When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry Part 41

Already the officer, with deep chagrin, recognized his folly. The open trap of the loft bristled with rifle mouths. The two doors which had a moment before been closed were now open and showed other muzzles peeping through, but who the men behind the guns might be, there was no indication--and there had been no sound.

"I didn't need ter show them guns--jest fer you," said Bear Cat slowly.

"A man don't hardly need ter call his folks tergether ter fight a skunk--but I knowed thet ye'd go back ter Kinnard Towers, an' I'd jest as lief hev ye name hit ter him, thet ye didn't find me hyar all by myself." He paused and then the cold contempt of his manner gave way to a more explosive anger.

"I aims ter furnish ye with a lantern an' one of my men will start ye on yore road.... I wants ter see thet lantern goin' over ther hill-top plumb outen sight--an' I don't want ter see hit hesitate whilst hit goes. Ef hit does pause--or ef ye ever comes back ter me ergin with any proffer of partners.h.i.+p, so holp me G.o.d Almighty, I'll send yore scalp ter Was.h.i.+n'ton with my regards ter ther government." He pointed a peremptory finger to the front door. "Now, d.a.m.n ye, begone an' go swiftly!"

Outside Tapper saw a lantern moving, but revealing no face. He knew that it was attached to a long pole and that one side was masked--the hill device of men who need light for their footsteps yet seek to avoid becoming conspicuous--and he followed its glimmer until a voice said, "I reckon ye kin go yore own route from hyar--yon way lies ther high road. Ye kin tek ther lantern with ye."

Blossom who, until a few weeks ago, had been thought of as a lovely child, was now the "Widder Henderson" to all who spoke her name. The people she met accosted her with a lugubrious sympathy which was hard to bear, so that she hastened by with a furtive shyness and an anxiety to be left alone. Every day she made her pilgrimage to the graveyard to lay freshly cut evergreens on the grave there, and the rabbit that had its nest deep under the thorns sat on its haunches regarding her with a frank curiosity devoid of fear. He seemed to recognize a kins.h.i.+p of shy aloofness between them which need not set even his most timorous of hearts into a flutter.

Yet although she was the "Widder Henderson," who had experienced the bitter fate of so many mountain wives, she was after all, in years and in experience, a child.

Until a little while ago--a very little while--she had sung with the birds and her spirits had sparkled with the suns.h.i.+ne that flashed back from woodland greenery. Life had seemed a simple thing with the rainbow promise of romance lying somewhere ahead. Then Turner had awakened her to a conception of adult love--a conception which might have satisfied all her dreams had not Jerry Henderson come to dazzle her and alter her standards of comparison. Henderson had, as even his critic at the club admitted, that "d.a.m.ned charm" that is seductively indefinable yet potent, and what had been "d.a.m.ned charm" to the clubman's sophistication was a marvelous and prodigal wonder to the mountain girl. He had wooed her pa.s.sionately in the shadow of death. He had come back to her through the shadow of death, and left her to go, not only into its shadow, but its grimly mysterious reality. Now he was not only her hero but also her martyr.

Mountain children know little of Christmas, except that it is often a period of tragedy, since then men ride wildly with pistol and jug, and hilarity turns too often to homicide. But one Christmas legend the children do know: that on the night and at the hour of the Saviour's birth the cattle kneel in homage and the sere elder bushes, for a brief matter of miraculous minutes, break into a foam of bloom.

Blossom clung to that beautiful parable, even now finding comfort in its sentiment, as she stood among the untended graves.

"I wonder now," she speculated, nodding her head wistfully toward the inquisitive cotton-tail that sat wriggling its diminutive nose, "I wonder now ef it would be _wrong_ to put some elder branches here Christmas eve so thet--that--if they does bloom--I mean _do_ bloom--they'd be nigh him?"

"Howdy, Blossom," accosted a voice and the girl looked up startled.

Lone Stacy's wife stood at the thicketed edge of the burial-ground, gazing at her, with eyes less friendly than their former wont.

The girl-widow came slowly forward, trying to smile, but under that unblinking stare she felt unhappy, and the older woman went on with a candid bluntness.

"La! Ye've done broke turrible, hain't ye? An' ye used ter be ther purtiest gal hyarabouts, too."

"It's been--hard times fer me," Blossom answered faintly.

"Hit's done been right hard times fer all of us, I reckon," came the uncompromising rejoinder, "but thet hain't no proper cause ter ketch yore death of grave-yard damp," and with that admonition, Mrs. Stacy went on her way.

Blossom stood silently looking after her, wondering vaguely why that almost resentful note of hardness had rasped in her voice.

"I haven't done nothin'--anything, I mean," she murmured in distress.

"Why did she look at me that way, I wonder." Then suddenly she understood. That was just it. She had not done anything. The old woman was alone; her husband in prison and her son hunted from hiding place to hiding place like some beast dogged to death, and she, the girl who had always been like a daughter in that house, had been too stunned by her own sorrow to take account of her neighbor's distress.

Mrs. Stacy had always expected that Blossom's children would be her grandchildren. Turner had been wounded in defense of Jerry Henderson.

Into the girl's memory flashed a picture with a vivid completeness which had failed to impress her in its just proportions at the time of its reality. Then her eyes had been engrossed with one figure in the group to the exclusion of all others. Now in retrospect she could visualize the trio that had stumbled through the door of her house, when they brought Jerry Henderson in. She could see again the way Bear Cat had reeled and braced himself against the wall, and the stricken wretchedness of his face.

Slowly the tremendous self-effacement of his generosity began to dawn upon her, and to sting her with self-reproach.

So long as she lived she felt that her heart was dead to any love save that for the man in the grave, but to the old comrades.h.i.+p--to the grat.i.tude for such a friends.h.i.+p as few women had ever had--she would no longer be recreant. No wonder that Turner's mother looked at her with tightly pressed lips and hostile eyes. She would go over there and do what she could to make amends and alleviate the loneliness of a house emptied of its men; a house over which hung the unlifting veil of terror, which saw in the approach of every pa.s.ser-by a possible herald of tragedy.

Uncle Israel Calvert sat alone by the small red-hot stove of his way-side store late in the afternoon. He was half dozing in his hickory-withed chair, and it was improbable that any customer would arouse him. A wild day of bellowing wind was spending itself in gusty puffs and the promise of blizzard, while a tarnished sun sank into lurid banks of cloud-threat.

Uncle Israel's pipe had gone out, though it still hung precariously between his clean-shaven jaws and his white poll fell drowsily forward from time to time. He listened between cat-naps to the voice of the storm and mumbled to himself. "I reckon n.o.body won't come in ter-night--leastways n.o.body thet hain't hurtin' powerful bad fer some plumb needcessity."

Then he fell again to dozing.

The rush of wind through a door suddenly opened, and closed, roused him, and seeing the figure of a man on the threshold, Uncle Israel came to his feet with a springy quickness of amazement.

"Bear Cat!" he exclaimed. "h.e.l.l's blazes, man, whar did ye drap from?"

But at the same moment he went discreetly to the window and, since the shutters hinged from outside, hastily hung two empty jute sacks across the smeared panes.

"Uncle Israel," Bear Cat spoke with the brevity of one in haste, as he tossed a wet rubber poncho and black hat to the counter, "hev ye got any black cloth on them shelves?"

The storekeeper went ploddingly around the counter and began inspecting his wares, rubbing his chin as he peered through the dim lamp-light.

"Wa'al now," he pondered, "let's see. I've got jest what ye mout call a scant remainder of this hyar black domestic. I don't keep no great quant.i.ty because thar hain't no severe call fer hit--save fer them women-folks thet affects mournin'. Ther Widder Henderson bought most of what I had a few days back."

Bear Cat Stacy flinched a little, but the old man had his face to his shelves and did not see that.

"Ye'd better lay in a stock then," said Turner curtly. "Henceforth thar's liable ter be _more_ demand."

Something in the tone made Uncle Israel turn sharply. "Does ye mean fer mournin'?" he demanded, and the reply was enigmatical.

"Mebby so--but fer another kind of mournin' then what ye hev in mind, I reckon. These hills has a plenty ter mourn about. I reckon ye'll heer tell of this black cloth again."

It was a night when cabin doors were tight-barred and when families huddled indoors, drawing close to the fires that roasted their faces while their backs were cold from wind hissing through the c.h.i.n.ks in wall and puncheon flooring.

Even the drag net of Kinnard Towers' search lay idle to-night in the icy grip of the storm.

Through the wildness of shrieking winds, las.h.i.+ng the tree-tops, some men said that they heard ghostly incantations like the chant of a great company of restless spirits.

Jim Towers, who had been knocked sprawling into his own bonfire before the eyes of his myrmidons, was feeling somewhat appeased in spirit to-night. He dwelt in a two-story house so weatherproof that, for him, the tempest remained an external matter. To-night he had with him some half-dozen friends who had come for counsel earlier in the day and whom the storm had interned there for the night. They were all men who had been with him on the expedition that had gone awry when George Kelly had deserted. Now, as then, the company was defeating tedium with wa.s.sail. The drab woman who was Jim's wife, and his slave, had fed them all to repletion with "side-meat" and corn pone and gravy, and had withdrawn to a chair apart, where she sat forgotten.

They had been cursing Bear Cat Stacy and George Kelly until their invectives had been exhausted and the liquor had warmed them into a cheerier mood in which they planned spectacular and complete reprisal.

"Es fer Kelly, I reckon he's got his belly full an' bustin' already,"

boasted Jim Towers with an unpleasant chuckle. "Charlie Reverdy, hyar, an' me hes seen ter thet right fully. In ther place whar his dwellin'-house stood thar hain't nothin' left but jest a pile of ashes.

He dastn't show his face in ther open--an' in due time Kinnard aims ter fo'close on ther ground hitself."

"George Kelly hain't ther only man thet's aidin' an' abettin' him, though," demurred a saturnine guest, whose hair grew down close to his eyebrows. "No man knows how many low-down sons of hussies he's got with him."

Jim Towers laughed and poured from jug to tin-cup. "A single fox kin hide out whar a pack of wolves would hev ter shew themselves," he said.

"I estimate thet he's got mebby a half dozen--an' afore long now we'll hev ther hides of ther outfit nailed up an' dryin' out."

At length the host arose and stretched his arms sleepily. "I reckon hit's mighty nigh time ter lay down," he suggested, and as yawning lips a.s.sented he added, "Be quiet a minute--I want ter listen. 'Pears like ther storm's done plumb spent hitself an' abated."

A silence fell upon them, and then as an uncanny and inexplicable sound came to their ears, they stood transfixed, and into their bewilderment crept an unconfessed hint of panic. Their eyes dilated as though they had been confronted by an apparition, and yet none of them was accounted timorous.

"h.e.l.l an' tormint, what _air_ thet?" whispered Jim Towers in a hissing undertone.