The Heart's Kingdom Part 4

Of course, I had accepted the Reverend Mr. Goodloe's invitation for the journey out into the hills in order to sit beside this very new kind of father I was dimly discovering myself to possess, but I do not to this day know how it happened that I was crushed against the arm steering the gray racer as we sped through Goodloets toward Old Harpeth, while the judge sat beaming, though silent, beside the more silent Bill--who did not beam, but looked out at the road ahead with the shadow in his face of the fatalism that so many of the mountain folk possess.

We were just turning out from the edge of the town, past the last house with its stately white pillars, when a bunch of pink-and-white precipitated itself directly in front of the car--which made the first of the wildcat springs that its master had prophesied for it and then stood with its engine palpitating with what seemed like mechanical fear, while I buried my head on the strong arm next to me, which I could feel tremble for an instant as the Reverend Mr. Goodloe breathed a fervent, "Thank G.o.d." Father rose from his seat with a good round oath and silent Bill snorted like a wild animal.

"Why didn't you stop when you saw me coming?" an imperious young voice demanded in tones of distinct anger, and Charlotte, my name daughter of the house of Morgan, calmly climbed up on the running board, over the door next to father, and settled herself in between him and the silent Bill. "Now you can go on," she calmly announced, in a very much mollified tone of voice as she shook out her ruffles into a less compressed state and wiped her face with her dirty hand, much to the detriment of the roses in her cheeks.

"Where are you going, Charlotte, may I inquire?" asked the Reverend Mr.

Goodloe in a cheerful and calm voice, though I saw that his fingers still trembled on the steering wheel as he held back the enraged gray engine. I was still speechless and I saw that father was in the same condition.

"You said I might go 'next time' when my Auntie Harriet didn't want me to go with you last Tuesday on account of my stomach from the raw potato Jimmy dared me to eat. This is that time," she calmly answered, as she gave an interested look at the silent Bill and again settled the short, pink skirts.

"Yes, I did say that," admitted Mr. Goodloe, as he turned in his seat as far as he could and began to argue the question. "But we shall be gone almost all day and I am afraid your mother wouldn't want you to be gone that long."

"Is it true for you to say that when you know that she will be mighty glad for you to keep me safe with you all day?" Charlotte demanded of him, looking directly into his smiling, friendly face.

"No, that wasn't quite honest, I'll admit," he answered her gravely with the guilt of conviction showing in his face just as plainly as it would have shown if one of his deacons had caught him evading a question of grave moment. "And as it is the fulfillment of a promise which you claim, I am going to ask Miss Powers and the judge if they will permit me to add you to the party, and then go and get permission from your mother to take you with us."

"My mother told me to go and bother Auntie Charlotte an hour or two and that was when I met you. I ran into the car just minding my mother,"

Charlotte answered him with calm pride at her near achievement of death through literal obedience.

"Just drive by and we'll call to Nell. I am afraid the case must have been desperate, for I am seldom the victim," I said in an undertone to our host, who acquiesced with a laugh. "Harriet Henderson must be dead, for Nell usually sends the worse one to her," I added under my breath.

"My Auntie Harriet is having a man cut the ache out of one of her teeth," Charlotte remarked, apropos of nothing, as the huge car swung around into the street in which the Morgans reside. "And, besides, I don't like her any more, because, when she said Sue had to have part of the doll house she bought for us to play in down at her home, and I said then Sue would have to take the outside because I wanted the inside, she locked it up for all this week."

"The modern business ac.u.men of the feministic persuasion," father remarked, as we all laughed at this candid revelation of an egocentric att.i.tude of mind in small Charlotte.

After a few whirls of the gray wheels we paused a moment at the Morgan gate.

"Heavens, yes, and thank you," called Nell in response to our demand for her small daughter's company. "If I had another one clean, I'd give it to you."

"Better go on quick, for Jimmy can wash in a piece of a minute if he wants to," warned Charlotte, and in a second the parson had sent the gray car flying out toward Old Harpeth, though I saw him glance back with a trace of distress in his eyes at the fading vision of a small boy running, howling, to the front gate of the Morgan residence.

"Now mother'll whip him for crying if she does as she says she would, but she won't," observed the tender big sister, as she rose to her feet and waved a maddening farewell to the distressed urchin being left behind.

"Is she totally depraved?" I asked of the young Charlotte's spiritual adviser at my side.

"No; perfectly honest," he answered me with a glint in his eyes that was a laughing challenge.

"There is something awful about honesty," I answered, without appearing to notice the glint.

"There wouldn't be if it were a universal custom," was the answer I got as we whirled by a farmer's wood lot and began to climb the first foothill of Old Harpeth.

All my life I have been going out to Old Harpeth on excursions, but never had I spent a day like the one I had begun with the Jaguar in his native fastnesses. The whole old mountain was beginning to bud and I could almost see it draping on a regal Persian garment of rose and green threaded with purple and blue woven against the old brown and gray of the earth color. The wine-colored trillium with its huge spotted leaves, the slender white dog-tooth violets, the rose-pink arbutus, the blue star myrtle and the crimson oak buds, were matted into a vast robe that was gorgeously oriental, while a perfume that was surely more delicious than any ever wafted from the gardens of Arabia floated past us in gusts through which the gray car sped without the slightest shortness of breath. I seemed a million miles away from the great fetid city in which I had been living--and fast going farther. As we wound up and up into the great forest which is the crown of Old Harpeth, we could look down through occasional vistas and see the Harpeth River curling and bending through pastures in which the chocolate plowed fields were laid off in huge checks with the green meadows, while the farmhouses and barns dotted the valley like the crude figures on a hand-woven chintz.

There are very few men who know enough not to talk to a woman when she has no desire for their conversation, but the Reverend Jaguar seemed to be one of the variety who comprehend the value of silences, and neither of us spoke for at least ten miles, though, of course, it was his duty to make hay while the sun of my nature shone upon him and delicately to inquire into my spiritual condition. He didn't. He just let the wind blow into my empty s.p.a.ces and kept his eyes and thoughts on the road ahead of him. Charlotte's chatter with father was blown back from me and I was happy in a kind of aloneness I had never felt before.

"We are in Hastings County now and in a few minutes we shall be in Hicks Center, the county seat," were the first words that broke in on my self-communion as we began to speed past rough board and log cabins, each surrounded by a picket fence which in no way seemed to fend the doorsteps from razor-back pigs, chickens and a few young mules and calves. "It must be court day, for I don't see a single inhabitant sitting chewing under his own vine and fig tree."

"Yes; it's the first Monday," answered father, as the gray machine pulled gallantly through a few hundred feet of thick, black mud and turned from the wilderness into the public square of the metropolis of Hicks Center.

"Yes, court is in session and there the whole population is in the courthouse," said father, as we glided slowly down the village street.

"They must be trying a murder or a horse-stealing case," and I saw his eyes gleam for a second under their heavy brows as the eyes of an old war horse must gleam when he scents powder.

"Ugh," a.s.sented silent Bill, making the first remark of the journey, and as he spoke the syllable he rose and pointed to the courthouse, which stood in the midst of a mud-covered public square, completely surrounded by hitching-posts to which were hitched all the vehicles of locomotion of the last century down to the present in Hicks Center--which had not as yet arrived as far as the day of the motor car.

"Is Jed in there, Bill?" demanded the Reverend Mr. Goodloe; and as Bill a.s.sented with muscular vigor, if not vocal, he drew the gray car up beside, an old-fas.h.i.+oned carryall, whose wheels were at least five feet high and which had hitched to its pole an old horse and a young mule.

"That team makes a nice balance of--temperament," Mr. Goodloe remarked, as he lifted out Charlotte and then turned to swing me, in his strong arms, free of a mud puddle and onto the old brick pavement which was green with the moss of generations.

Then, piloted by the silent Bill, we made our way through a quiet throng of men and women and children, from the awkward age of shoe-top trousers and skirts to that which, in many cases, was partaking from the maternal fount, as the women stood in groups and whispered as they looked at us shyly. Somehow their decorous calico skirts, which just cleared the ground, made me feel naked in my own of white corduroy, which was all of eight inches from the mud in which theirs had draggled.

And as silent as they, even Charlotte's chatter subdued, we entered the court room and were led through a crowd up to the front seat. At least the rest of us were seated, but the judge, jury and prisoner and prosecuting attorney rose in a body and shook hands with the Reverend Mr. Goodloe as if he were their common and best beloved son.

"He's been in the Harpeth Valley less than a year, and look at that.

We've been here all our lives and they don't know who we are,"

whispered father, with the same pride s.h.i.+ning in his eyes that shone upon the parson from the eyes of the gaunt prisoner, who rose and shook hands with Mr. Goodloe with the sheriff beside him, while the rough old judge from the bench waited his turn.

"We accommodated Jed by waiting until you come before we begun his trial, Parson," the judge said, as he turned back to his bench, which was a splint-bottom chair behind a rude table, dignity being lent to the chair by its being the only one in the room. The rest of the population of the court room of Hicks Center were seated upon benches made of split and hewn logs.

"Thank you, Mr. Hilldrop," said the Reverend Mr. Goodloe, as he sat down beside the prisoner and began a whispered conversation with him.

"The court have come to order. Shoot ahead, Jim, and tell us what Jed have done and how he done it," commanded the judge, as he tilted back his chair, took out his knife and began to whittle a stick of bright red cedar. Twelve good men and true, attired in b.u.t.ternut trousers stuffed into muddy boots, settled themselves in the jury box, which was a log bench set at right angles to the other benches, a little apart from the table and chair of the judge, and nine of them took out their knives and bits of cedar and began to follow the lead of the judge in making fine pink curls fall upon the floor.

"May it please your honor, the prisoner is charged with the stealing of a young mule," said a lanky young mountain lawyer, who had put on a coat over his flannel s.h.i.+rt and brushed a little patch of tow hair just above his brows in deference to his position of prosecuting attorney.

"State yo' case," commanded the judge, as he tried the point of his splinter against his thumb to test its whittled sharpness.

"Hiram Turner, over at Sycamore, lent Jed a team of mules to haul his daughter, who married Jed, home in a wagon with her beds and truck, and when he come down Paradise Ridge to git the team, Jed claimed one had got away from him and run off in the big woods. They was a horse and mule trader come along the same day Jed lost the mule and when Hi and his boy, Bud, knocked Jed down in a fight they found fifty dollars on him in a wad what he won't say where he got it."

With which concise statement the prosecuting attorney sat down and fanned his perspiring brow with his ragged felt hat.

"Got anything to say, Jed?" inquired the judge in a friendly and leisurely fas.h.i.+on, after the accused had been duly sworn in by the sheriff. "How come a man like you to let a mule git away from him?"

With the judge's friendly question there entered another actor on the scene, in the person of a mountain girl who had been cowering on a bench just behind Jed, her face hidden by a black calico split bonnet.

"Please lemme tell, Jed," she pleaded in a soft whisper that only father and I heard, as we sat just behind her.

"Naw," was the one word he gave her, but it was spoken with a soft little purr in his husky voice. Then he answered the judge with a kind of quiet dignity, which I saw that the twelve booted jurymen listened to with respect.

"Jedge," he said, with a stern look into the judge's face, "I reckon you'll have to send me down to the pen. I let that mule git away from me and I didn't steal or sell him; that is all I got to say." And he sat down. I felt father start at my side and then sink back onto his bench.

"Where did you git the money, Jed?" the judge demanded.

"That I ain't a-telling," answered Jed determinedly. "Jest send me down to the pen, fer you-all know all you'll ever know."

"Well, Jed," the judge was beginning to say in an argumentative tone of voice, when father arose and stepped in front of the bench.

"May it please your honor to appoint a counsel for the defense?" he asked in a ringing voice that brought all the outsiders crowding into the door. I had never heard or seen my father in a court room and I had never suspected him of the resonant silver voice with which he made his demand.

"We ain't got a lawyer in Hicks Center but Jim Handy here, and he can't prosecute and defend too. I always kinder looks out fer the prisoners myself," answered the judge.