Mountain Blood Part 24

"She's dead," he said, after a minute. Simeon Caley made no immediate reply, and he repeated in exactly the same manner:

"She's dead."

A sudden bitterness of contempt flamed in the other's ineffable blue eyes.

"G.o.d d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l!" he exclaimed; "now you got the money and nothing to hinder you."

His resentment vanished as quickly as it had appeared. He rose and picked up the lantern, and with their puny illumination they went out together into the dark.

THREE

I

On an afternoon of the second autumn following Lettice's death Gordon was fetching home a headstall resewn by Peterman. The latter, in a small shed filled with the penetrating odor of dressed leather at the back of the hotel, exercised the additional trade of saddler. General Jackson ambled at Gordon's heel.

The dog had grown until his shoulder reached the man's knee; he was compact and powerful, with a long, heavy jaw and p.r.o.nounced, grave whiskers; the wheaten color of his legs and head had lightened, sharply defining the coa.r.s.e black hair upon his back.

October was drawing to a close: the autumn had been dry, and the foliage was not brilliantly colored, but exhibited a single shade of dusty brown that, in the sun, took the somber gleams of clouded gold. It was warm still, but a furtive wind, stirring the dead leaves uneasily over the ground, was momentarily ominous, chill.

The limp rim of a felt hat obscured Gordon's features, out of the shadow of which protruded his lean, sharp chin. His heavy shoes, hastily sc.r.a.ped of mud, bore long cuts across the heels, while shapeless trousers, a coat with gaping pockets, hung loosely about his thin body and bowed shoulders.

He pa.s.sed the idlers before the office of the _Bugle_ with a scarcely perceptible nod; but, farther on, he stopped before a solitary figure advancing over the narrow footway.

It was Buckley Simmons. He was noticeably smaller since his injury at the camp meeting; he had shrivelled; his face was peaked and wrinkled like the face of a very old man; the shadows in the sunken cheeks did not resemble those on living skin, but were dry and dusty like the autumn leaves. His gaze was fixed upon the ground at his feet; but, as he drew up to Gordon, he raised his head.

Into the dullness of his eyes, his slack lips, crept a dim recognition; among the ashes of his consciousness a spark glowed--a single, live coal of bitter hate.

"How are you, Buckley?" Gordon p.r.o.nounced slowly.

The other's hands clenched as the wave of emotion crossed the blank countenance. Then the hands relaxed, the face was again empty. He continued, oblivious of Gordon's salutation, of his presence, upon his way.

Gordon Makimmon stood for a moment gazing after him. Then, as he turned, he saw that there was a small group of men on the Courthouse lawn; he saw the sheriff standing facing them from the steps, gesticulating.

II

The purpose of this gathering was instantly apparent to him, it stirred obscure memories into being.--A property was being publicly sold for debt.

The trooping thoughts of the past filled his mind; thoughts, it seemed to him, of another than himself. Surely it had been another Gordon Makimmon that, sitting before the _Bugle_ office, had heard the sheriff enumerating the scant properties of the old freehold by the stream to satisfy the insatiable greed of Valentine Simmons. It had been a younger man than himself by fifteen years. Yet, actually, it had been scarcely more than three years since the storekeeper had had him sold out.

That other Makimmon had been a man of incredibly vivid interests and emotions. Now it appeared to him that, in all the world, there was not a cause for feeling, not an incentive to rouse the mind from apathy.

Stray periods reached him from the sheriff's recounting of "a highly desirable piece of property." His loud, flat voice had not changed by an inflection since he had "called out" Gordon's home; the merely curious or materially interested onlookers were the same, the dragging bidding had, apparently, continued unbroken from the other occasion. The dun, identical repet.i.tion added to the overwhelming sense of universal monotony in Gordon Makimmon's brain. He turned at the corner, by Simmons' store, while the memories faded; the customary greyness, like a formless drift of cloud obscuring a mountain height, once more descended upon him.

At the back of the store a small open s.p.a.ce was filled with broken crates, straw and boxes--the debris of unpacking. And there he saw a youthful woman sitting with her head turned partially from the road. As he pa.s.sed a suppressed sob shook her. It captured his attention, and, with a slight, involuntary gasp, he saw her face. The memories returned in a tumultuous, dark tide--she reminded him vividly of Lettice. It was in the young curve of her cheeks, the blue of her eyes, and a sameness of rounded proportions, that the resemblance lay.

He stopped, without formulated reason, and in spite of her obvious desire for him to proceed.

"It's hardly fit to sit here and cry before the whole County," he observed.

"The whole County knows," she returned in the egotism of youthful misery.

Her voice, too, was like Lettice's--sweet with the premonition of the querulous note that, Rutherford Berry had once said, distinguished all good women.

A sudden intuition directed his gaze upon the Courthouse lawn.

"They're selling you out," he hazarded, "for debt."

She nodded, with trembling lips. "Cannon is," she specified.

Cannon was the storekeeper for whom his brother-in-law clerked. He thought again, how monotonous, how everlastingly alike, life was. "You just let the amount run on and on," he continued; "you got this and that. Then, suddenly, Cannon wanted his money."

Her eyes opened widely at his prescience. "But there was sickness too,"

she added; "the baby died."

"Ah," Gordon said curtly. The lines in his worn face deepened, his mouth was inscrutable.

"If it hadn't been for that," she confided, "we could have got through.

Everything had started fine. Alexander's father had left him the place: there isn't a better in the Bottom. Alexander says Mr. Cannon has always wanted it. Now ... now ..." her blue gaze blurred with slow tears.

Her similarity to Lettice grew still more apparent--she presented the same order, her white s.h.i.+rtwaist had been crisply ironed, her shoes were rubbed bright and neatly tied. He recalled this similitude suddenly, and it brought before him a clearly defined vision of Lettice, not as his wife, but of the girl he had driven to and from the school at Stenton. He had not thought of that Lettice for months, for three years; not since before she had died; not, he corrected himself drearily, since he had killed her. He had remembered the last phase, of the glazed and bloodless travesty of her youth. But even that lately had been lost in the fog of nothingness settling down upon him.

And now this girl, on a box back of Simmons' store, brought the buried memories back into light. They disconcerted him, sweeping through the la.s.situde of his mind; they stirred shadowy specters of fear.... The voice of the sheriff carried to them, describing the excellent repair of incidental sheds.

"I nailed all the tar-paper on the--the chicken house," she told him in a fresh accession of unhappiness, the tears spilling over her round, flushed cheeks.

It annoyed him to see her cry: it was as though Lettice was suffering again from old misery. His irritation grew at this seeming renewal of what had gone; it a.s.sumed the aspect of an intentional reproach, of Lettice returned to bother him with her pain and death. He turned sharply to continue on his way. But, almost immediately, he stopped.

"Your name?" he demanded.

"Adelaide Crandall."

The Crandalls, he knew, were a reputable family living in the valley bottom east of Greenstream village. Matthew Crandall had died a few years before, and, as this girl had indicated, had left a substantial farm to each of his sons. Cannon would get this one, and it was more than probable, the others.

The old enmity against Valentine Simmons, directed at Cannon, flamed afresh. Simmons or the other--what did the name matter? they were the same, a figurative apple press crus.h.i.+ng the juice out of the country, leaving but a mash of hopes and lives. He stood irresolute, while Adelaide Crandall fought to control her emotions.

The badgering voice of the sheriff sounded again on his hearing. He crossed the road, pushed open the grinding iron gate of the fence that enclosed the Courthouse lawn, and made his way through the sere, fallen leaves to the steps.

III