, a little pale and very stern.
“Do you hold with them?” he asked. “I had no intention of killing Blatch. The quarrel was forced on me, as they would say if they told the truth.”
“Well, they won’t tell the truth,” said Judith impatiently. “What differ does it make how come it? They’re bound to run ye out. Hit’s a question of yo’ life ef ye don’t go. I—I don’t know what makes me come an’ warn ye—but you and Huldy had better git to the settlement as soon as ye can.”
Creed saw absolutely nothing in her coupling of his name with Huldah Spiller’s, but the fact that both were under the displeasure of the Turrentines. She searched his face with hungry gaze for some sign of denial of that which she imputed. Instead, she met a look of swift distress.
“I’ve got to see Wade about Huldah,” Creed asserted doggedly. “I promised her—I told her——”
Judith drew back.
“Well, see Wade then!” she choked. “There he is,” and she pointed to the wall of greenery behind which her quicker eyes had detected a man who stole, rifle on shoulder, through the bushes toward a point by the path-side.
“What do I care?” she flung at him. “What is it to me?—you and your Huldy, and your grand plans, and your killin’ up folks and a-gittin’ run out o’ the Turkey Tracks! Settle it as best ye may—I’ve said my last word!”
Her breast heaved convulsively. Bitter, corroding tears burned in her flashing eyes; rage, jealousy, thwarted passion, tenderness denied, and utter terror of the outcome—the time after—all these tore her like wild wolves, as she turned and fled swiftly up the path she had come.
The pale young fellow with the marred, stricken face, standing by the mule, looked after her heavily. Those flying feet were carrying away from him, out of his life, all that made that life beautiful and blest. Yet Creed set his jaw resolutely, and facing about once more, addressed himself to the situation as it was.
“Wade—Wade Turrentine!” he called. “Come out of there. I see you. Come out and talk to me.”
With all the composure in life Wade slouched into the opening of the path.
“You’ve got good eyes,” was his sole comment. Then, as the other seemed slow to begin, “What might you want speech with me about?” he inquired.
“It’s about Huldah,” Creed opened the question volubly now. “You love her, and she loves you. She came over to warn me because we are old acquaintances and friends, and I guess she don’t want you to get into trouble. Is it true that her life is not safe if she stays here on the mountain?”
Wade’s pleasant hazel eyes narrowed and hardened.
“You’re a mighty busy somebody about things that don’t consarn ye,” he remarked finally.
“But this does concern me,” Creed insisted. “I can’t be the cause of breaking up a match between you and Huldah——”
He would have gone further, but Wade interrupted shaking his head.
“No—I reckon you cain’t. Hit’d take more than you to break up any match I was suited with. Mebbe I don’t want no woman that’s liable to hike out and give me away whenever she takes the notion.”
“Oh, come now, Wade,” said Bonbright, with good-natured entreaty in his voice. “You know she wouldn’t give you away. She didn’t mean any harm to you. I’ll bet you’ve done plenty of things twice as bad, if Huldah had the knowing of them.”
“Mebbe I have,” agreed Wade, temperately, and suddenly one saw the resemblance to his father. “Mebbe I have—but ye see I ain’t the one that’s bein’ met up with right now. I ain’t carin’ which nor whether about Huldy Spiller; but you’ve got to walk yo’self from the Turkey Tracks—and walk sudden and walk straight, Mr. Creed Bonbright—or you’ll come to more trouble with the Turrentines. I tell ye this in pure good will.”