Читать книгу: «When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry», страница 18

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-wishing 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 débris 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 constituted a great wastage, bringing no material profit to anyone. He himself was left in the disconcerting attitude 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 space 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 embarrassing 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 shifting 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 assurance 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 shielded 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 assure 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 assumption 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 attitude. 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 God 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."

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 partnership, so holp me God Almighty, I'll send yore scalp ter Washin'ton with my regards ter ther government." He pointed a peremptory finger to the front door. "Now, damn 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 kinship 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 sunshine 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 "damned charm" that is seductively indefinable yet potent, and what had been "damned charm" to the clubman's sophistication was a marvelous and prodigal wonder to the mountain girl. He had wooed her passionately 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 comradeship – to the gratitude for such a friendship 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 passer-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 nobody won't come in ter-night – leastways nobody 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. "Hell'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 quantity 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 chinks 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, lashing 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 wassail. 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 assented 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.

"Hell an' tormint, what air thet?" whispered Jim Towers in a hissing undertone.

They all fell into attitudes of concentrated attention – bent forward and listening. Out in the night where there had been only the lashing of wind, rose a swell of song, bursting confidently and ominously from human throats. It sounded like a mighty chorus carried on the lips of a marching host, and with its martial assurance it brought a terrifying menace.

"I've heered thet song afore," quavered the woman, whose lips were ashen as she rose out of her obscurity. "Hit's called ther Battle Hymn – my daddy l'arned hit in ther war over slavery … hit says su'thin 'bout 'My eyes hes seed ther Glory of ther comin' of ther Lord!'"

"Shet up, woman," commanded her husband, roughly. "I'm a-listenin'."

Towers braced himself against a nameless foreboding and went cautiously to the door, picking up his rifle on the way. The other men, instinctively drifted toward their weapons, too, though they felt it to be as futile a defense as arming against ghosts.

Soon the master of the house was back, with a face of greenish pallor. He licked his lips and stammered in his effort at speech.

"I kain't … in no fashion … make hit out – " he admitted. "Thar's a host of torches comin' hither… They're flamin' like es ef hell hitself war a-marchin' in on us!"

The woman threw herself down on her knees and fell into hysterical and incoherent prayer.

For a little space the men stood irresolute, divided between a wild impulse to seek hiding in the timber and a sentiment in favor of pinning their trust to the strength of solid walls and barred doors.

But upon their jarred nerves the great volume of sound, crashing nearer and nearer, beat like a gathering flood.

Turning out the lamp and half-smothering the fire, Jim Towers stole noiselessly to the back door and opened it to a narrow slit. He thrust forth his head and drew it back again as precipitately as though it had been struck by a fist.

"What did ye see?" came the whispered interrogation from stiff lips, and the man hoarsely gasped out his response.

"Thar was – a black ghost standin' thar – black as sin from head ter foot. He held a torch, an' each side of him stood another one jest like him – Good God! I reckon hit's jedgment day an' nothin' less!"

The woman had slipped out of sight, but now she came lurching back in wild terror.

"I peeked outen a winder," she whimpered. "Thar's score on' score of men – or sperrits out thar – all black as midnight. They've got torches flamin' – but they hain't got no faces – jest black skulls! Oh – Lord, fergive my sins!"

Then upon front and back doors simultaneously came a loud rapping, and the men inside fell into a rude circle, as quail hover at night with eyes out-turned against danger.

"I'm Bear Cat Stacy," came a voice of stentorian command. "Open the doors – and drop yore guns. We don't seek ter harm no women ner children."

Still there was dead silence inside, as eye turned to eye for counsel. Then against the panels they heard the solid blow of heavy timbers.