When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry Part 40

Under a blow that dropped him unconscious and bleeding from a face laid open as if by a shod hoof, Towers collapsed, scattering red embers as he fell.

Two others were on their feet now, but, facing Stacy's twin pistols and the rifle in the hands of their deserter, they gauged the chances and without a word stretched their hands high above their heads.

"Now well tek up a collection--of guns--once more," directed Stacy, "an' leave hyar."

As two men backed through the gorge into darkness, out of which only one had come, a murder party, disarmed and mortified, shambled to its respective feet and busied itself with a figure that lay insensible with its head among the scattered embers.

"George," said Turner a half hour later, "ye come ter me when I needed ye right bad--but hit's mighty unfortunate thet ye hed ter do hit jest thet way. Ye're ther only man I've got whose name is beknownst ter Kinnard Towers--an' next ter me, thar won't be a man in ther hills harder dogged. Ye hain't been married long--an' ye dastn't go home now."

George Kelly shook his head. "I'm in hit now up ter my neck--an' thar hain't no goin' back. Afore they hes ther chanst ter stop me though, I'm goin' by home ter see my woman, an' bid her fare over ter her folks in Virginny."

CHAPTER XXIII

Bear Cat Stacy had gone with George Kelly to the house where his wife was awaiting him that night, and though he had remained outside while the husband went in, it was not hard to guess something of what took place. The wife of only a few months came out a little later with eyes that were still wet with tears, and with what things she was going to take away with her, wrapped in a shawl. She stood by as George Kelly nailed slats across the door. Already she had put out the fire on the hearth, and about her ankles a lean cat stropped its arched back.

Bear Cat had averted his face, but he heard the spasmodic sob of her farewell and the strange unmanning rattle in the husband's throat.

It was a new house, of four-squared logs, recently raised by the kindly hands of neighbors, amid much merry-making and well-wis.h.i.+ng and it had been their first home together.

Now it was no longer a place where they could live. For the man it would henceforth be a trap of death, and the wife could not remain there alone. It stood on ground bought from Kinnard Towers--and not yet paid for.

Kelly and his wife paused by the log foot-bridge which spanned the creek at their yard fence. In the gray cheerlessness, before dawn, the house with its stark chimney was only a patch of heavier shadow against ghostly darkness. They looked back on it, with wordless regret, and then a mile further on the path forked, and the woman clutched wildly at her husband's shoulders before she took one way and he the other.

"Be heedful of yoreself, George," was all she said, and the man answered with a miserable nod.

So Kelly became Turner's companion in hiding, denied the comfort of a definite roof, and depending upon that power of concealment which could only exist in a forest-masked land, heaped into a gigantic clutter of cliffs and honey-combed with natural retreats.

But two days after his wife's departure, he was drawn to the place that had been his home by an impulse that outweighed danger, and looked down as furtively as some skulking fox from the tangled elevation at its back.

Then in the wintry woods he rose and clenched his hands and the muscles about his strong jaw-bones tightened like leather.

The chimney still stood and a few uprights licked into charred blackness by flame. His nostrils could taste the pungent reek of a recent fire upon whose debris rain had fallen. For the rest there was a pile of ashes, and that surprising sense of smallness which one receives from the skeleton of a burned house, seemingly at variance with the dignity of its inhabited size.

"Hit didn't take 'em long ter set hit," was his only comment, but afterward he slipped down and studied upon the frozen ground certain marks that had been made before it hardened. He found an empty kerosene can--and some characteristics, marking the tracks of feet, that seemed to have a meaning for him. So Kelly wrote down on the index of his memory two names for future reference.

It had occurred to Mark Tapper, the revenue agent, that the activities of Bear Cat Stacy const.i.tuted a great wastage, bringing no material profit to anyone. He himself was left in the disconcerting att.i.tude of a professional who sees his efforts fail while an amateur collects trophies. Before long the fame of recent events would cease to be local. The talk would be borne on wayfaring tongues to the towns at the ends of the rails and some local newspaper correspondent, starving on s.p.a.ce rates, would discover in it a bonanza. Here ready-made was the story of an outlaw waging a successful war on outlawry. It afforded an intensity of drama which would require little embellishment.

If such a story went to press there would be news editors quick to dispatch staff correspondents to the scene and from somewhere on the fringes of things these scribes would spill out columns of saffron melodrama. All these matters worked through the thoughts of Mark Tapper as preliminary and incidental. His part in such publicity would be unpleasant. His superiors would ask questions, difficult to answer, as to why he, backed--in theory--with the power of the government had failed where this local prodigy had made the waysides bloom with copper.

Decidedly he must effect a secret coalition with Bear Cat Stacy. If he could make some such arrangement as he already had with Towers, it might work out to mutual satisfaction. It might be embarra.s.sing for Bear Cat to raid his kinsmen. It was equally so for Tapper to raid Towers' favorites. But by exchanging information they could both obtain results as harmonious as the arrangement of Jack Spratt and his wife.

It was all a very pretty scheme for double-and-triple-crossing--but the first difficulty was in seeing Bear Cat himself.

Finally Mark decided to mail a letter to his man. For all his hiding out it was quite likely that there was a secret line of communication open between his s.h.i.+fting sanctuary and his home. He wrote tactfully inviting Turner to meet him across the Virginia line where he would be safe from local enemies. He gave a.s.surance that he had no intention of serving any kind of summons and that he would come to the meeting place unaccompanied. He held out the bait of using his influence toward a dismissal of the prosecution against Bear Cat's father. Then he waited.

In due time he received a reply in Bear Cat's own hand.

"Men that want to see me must come to me. I don't go to them," was the curt reply. "I warn you that it will be a waste of time, but if you will come to the door of the school-house at the forks of Skinflint and Little Slippery at nine o'clock Tuesday night there will be somebody to meet you, and bring you to me. If you are not alone or have spies following you, your trouble will be for naught. You won't see anybody.

Bear Cat Stacy."

At the appointed time and in strict compliance with the designated conditions Mark Tapper stood at the indicated point.

At length a shadow, unrecognizable in the night, gradually detached itself from the surrounding shadows and a low voice commanded, "Come on."

Mark Tapper followed the guide whose up-turned collar and down-drawn hat would have s.h.i.+elded his features even had the darker cloak of the night not done so. After fifteen minutes spent in tortuous twisting through wire-like snarls of thorn, the voice said: "Stand quiet--an'

wait."

Left alone, the revenuer realized that his guide had gone back to a.s.sure himself that no spies were following at a distance. Tapper knew this country reasonably well, but at the end of an hour he confessed himself lost. Finally he came out on a narrow plateau-like level and heard the roar of water far below him. He saw, too, what looked like a window cut in the solid night curtain itself. Then the shadow-shape halted. "Go on in thar," it directed, and with something more like trepidation than he cared to admit, Tapper groped forward, felt for the doorstep with his toe and rapped.

"Come in," said a steady voice, and again he obeyed.

He stood in an empty cabin and one which had obviously been long tenantless. A musty reek hung between the walls, but on the hearth blazed a hot fire. The wind sent great volumes of choking smoke eddying back into the room from the wide chimney and gusts buffeted in, too, through the seams of the rotting floor.

Bear Cat Stacy stood before the hearth alone and seemingly unarmed. He had thrown aside his coat and his arms were folded across a chest still strongly arched. His eyes were boring into the visitor with a gimlet-like and disconcerting penetration.

"Wa'al," came his crisp interrogation, "what does ye want of me?"

"I wanted to talk things over with you, Stacy," began the revenuer, and the younger man cut him short with an incisive interruption.

"Don't call me Stacy. Call me Bear Cat. Folks round hyar gave me thet name in derision, but I aims ter make hit ther best knowed an' ther wust feared name in ther hills. I aims ter be knowed by hit henceforth."

"All right, Bear Cat. You and I are doing the same thing--from different angles." The visitor paused and drew closer to the fire. He talked with a difficult a.s.sumption of ease, pointing out that since Bear Cat had recognized and declared war on the curse of illicit distilling, he should feel a new sympathy for the man upon whom the government imposed a kindred duty. He had hoped that Bear Cat would make matters easier by joining in the talk, but as he went on, he became uncomfortably aware that the conversation was a monologue--and a strained one.

Stacy stood gazing at him with eyes that seemed to punch holes in his sham of att.i.tude. When the revenuer paused silence lay upon the place until he himself broke it.

Finally Tapper reached a lame conclusion, but he had not yet dared to suggest the thing he had come to broach, the arrangement whereby the two of them were to divide territory, and swap betrayals of confidence.

"Air ye done talkin' now?" The question came with the restrained iciness of dammed-up anger.

"Well--I guess so. Until you answer what I've already said."

"Then I'll answer ye right speedily. I'm bustin' stills like a man blasts up rock thet bars a road: ter make way fer highways an' schools.

_You_ raid stills like Kinnard Towers' men commit murder--fer hire. I reckon thar hain't no common ground thet we two kin stand on. Ye lives by treachery an' blood money. Yore saint air Judas Iscariot an' yore G.o.d air Gain. I hunts open, an'--though ye won't skeercely comprehend my meanin'--thar's a dream back of what I'm doin'--a big dream."

Mark Tapper flushed brick red, and rose.

"Bear Cat," he said slowly. "Your father lies in jail waiting trial. I can do a heap to help him--and a heap to hurt him. You'd better think twice before you turn me away with insults."

Turner's voice hardened and his eyes became menacing slits.

"Yes--he lays in jail because Kinnard Towers bartered with ye ter jail him, but I hain't a-goin' ter barter with ye ter free him. Ye talks of turnin' ye away with insult--but I tells ye now hit's all I kin do ter turn ye away without killin' ye."

Stacy was unarmed and Mark's own automatic pistol was in his coat pocket. He should have known better, but the discovery that somehow Bear Cat Stacy had learned his complicity in a murder plot blinded him with an insane fury of fear and the hand leaped, armed, from its pocket.

"Ef I war you," suggested Bear Cat, who had not moved the folded arms on his chest, "I wouldn't undertake no vi'lence--leastways tell I'd looked well about me. Hev a glance at that trap overhead--an' them two doors."