When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry Part 37

Kinnard's squad reached the house of Dog Tate while the morning was yet young, searching each cabin along the way, in the hope that last night's raider might be still hiding in their own terrain.

They found Joe Sanders sitting on the doorstep, with the morose aspect of a man deprived of his avocation in life. The wintry hillsides were no moodier than his eyes, and the sullen skies no more darkly lowering.

But Dog Tate himself was loquacious to a fault. He raved with a fury so unbridled that it suggested lunacy. Bear Cat had come to his place wounded and had been succored. Twenty-four hours later he had come there again treasonably to repay that service by ripping out an unguarded still. Henceforth the Stacy call might remain eternally unanswered, and be relegated to perdition for all of him.

"Dog," suggested the leader of the squad, "we've done been askin' leave ter kinderly hev a look inter dwellin' houses--in case Bear Cat's still layin' concealed over hyar. I reckon ye hain't hardly got no objection, hev ye?"

"Does ye 'low thet I'd be hidin' out ther man thet raided me?" The host put his question with a fine irony, and the reply was apologetic.

"Not sca'cely. Hit's jest so thet we kin tell Kinnard, we didn't pa.s.s no house by, thet's all."

The speaker and the ex-moons.h.i.+ner were standing at the threshold of the log shack. It was a place of a single, windowless room with a lean-to kitchen--and above was the loft reached by a trap and ladder.

"Come right in then," acceded Dog Tate with disarming readiness. "I hain't got no _ex_cess of love fer Kinnard--but I've got yit less fer still-busters."

Far back where the s.h.i.+ngle roof dropped steeply from ridge pole to edge was a murky recess hidden behind a litter of old bedding, piled up potatoes and onions. Silently listening and mercifully blotted into shadow there, Bear Cat Stacy crouched with rifle-barrel thrust forward and his finger caressing the trigger.

The squad-leader looked about the place with perfunctory eye and then, seeing the ladder, set his foot upon its lowest rung.

Dog Tate felt a sudden commotion of hammering pulses, but his lids did not flicker nor his mouth alter its line. Quite unostentatiously, however, his wife moved toward the front door and stood there blankly expressionless. Also, Dog laid his hand idly on the ladder as the visitor climbed upward. If the search proved embarra.s.sing he meant to kick the support from under the Towers minion, and his wife meant to bar the door for siege.

But the intruder went only high enough to thrust his head into the overhead darkness while a match flared and went out. He had seen nothing, and as he stumped down again the poised finger relaxed on the rifle trigger, and the Tates breathed free.

"I'm obleeged ter ye," said the searching lieutenant. "Ef ye wants ter start up yore still ergin, I reckon ye'll be safe. He won't be runnin'

wild fer long nohow."

The Quarterhouse emissaries were raking the hills with an admirable thoroughness, running like a pack in full cry on the man trail, but they did not again come so near the fringes of success as when they missed the opportunity at Dog Tate's house.

In spite of a watchfulness that gave eyes to the hills and ears to the timber, their quarry left that house and went to his own.

He had no intention of making the mad effort to remain there. The wild tangle of cliff and forest was his safest refuge now--but there were two things to be done at home. He wished to have for companions.h.i.+p in exile his "Lincoln, Master of Men," and he wished to learn if out of the wholesale desertion of yesterday there had not come back to him even one or two followers.

So that afternoon he slipped, undetected by his trailers, into and out of his father's house; and there followed him, though each went singly and casually to escape detection, some eight or ten men, who henceforth were to be his secret followers and, he hoped, the nucleus of a larger force.

The next morning in both Stacy and Towers territory, hickories and walnuts and sycamores burst into copper fruitage. The hills were alive with armed search-parties, liquor-incited and vowing vengeance, yet through their cordons he moved like some invisible and soundless creature, striking and escaping while they raged.

At ever-changing points of rendezvous he met and instructed his mysterious handful of faithful supporters, struck telling blows--made fresh raids and seemingly evaporated.

From all that Towers could learn, it appeared that Bear Cat Stacy was operating as a lone bandit. Yet the ground he seemed to cover single-handed was so wide of boundary and his success so phenomenal that already he was being hallowed, in country-side gossip, with legendary and heroic qualities. In that Towers read a serious menace to his own prestige; until he ground his teeth and swore sulphurously. He organized a larger force of human hounds and fired them more hotly with the incentive of liquor and greed for promised reward. The doors of Old Lone Stacy's house, tenanted now only by the wife of the prisoner and the mother of the refugee, were endlessly watched by unseen eyes.

Around the cabin where Jerry Henderson lay lingering with a tenuous hold on life, lounged the men posted there by Joe Stacy, and back in the timbered slopes that frowned down upon its roof crouched yet other shapes of b.u.t.ter-nut brown; shapes stationed there at the behest of the Quarterhouse.

Going in and out among these would-be avengers and learning all their plans, by dint of a pretendedly bitter hatred of Bear Cat Stacy, were such men as Dog Tate and Joe Sanders, spying upon the spies.

Old Bud Jason at his little tub-mill and Uncle Israel at his general store secretly nodded their wise old heads and chuckled. They knew that, hushed and undeclared, a strong sentiment was being born for the boy who was outwitting scores of time-seasoned murder hirelings. But they shook their heads, too--realizing the deadly odds of the game and its tragic chances.

One afternoon after a day sheeted in cold rain that sometimes merged into snow, Bear Cat crept cautiously toward the sagging door of the abandoned cabin which had, on another night, housed Ratler Webb. It had been a perilously difficult day for the man upon whose head Towers had set the price of a river-bottom farm. Like a hard-run fox he had doubled back and forth under relentless pursuit and gone often to earth. The only things they needed with which to harry him further were bloodhounds.

Now in the later afternoon he came to the cabin and sought a few minutes' shelter there against the penetrating misery of rain and sloppy snow that thawed as it fell. He dared not light a fire, and must not relax the vigilance of his outlook.

Just before sunset Bear Cat saw a man edging cautiously through the timber, moving with a shadowy furtiveness--and recognized Joe Sanders.

The newcomer slipped through the rotting lintels, bringing a face stamped with foreboding.

"Ye kain't stay hyar," announced the excited voice. "I don't hardly know whar ye _kin_ go to nuther, onlessen' ye kin make hit back ter Dog Tate's dwellin'-house by ther hill-trail."

"Tell me all ye knows, Joe," directed Stacy with a steadying calmness, and the other went on hurriedly:

"They've done picked up yore trail--an' lost hit ergin--a couple of miles back. They 'lows ye hain't fur off, an' thar's two score of 'em out huntin'--all licker-crazed but yit not disabled none. Some of 'em 'lows ter come by hyar. I'm with a bunch thet's travelin' a diff'rent route. They're spreadin' out like a turkey gobbler's tail feathers an'

combin' this territory plumb close. Above all don't go to'rds home.

Hit's thet way thet they's most numerous of all. I surmised I'd find ye hyar an' I slipped by ter warn ye."

"I'm obleeged ter ye, Joe. What's thet ye've got thar?" The last question was prompted by the gesture with which Saunders, as if in afterthought, thrust his hand into his coat pocket.

"Hit hain't nuthin' but a letter Brother Fulkerson bid me give ter ye--but thar hain't no time ter read hand-write now. Every minute's wuth countless letters."

But Turner Stacy was ripping the envelope. Already he had recognized the clear, precise hand which had been the fruit of Blossom's arduous efforts at self-education.

"Don't tarry, man! I cautions ye they're already makin' ready ter celebrate yore murder," expostulated the messenger, but Bear Cat did not seem to hear him. In the fading light he was reading and rereading, forgetful of all else. Joe Sanders, fixing him with a keen and impatient scrutiny, noticed how gaunt were his cheeks and how hollow-socketed his eyes. Yet as he began the letter there was a sudden and eager hopefulness in his face which faded into misery as he finished.

"A famed doctor came up from Louisville," wrote Blossom. "He's done all that could be done. He says now that only Jerry's great courage keeps life in him and that can't avail for long. He hasn't been able to talk--except for a few words. The longest speech was this: 'Send word to Bear Cat--that I'm honester than he thinks.... I want to die with his friends.h.i.+p ... or I can't rest afterwards....' He looked like he wanted to tell something else and he named your father and your Uncle Joe Stacy, but he couldn't finish. He keeps saying 'Stacy, you don't understand.' What is it, that you don't understand, Turney? Can't you slip over just long enough to shake hands with him? He wants you to do it--and he's dying--and I love him. For my sake can't you come? Your mother says you came once just to get a book--won't you do that much for me? Blossom Henderson."

Joe Sanders shuffled his feet in poignant disgust for the perilous procrastination. Here was a man whose life hung on instant flight, yet he stood with eyes wide and staring, holding before them a silly sheet of paper. His lips whispered, "Blossom Henderson--_Henderson_--not Fulkerson no more!"

Then a wave of black resentment swept Bear Cat's face and he licked his dry lips. "Joe," he said absently, "I hates him! I kain't shake his hand. I tells ye I kain't do hit."

"Whose hand?--don't shake hit, then," retorted Sanders irritably, and, with a sudden start as though he had been rudely awakened while prattling in his sleep, Bear Cat laughed bitterly.

"Hit don't make no difference," he added shortly. "I war kinderly talking ter myself. I reckon I'd better be leavin'."

Hurrying through the timber, toward Dog Tate's house, Turner's mind was in a vexed quandary and after a little he irresolutely halted. His forehead was drawn and his lips were tight. "Blossom Henderson!" he muttered. "G.o.d knows I took plentiful risks thet ye mout w'ar thet name--an' yit--yit when I reads. .h.i.t, seems like hit drives me plumb ravin' mad!"

From the tangle of dead briars the cold rain dripped desolately. A single smear of lurid red was splashed across the west beyond the silhouetted ridges.

"They're aimin' ter head me off ef I goes to'rds home," he reflected in a bitter spirit. "An' he wants thet I should fight my way through all them enemies ter shake his hand--so thet he kin die easy. I reckon hit don't make no manner of diff'rence how hard I dies myself."

He covered his face with his hands and when he took them away he altered his course, setting his steps in the direction of his own house.

"She said--fer _her_ sake," he repeated in a dazed voice, touched with tenderness. "I reckon I've got ter undertake hit."

Never before had the woods been so efficiently picketed. Never had the net of relentless pursuit been so tight-drawn and close of mesh. For a long distance he eluded its entanglement though at times, as it grew dark, he saw the glimmer of lanterns whose portent he understood.

But finally the clouds broke and a cold moon shone out to aid the pack and cut to a forlorn hope the chances of the quarry.

As Bear Cat went creeping from shadow to shadow he could hear faint sounds of pursuit closing in upon him. He came at length upon a narrow road that must be crossed and for a while he bent low, listening, then stole forward, rea.s.sured.

But as he reached the farther side, the black solidity of a hill-side broke not in one but in several tongues of flame and the bark of three rifles shattered the quiet.