When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry Part 20

"Ye went down thar ter town with him," she accused in the high falsetto of wrath, "an' ye come back scot free an' abandoned him ter ther penitenshery an' ye didn't raise a hand ter save him! Ef hit hed of been me I'd hev brought him home safe or I wouldn't of been hyar myself ter tell of hit!"

Bear Cat Stacy went over and took the woman's wasted hands in both of his own. As he looked down on her from his six feet of height there came into his eyes a gentleness so winning that his expression was one of surprising and tender sweetness.

"Does ye 'low," he asked softly, "that I'd hev done _thet_ ef he hadn't p'intedly an' severely bid me do hit?"

He told her the story in all its detail and as she listened no tears came into her eyes to relieve the hard misery of her face. But when he had drawn a chair for her to the hearth and she had seated herself stolidly there, he realized that he must go and remove the evidence which still remained back there in the laurel thickets. He left her tearless and haggard of expression, gazing dully ahead of her at the ashes of the burned-out fire; the gaunt figure of a mountain woman to whom life is a serial of apprehension.

When he came back at sunset she still sat there, bending tearlessly forward, and it was not until he had crossed the threshold that he saw another figure rise from its knees. Blossom Fulkerson had been kneeling with her arms about the shrunken shoulders--but how long, he did not know.

"Blossom," he said that evening as he was starting away into banishment across the Virginia boundary, "I don't know how long I'm a-goin' ter be gone, but I reckon you knows how I feels. I've done asked Mr. Henderson ter look atter ye, when he comes back from Louisville. He aims ter see ter hit that paw gits ther best lawyers ter defend him while he's thar."

"I reckon then," replied the girl with a faith of hero-wors.h.i.+p which sent a sharp paroxysm of pain into Bear Cat's heart, "thet yore paw will mighty sartain come cl'ar."

They were standing by the gate of the Stacy house, for Blossom meant to spend that night with the lone woman who sat staring dully into the blackened fireplace. To the lips of the departing lover rose a question, inspired by that note of admiration which had lent a thrill to her voice at mention of Jerry Henderson, but he sternly repressed it.

To catechize her love would be disloyal and ungenerous. It would be a wrong alike to her whom he trusted and to the man who was his loyal friend--and hers. But in his heart, already sore with the prospect of exile, with the thought of that dejectedly rocking figure inside and the other figure he had left in the neutral grayness of the jail cell, awakened a new ache. He was thinking how untutored and raw he must seem now that his life had been thrown into the parallel of contrast with the man who knew the broad world of "down below" and even of over-seas.

If to Blossom's thinking he himself had shrunken in stature, it was not a surprising thing--but that did not rob the realization of its cutting edge or its barb.

"Blossom," he said, as his face once more became ineffably gentle, "thar's ther evenin' star comin' up over ther Wilderness Ridges." He took both her hands in his and looked not at the evening star but into the eyes that she lifted to gaze at it. "So long es I'm away--so long es I lives--I won't never see hit withouten I thinks of _you_. But hit hain't only when I see _hit_ thet I thinks of ye--hit's _always_. I reckon ye don't sca'cely realize even a leetle portion of how much I loves ye." He fell for a s.p.a.ce silent, his glance caressing her, then added unsteadily and with an effort to smile, "I reckon thet's jest got ter be a secret a-tween ther Almighty, Who knows everything--an' me thet don't know much else but jest _thet_!"

She pressed his hands, but she did not put her arms about him nor offer to kiss him, and he reflected rather wretchedly that she had done that only once. Though it might be ungenerous to think of it, save as a coincidence, that one time had been before Jerry Henderson had been on the scene for twenty-four hours.

Bear Cat Stacy, with the lemon afterglow at his back and only the darkness before his face, was carrying a burdened spirit over into old Virginia, where for the first time in his life he must, like some red-handed murderer, "hide out" from the law.

Kinnard Towers felt that his plans had worked with a well-oiled precision until the day after Lone Stacy's arrest, when he awoke to receive the unwelcome tidings that Jerry Henderson had taken the train at four o'clock that morning for Louisville.

For a moment black rage possessed him, then it cleared away into a more philosophical mood as his informant added, "But he 'lowed ter several folks thet he aimed ter come back ergin in about a week's time."

On that trip to Louisville Jerry Henderson saw to it that old Lone Stacy should face trial with every advantage of learned and distinguished counsel.

Jerry and President Williams of the C. and S.-E. Railways knew, though the public did not, that the expenses of that defense were to be charged up to the road's accounts under the head of "Incidentals--_in re_ Cedar Mountain extension."

Old Lone had been an unconscious sponsor during these months and his friends.h.i.+p warranted recognition, not only for what he had done, but also for what he might yet do.

But the promoter's stay in the city was not happy since he found himself floundering in a quandary of mind and heart which he could no longer laugh away. He had heretofore boasted an adequate strength to regulate and discipline his life. Such a power he had always regarded as test and measure of an ambitious man's effectiveness. Its failure, total or partial, was a flaw which endangered the metal and temper of resolution.

On these keen and bracing days, as he walked briskly along the streets of the city, he found himself instinctively searching for a face not to be found; the face of Blossom Fulkerson and always upon realization followed a pang of disappointment. Unless he watched himself he would be idiotically falling in love with her, he mused, which was only a vain denial that he was already in love with her.

It was in their half-conscious pervasiveness, their dream-like subtlety, that these influences were strongest. When they emerged into the full light of consciousness he laughed them away. Such fantasies did not fit into his pattern of life. They were suicidally dangerous.

Yet they lingered in the fairy land of the partially realized.

He wished that her ancestors had been among those who had won through to the promised land of the bluegra.s.s, instead of those who had been stranded in the dry-rot of the hills. In that event, perhaps, her grandmothers would have been ladies in brocade and powdered hair instead of bent crones dipping snuff by cabin hearth-stones. All their inherent fineness of mind and charm, Blossom had--under the submerging of generations. The most stately garden will go to ragged and weed-choked desolation if left too long untended.

But he could hardly hope to make his more fas.h.i.+onable world see that.

The freshness of her charm would be less obvious than the lapses of her grammar; the flash of her wit less marked than her difficulties with a tea-cup.

Blossom, too, of late had been troubled with a restlessness of spirit, new to her experience. Until that day last June upon which so many important things had happened the gay spontaneity of her nature had dealt little with perplexities. She had acknowledged a deep and unsatisfied yearning for "education" and a fuller life, but even that was not poignantly destructive of happiness.

Then within a s.p.a.ce of twenty-four hours, Henderson had made his appearance, bringing a sense of contact with the wonder-world beyond the purple barriers; she had prayed through the night for Turner and he had come to her at dawn with his pledge--and finally, she had confessed her love.

In short she had matured with that swift sequence of happenings into womanhood, and since then nothing had been quite the same. But of all the unsettling elements, the disturbing-in-chief was Jerry Henderson.

He had flashed into her life with all the startling fascination of Cinderella's prince, and matters. .h.i.therto accepted as axiomatic remained no longer certain.

"Gittin' education" had before that meant keeping pace with Turner's ambition. Now it involved a pathetic effort to raise herself to Henderson's more complex plane.

She had sought as studiously as Jerry himself to banish the absurd idea that this readjustment of values was sentimental, and she had as signally failed.

These changes in herself had been of such gradual incubation that she had never realized their force sufficiently to face and a.n.a.lyze them--yet she had sent young Stacy away without a caress!

"I'm jest the same as plighted to Bear Cat," she told herself accusingly, because loyalty was an element of her blood. "I ain't hardly got ther right to think of Mr. Henderson." But she did think of him. Perhaps she was culpable, but she was very young. Turner had seemed a planet among small stars--then Jerry had come like a flaming comet--and her heart was in sore doubt.

When, on his return, Henderson dropped from the step of the rickety day-coach to the cinder platform of the station at Marlin Town, he met Uncle Israel Calvert who paused to greet him.

"Wa'al howdy, stranger," began the old man with a full volumed heartiness, then he added swiftly under his breath and with almost as little movement of his lips as a ventriloquist. "Don't leave town withouten ye sees me fust--hit's urgent. Don't appear ter hev much speech with me in public. Meet me at ther Farmers' Bank--upsta'rs--one hour hence."

Jerry Henderson recognized the whispered message as a warning which it would be foolhardiness to ignore. Probably even as he received it he was under surveillance, so instead of setting out at once on foot, he waited and at the appointed time strolled with every appearance of unconcern into the Farmers' Bank.

At the same time Black Tom Carmichael happened in to have a two-dollar bill changed into silver, and overheard the cas.h.i.+er saying in a matter-of-fact voice, "Thar's been some little tangle in yore balance, Mr. Henderson. Would ye mind steppin' up to the directors' room an'

seein' ef ye kin straighten it out with the bookkeeper. She's up thar."

With a smile of a.s.sent Henderson mounted the narrow stairs and Black Tom lighted his pipe and loafed with inquisitive indolence below.

CHAPTER XII

Instead of a puzzled accountant Jerry found in the bare upper room the rosy-faced, white-haired man who had given him credentials when he first arrived in the hills, and who kept the store over on Big Ivy.

"I come over hyar on my way ter Knoxville ter lay me in a stock of winter goods," volunteered the storekeeper, "an' I 'lowed I'd tarry an'

hev speech with ye afore I fared any further on." As he spoke he tilted back his chair, and thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

Henderson lifted his brows in interrogation and the storekeeper proceeded with deliberate emphasis.

"Somebody, I hain't found out jest who--aims ter hev ye lay-wayed on yore trip acrost ther mounting. I felt obleeged ter warn ye."

"Have me way-laid," repeated Jerry blankly, "what for?"

Uncle Israel shook his silvery poll. "I hain't hardly got ther power ter answer thet," he said, "but thar's right-smart loose talk goin'

round. Some folks laments thet ye 'lowed ter teach profitable farmin'

an' ye hain't done nothin'. They 'lows ye must hev some crooked projeck afoot. This much is all I jedgmatic'lly knows, Joe Campbell was over ter Hook Brewer's blind tiger, on Skinflint, last week. Some fellers got ter drinkin' an' talkin' aimless-like an' yore name come up.

Somebody 'lowed thet yore tarryin' hyar warn't a-goin' ter be tolerated no longer, an' thet he knowed of a plan ter git ye es ye crossed ther mounting whilst Lone Stacy an' Bear Cat was both away. Joe, bein' a kinsman of mine an' Lone's, told me. Thet's all I knows, but ef I was you I wouldn't disregard hit."

"What would you advise, Uncle Israel?"

"Does ye plumb pi'ntedly _hev_ ter go over thar? Ye couldn't jest linger hyar in town twell ther night train pulls out an' go away on hit?"