The Raid of The Guerilla and Other Stories Part 2

She could scarcely control her terror when she saw that he intended her to ride with him to the spot, yet she feared even more to draw back, to refuse. He held out one great spurred boot. Her little low-cut shoe looked tiny upon it as she stepped up. He swung her to the saddle behind him, and the great warhorse sprang forward so suddenly, with such long, swift strides, that she swayed precariously for a moment and was glad to catch the guerilla's belt-to seize, too, with an agitated clutch, his right gauntlet that he held backward against his side. His fingers promptly closed with a rea.s.suring grasp on hers, and thus skimming the red sunset-tide they left behind them the staring group about the blacksmith shop, which the cavalrymen had now approached, watering their horses at the trough and lifting the saddles to rest the animals from the constriction of the pressure of the girths.

Soon the guerilla and the girl disappeared in the distance; the fences flew by; the shocks of corn seemed all a-trooping down the fields; the evening star in the red haze above the purple western mountains had spread its invisible pinions, and was a-wing above their heads. Presently the heavy shadows of the looming wooded range, darkening now, showing only blurred effects of red and brown and orange, fell upon them, and the guerilla checked the pace, for the horse was among boulders and rough ledges that betokened the dry bed of a stream. Great crags had begun to line the way, first only on one marge of the channel; then the clifty banks appeared on the other side, and at length a deep, black-arched opening yawned beneath the mountains, glooming with sepulchral shadows; in the silence one might hear drops trickling vaguely and the sudden hooting of an owl from within.

He drew up his horse abruptly, and contemplated the grim aperture.

"So they came into Tanglefoot down the road, and went out of the Cove by this tunnel?"

"Yessir!" she piped. What had befallen her voice? what appalled eerie squeak was this! She cleared her throat timorously. "They couldn't hev done it later in the fall season. Tanglefoot Creek gits ter runnin' with the fust rains."

"An' Tolhurst knew that too! He must have had a guide-a guide that knows the Cove like I know the palm of my hand! Well, I'll catch him yet, sometime. I'll hang him! I'll hang him-if I have to grow a tree a-purpose."

What strange influence had betided the landscape? Around and around circled the great stationary mountains anch.o.r.ed in the foundations of the earth. It was a long moment before they were still again-perhaps, indeed, it was the necessity of guarding her balance on the fiery steed, a new cause of apprehension, that paradoxically steadied Ethelinda's nerves. Ackert had dismounted, throwing the reins over his arm. He had caught sight of the hoofmarks along the moist sandy s.p.a.ces of the channel, mute witness in point of number, and a guaranty of the truth of her story. A sudden glitter arrested his eyes. He stooped and picked up a broken belt-buckle with the significant initials U.S. yet showing upon it.

"I'll hang that guide yet," he muttered, his eyes dark with angry conviction, his face lowering with fury. "I'll hang him-I won't expect to prove it p'int blank. Jes' let me git a mite o' suspicion, an' I'll guarantee the slipknot!"

She could never understand her motive, her choice of the moment.

"Cap'n Ackert," she trembled forth. There was so much significance in her tone that, standing at her side, he looked up in sudden expectation. "I tole ye the truth whenst I say I seen no guide"-he made a gesture of impatience; he had no time for twice-told tales-"kase-kase the guide war-war-myself."

The clear twilight fell full on his amazed, upturned face and the storm of fury it concentrated.

"What did you do it fur?" he thundered, "you limb o' perdition!"

"Jes' ter help him some. He-he-he-would hev been capshured."

He would indeed! The guerilla was very terrible to look upon as his brow corrugated, and his upturned eyes, with the light of the sky within them, flashed ominously.

"You little she-devil!" he cried, and then speech seemed to fail him.

She had begun to s.h.i.+ver and shed tears and emit little gusts of quaking sobs.

"Oh, I be so feared--" she whimpered. "But-but-you mustn't hang-n.o.body else on s'picion!"

There was a vague change in the expression of his face. He still stood beside the saddle, with the reins over his arm, while the horse threw his head almost to the ground and again tossed it aloft in his impatient weariness of the delay.

"An' now you are captured yourself," he said, sternly. "You are accountable fur your actions."

She burst into a paroxysm of sobs. "I never went ter tell! I meant ter keep the secret! The folks in the Cove dun'no' nuthin'. But-oh, ye mustn't s'picion n.o.body else-ye mustn't hang n.o.body else!"

Once more that indescribable change upon his face.

"You showed him the way to this pa.s.s yourself? Tell the truth!"

"He war ridin' his horse-critter-'tain't ez fast, nor fine, nor fat ez yourn."

He stroked the glossy mane with a sort of mechanical pride.

"And so he went plumb through the cave?"

"An' all the troop-they kindled pine-knots fur torches."

He glanced about him at the convenient growths.

"And they came out all safe in Greenbrier?" He winced. How the lost opportunity hurt him!

"Yessir. In Greenbrier Cove."

"Did he pay you in gold?" sneered Ackert. "Or in greenbacks? Or mebbe in Cornfed money?"

"I wouldn't hev his gold." She drew herself up proudly, though the tears were still coursing down her cheeks. "So he gin me a present-a whole pa.s.sel o' coffee in my milk-piggin." Then to complete a candid confession she detailed the disposition she had made of this rare and precious luxury at the rebel smallpox camp.

His eyes seemed to dilate as they gazed up at her. "Jesus Gawd!" he exclaimed, with uncouth profanity. But the phrase was unfamiliar to her, and she caught at it with a meaning all her own.

"That's jes' it! Folks in gineral don't think o' them,'cept ter git out o' thar way; an' n.o.body keers fur them, but kase Jesus is Gawd He makes somebody remember them wunst in a while! An' they did seem pa.s.sable glad."

A vague sweet fragrance was on the vesperal air; some subtle distillation of asters or jewel-weed or "mountain-snow," and the leaf.a.ge of crimson sumac and purple sweet-gum and yellow hickory and the late ripening frost-grapes-all in the culmination of autumnal perfection; more than one star gleamed whitely palpitant in a sky that was yet blue and roseate with a reminiscence of sunset; a restful sentiment, a brief truce stilled the guerilla's tempestuous pulse as he continued to stand beside his horse's head while the girl waited, seated on the saddle blanket.

Suddenly he spoke to an unexpected intent. "Ye took a power o' risk in goin' nigh that Confederate pest-camp-an' yit ye're fur the Union an' saved a squadron from capture!" he upbraided the inconsistency in a soft incidental drawl.

"Yes, I be fur the Union," she trembled forth the dread avowal. "But somehows I can't keep from holpin' any I kin. They war rebs-an' it war Yankee coffee-an' I dun'no'-I jes' dun'no'--"

As she hesitated he looked long at her with that untranslated gaze. Then he fell ponderingly silent.

Perhaps the revelation of the sanct.i.ties of a sweet humanity for a holy sake, blessing and blessed, had illumined his path, had lifted his eyes, had wrought a change in his moral atmosphere spiritually suffusive, potent, revivifying, complete. "She is as good as the saints in the Bible-an' plumb beautiful besides," he muttered beneath his fierce mustachios.

Once more he gazed wonderingly at her.

"I expect to do some courtin' in this kentry when the war is over," the guerilla said, soberly, reaching down to readjust the reins. "I haven't got time now. Will you be waiting fur me here in Tanglefoot Cove-if I promise not to hang you fur your misdeeds right off now?" He glanced up with a sudden arch jocularity.

She burst out laughing gleefuly in the tumult of her joyous rea.s.surance, as she laid her tremulous fingers in his big gauntlet when he insisted that they should shake hands as on a solemn compact. Forthwith he mounted again, and the great charger galloped back, carrying double, in the red after-glow of the sunset, to the waiting group before the flaring doors of the forge.

The fine flower of romance had blossomed incongruously in that eager heart in those fierce moments of the bitterness of defeat. Life suddenly had a new meaning, a fair and fragrant promise, and often and again he looked over his shoulder at the receding scene when the trumpets sang "to horse," and in the light of the moon the guerilla rode out of Tanglefoot Cove.

But Ethelinda saw him never again. All the storms of fate overwhelmed the Confederacy with many a rootless hope and many a plan and pride. In lieu of the materialization of the stalwart ambition of distinction that had come to dominate his life, responsive to the discovery of his peculiar and inherent gifts, his destiny was chronicled in scarce a line of the printed details of a day freighted with the monstrous disaster of a great battle; in common with others of the "missing" his bones were picked by the vultures till shoved into a trench, where a monument rises to-day to commemorate an event and not a commander. Nevertheless, for many years the flare of the first red leaves in the cleft among the pines on the eastern slope of Tanglefoot Cove brought to Ethelinda's mind the gay flutter of the guidon, and in certain sonorous blasts of the mountain wind she could hear martial echoes of the trumpets of the guerilla.

WHO CROSSES STORM MOUNTAIN?

The wind stirred in the weighted pines; the snow lay on the ground. Here and there on its smooth, white expanse footprints betokened the woodland gentry abroad. In the pallid glister of the moon, even amid the spa.r.s.e, bluish shadows of the leafless trees, one might discriminate the impression of the p.r.o.nged claw of the wild turkey, the short, swift paces of the mink, the padded, doglike paw of the wolf. A progress of a yet more ravening suggestion was intimated in great hoofmarks leading to the door of a little log cabin all a-crouch in the grim grip of winter and loneliness and poverty on the slope of the mountain, among heavy, outcropping ledges of rock and beetling, overhanging crags. With icy ranges all around as far as the eye could reach, with the vast, instarred, dark sky above, it might seem as if sorrow, the world, the law could hardly take account of so slight a thing, so remote. But smoke was slowly stealing up from its stick-and-clay chimney, and its clapboarded roof sheltered a group with scarcely the heart to mend the fire.

Two women s.h.i.+vered on the broad hearth before the dispirited embers. One had wept so profusely that she had much ado to find a dry spot in her blue-checked ap.r.o.n, thrown over her head, wherewith to mop her tears. The other, much younger, her fair face reddened, her blue eyes swollen, her auburn curling hair all tangled on her shoulders, her voice half-choked with sobs, addressed herself to the narration of their woes, her cold, listless hands clasped about her knees as she sat on an inverted bushel-basket, for there was not a whole chair in the room.

"An' then he jes' tuk an' leveled!" she faltered.

A young hunter standing on the threshold, leaning on his rifle, a brace of wild turkeys hanging over his shoulders, half a dozen rabbits dangling from his belt, stared at her through the dull, red glow of the fading fire in amazed agitation.

"What did he level, Medory-a gun?"

"Wuss'n that!" replied the younger woman. "He leveled the weepon o' the law!"