Читать книгу: «When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry», страница 3

There was a pause, then Webb said slowly, and with a half-heartedness from which all the effrontery had ebbed:

"I 'lows ter go on erbout my business now, but if either one of ye moves from whar ye're standin' twell I'm outen range I aims ter kill ye both."

Shifting his revolver to his right hand and feeling behind him with his left, he began backing away, still covering his retreat and edging a step at a time toward the corner of the shack, but at the second step, with a swiftness which vindicated his name, the Bear Cat sprang.

The old miller shook his head, but made no outcry. He heard the thud of two bodies and the grunt driven from a chest by the impact of charging shoulders. He saw two figures go down together while a tongue of flame and a muffled roar broke belatedly from the mouth of the pistol.

Whether the bullet had taken effect or, if so, who was its victim, he could not at first distinguish. Two human beings, muscled like razor-backs were writhing and twisting in a smother of dust, their limbs clinched and their voices mingled in snarling and incoherent savagery. The mountain ethics of "fist and skull" impose no Queensbury restrictions. Tooth and knee, heel and knuckle may do their best – and worst.

But the pistol itself flew clear and the old miller picked it up, turning again to observe the result of the encounter.

The fighters had struggled up again to their feet and were locked in a bone-breaking embrace of hatred. For the moment the advantage seemed to rest with Webb, who was clutching Turner's head in the distressing chancery of his powerful right arm and doing his utmost to break the neck. Bear Cat's breathing was a hoarse and strangling agony, but his fists battered like unremitting flails against the ribs and kidneys of his antagonist. As they swayed and tottered their brogans were ploughing up the hard soil and, totally blinded by sweat and rage, they wavered perilously close to the edge of the huge rock – with its ten-foot drop to the mill race.

Even as Old Bud gave his warning cry, they went down together – and fell short of the brink, escaping that danger. Stacy writhed free from the neck-grip, and both came up again, leaping into a fresh embrace of panthers, with eyes glaring insanely out of blood-smeared faces.

Then it all ended abruptly. Bear Cat wrenched himself free and sent a chance blow, but one behind which went all his weight and passion, to the other's mouth. The smitten head went back with a jerk. Webb reeled groggily for an instant, then crumpled, but before he had quite fallen Stacy, with an insensate fury, was dragging him to his feet and clutching at the throat which his fingers ached to strangle.

At that instant, the old miller seized his arms.

"Hold on thar, Bear Cat," he cried with his quavering voice. "He's already licked. You'll kill him ef ye hain't heedful."

"I aims ter kill him," panted the boy, casting off the interference of aged arms with the savagery of a dog whose fangs have been pried too soon from the throat of its victim.

But Bud Jason clung on, reiterating: "Fer shame, son! Thet hain't yore manner of conduct. Fer shame!"

Unsteadily, then, with a slow dawning of reason Bear Cat Stacy staggered back and leaned heavily against the wall of the tub-mill, breathing in sob-like gasps. His shirt was half torn from his body and for the first time the miller saw the ugly gash where a pistol bullet had bitten its grazing course along his left shoulder. Grime and blood stained him and for a while he stood gazing down on the collapsed figure at his feet – a figure that stirred gropingly.

"I reckon," he said slowly, "I'd jest about hev finished him, ef hit hadn't a-been fer you, Bud. I'm beholden ter ye. I reckon I was seein' red."

Together they lifted Ratler Webb and gave him water from the gourd that hung by the door. When he was able to stand, dourly resentful, baleful of eye but mute as to tongue, Bear Cat spoke briefly with the victor's authority:

"I aims ter keep thet pistol o' your'n fer a spell, Ratler. I don't hardly trust ye with hit jest yit. When ye wants hit, come by my house and ask fer hit."

The bully turned sullenly away. He spoke no word of farewell and offered no protest, but when he was out of sight the miller shook his head and his voice was troubled.

"Of course ye knows, son, thet he hain't never agoin' ter fergit hit? So long as ther two of ye lives ye've got ter keep on watchin' him."

Turner nodded. He was bathing his shoulder and spreading cobwebs on its grazed wound.

"I've done wasted a heap of time," he said irrelevantly. "An' hit's comin' on to rain, too. I reckon I'll be benighted afore I gets over ter ther still."

Starting away, he paused and turned shamefacedly back for a moment.

"Hit won't profit us none to norrate this matter abroad," he suggested. "I've got enough name already fer gittin' into ructions. Paw don't like hit none."

Gazing after the retreating figures the old man wagged his head and his expression was one of foreboding.

"Meanness an' grudge-nursin' kin bring on a heap of pestilence," he mused. "This Ratler will nurse his on ther bottle, an' he won't never wean hit – an' some day – ! But it don't profit a feller ter borry trouble. These hills hes got enough misfortunes withouten thet."

Already twilight was settling over the valleys and the ridges were starkly grim as their color died to the neutrality of night, and the murk of a gathering storm.

CHAPTER IV

With a mutter of distant thunder in his ears, the young mountaineer plodded "slavishly" on under his load as night closed about him. The path twisted among heaped up bowlders where a misstep might mean broken bones and crawled through entanglements of fallen timber: of gnarled rhododendron and thorn-leaved holly. It wormed into dew-drenched thicknesses where branches lashed the burden-bearer's face with the sting of whips, and soon the colossal barriers began to echo with the storm roar of high places. The clouds were ripped with the blue-white blades of lightning. The rock walls of the ranges seemed quaking under the thunder's incessant cannonading, and the wind's shrieking mania. Then through the rent and buffeted timber-tops the rain burst in a lashing curtain of water as violent as a shot-shower.

Bear Cat Stacy, wet to the skin, with the steaming sweat of toil and fight turned into a marrow-pinching chill, cast about him for a place where he could protect his sack of meal until an abatement should come to the storm's violence.

As he sat under a dripping roof of shelving rock to which he had groped his way by the beacon of the lightning, a startled owl swept past him, almost brushing his face with its downy wings.

His wet clothes hung to his flesh with what seemed icy coldness. His shoulder throbbed with an abomination of pain and his bones ached with a dull wretchedness.

But after a time the wind and thunder dropped away to whimpering echoes. It was as if the hound pack of the furies had been whistled in, its hunt ended.

Turner rose and stamped his numbed feet. There was yet a long way to go before he arrived at the low-built shed, thatched with brush and screened behind a fallen hemlock top, where the Stacy still lay hidden.

At last he was there, with every muscle proclaiming its location by the outcry of sore tissues, and ahead of him lay the task of watching and feeding the fire under the mash kettle until dawn.

"Ye kin lay down when ye're ready, Lee," he said shortly to the stockily built man whom he was relieving from duty there. "I'll keep ther fire goin' an' call ye round about dawn."

Taking up the rifle to which he had fallen heir, as picket, he made his way from the sentinel's shelter to the still-house itself, stooping low, so that the waning fire might not throw his figure or face into relief. He piled a handful of wood under the kettle and crawled back into the timber.

The heavens were full of stars now: not the small light-points of skies arching over lowlands, but the gorgeous, great stars of the walled highlands.

His mother had done this sort of work to keep him alive, while his father was in prison! If he went on doing it, and if Blossom married him, they faced a future of the same drab decay! At the thought of that prospect he ground his chattering teeth and cursed under his breath.

The dull glow of the fire on a tin bucket and cup held his eyes with a spell of fascination. It was white liquor, raw, sweetish and freshly brewed. A gleam of craving flashed into his eyes: a craving that had come down through generations of grandsires – even though his own father had escaped it. Turner put out one hand, trembling with anticipation.

Here was warmth! Here was to be had for the taking a glow about the heart and a quickened current in the veins. Here was the stuff from which ease and waking dreams would come; release from his aching chill and dulness of spirit!

Bear Cat's eyes burned thirstily. He seemed only a vessel of flesh overflowing with craving – with a torture of craving – an utter hell of craving! Then he drew back the eagerly extended hand.

"No," he said grimly. "Blossom air right. Ther stuff'll ruin me."

Resolutely he turned his back and stood facing the woods, listening to the drip of drenched leafage. Through raw hours he struggled with his appetite. Each time that he went back to throw fresh faggots on the fire he moved warily around the bucket, seeking to keep his eyes averted, but each time his gaze came back to it, and rested there thirstily.

Twice as his watch drew near its end he dipped the cup into the pail only to spill back the contents again, almost wildly, watching the thin trickle; and greedily sniffing its sweetish invitation of odor. Once the rim met his lips and the taste touched his tongue, but he violently spat it out and wiped his lips on the sleeve of his shirt.

"Hits ther devil's holy water," he murmured to himself. "Thet's what Brother Fulkerson says – an' I reckon he's right."

The evening star always reminded him of Blossom. He thought of it as her star, and upon it, as upon her own face, he kept his eyes fixed for encouragement as his spirit's resistance waned in the mounting tide of exhaustion. But when even that beacon was gone behind the mountain-top he felt the despair of one whose last ally has abandoned him to face travail unsupported.

He fell back on his dreams; dreams of what Lincoln had faced and conquered; of what he, too, might achieve. But now he could see them only dispiritedly as hollow shapes; misty things without hope or substance. That bucket now – a sip from it would rehabilitate them, give them at least the semblance of attainability. There lay relief from despair!

His mind flashed back to his father's rebuke and his answer: "Ye says I lay drunk. Thet's true an' hit's a shameful thing fer a man ter admit… But hit's a thing I've got ter fight out fer myself."

A great indignation against his father's misunderstanding possessed him. He must fight in his own way! Even Blossom had only asked him not to drink "too much."

When it needed only an hour more for the coming of dawn, his face grew darkly sullen.

"Hit's hell thet I've got ter spend my whole life a-brewin' ther stuff ergin my will – takin' chances of ther jail-house fer hit – an' yit I kain't have a drink when I'm wet ter ther bone," he growled.

Going as if drawn by a power stronger than his own volition, he moved balkingly yet with inevitable progress once more to the bucket. He half filled the cup – raised it – and this time gulped it down greedily and recklessly to the bottom.

Immediately his chilled veins began to glow with an ardent gratefulness. The stars seemed brighter and the little voices of the night became sweeter. The iron-bound gates of imagination swung wide to a pageantry of dreams, and as he crouched in the reeking underbrush, he half forgot his discontent.

Repeatedly he dipped and drained the cup. He was still on duty, but now he watched with a diminished vigilance. Gradually his senses became more blunt. The waking dreams were vaguer, too, and more absurd.

He still tended the fire under the kettle – but he laughed scornfully at the foolish need of keeping his face always in the shadow. Then suddenly he dropped down close to the dark earth, let the cup splash into the bucket, and thrust forward his rifle.

His ears had caught a sound which might have been a raccoon stirring in the brush – or a fox slipping covertly through the fallen hemlock top.

But there was no repetition, so he laughed again and with the first pallid hint of dawn on the ridges he shook the shoulder of his sleeping companion. Then he himself sank down in the heavy torpor of exhaustion and drunkenness.

At the same time, because it would soon be light, the living creature which had made the sound began creeping away, and in doing so it avoided any other alarms. It was the figure of a man who had learned what he came there to determine.

When Lone Stacy plodded up to his still-house some hours later, he exchanged nods with the squat mountaineer whom he found waiting.

"Whar's Turner?" was his brief inquiry and the reply matched it in taciturnity. "In thar – a-layin' drunk."

The father went over and looked scowlingly down at the prostrate figure stretched awkwardly in open-mouthed stupor.

"I reckon," he announced succinctly, "thar hain't nothin' fer hit but ter suffer him ter sleep hit off."

With the toe of his boot Lone Stacy stirred the insensate body which sprawled there; all its youthful vitality stilled into grotesque stagnation. But when the hired man, Lee, was out of sight the bearded face twitched with a spasm of distress.

Its eyes traveled in a silent pathos from the sight of sagging jaw and hunched shoulders to the unresponsive majesty of the calm hills as if beseeching comfort there. In his only son's spirit had seemed to burn a fire of promise which even he could not understand. Was that fire to be quenched into the stale ashes of habitual drunkenness?

A groan rumbled in his throat.

Yet, had he remembered his Scriptures, Samson, the Mighty, had surrendered in his moment of weakness to the allurements and the shears of Delilah! Afterward, he had pulled down the pillars of the temple.

These hills that had stood upright in days when the Alps and the Himalayas had not yet stirred in conception, looked down placid, and unsympathetic. Perhaps the eternal spirit of the range was not ashamed of this erring child, asleep on its bosom. Perhaps, cognizant alike of tempest and calm, it recognized this son's kinship with itself. The prophecy which dwells in the immemorial may have foreseen gathering powers of hurricane and might, which should some day make him rise, above lesser summits. Possibly as he slept the great, silent voices were crooning a lullaby over offspring destined for mastery.

When Ratler Webb had turned away from the tub-mill his brain was still half stunned from the jarring punishment of battle. He was thoroughly conscious only of deep chagrin and a gnawing hunger for reprisal.

From childhood he retained no tender memories.

There was no one upon whom he had a claim of blood, and neighborhood report had not let him forget that he was a woodscolt. In hill parlance a woodscolt signifies one whose birth has been sanctioned by no prior rites of matrimony.

Since he could remember he had existed only by virtue of the same predatory boldness which gives the lean razor-back strength and innate craftiness to live.

Just now his whole abundant capacity for hatred was centered on Bear Cat Stacy, yet since Bear Cat's kinsmen peopled every creek and spring-branch of this country he could not be casually murdered.

Any word slipped to the ear of the revenue man might be traced back to him and after that he could no longer live among his native hills. Still, he reflected as he slowly rubbed his fingers along his uneven nose, time brings changes and chances. The possession of definite evidence against his enemy might some day bear fruit.

So Ratler did not ride home after his encounter at the mill. He took refuge instead in an abandoned cabin of which he knew, strategically located within a mile of the place where he had surmised the Stacy family were making illicit whiskey. While the storm raged, threatening to bring down the sagging roof timbers about his ears, he sat before its dead and ruined hearth, entertaining bitter thoughts.

Between midnight and dawn he stepped over the broken threshold and began his reconnaissance. For two hours he crouched, wet and cramped, in the laurel near enough to throw a stone against the kettle of the primitive distillery – waiting for that moment of relaxed vigilance, when the figure that moved in the shadows should permit a ray from the fire to fall upon its features.

When dawn had almost come his vigil was rewarded and he had turned away again.

Blossom Fulkerson knew none of these things at noon of the day following the fight at the mill when, in the road, she encountered Lone Stacy making his way back to his house for his midday dinner, but as the old man stopped and nodded she read trouble in his eyes.

"Air ye worrited about somethin', Mr. Stacy?" she demanded, and for a little space the man stood hesitantly silent.

At last he hazarded, "Little gal, thar's a thing I'd like ter name ter ye. I reckon if anybody kin holp me hit mout be you."

The girl's eyes lighted with an instinctive sympathy – then shadowed with a premonition of what was coming.

"Is hit – about – Turner?"

The father nodded his head gravely. His eyes wore the harassed disquiet of a problem for which he knew no solution.

"Does ye mean thet he's – he's – " She broke off abruptly and Lone Stacy answered her with unrelieved bluntness.

"He's a-layin' up thar drunk ergin, an' he's got a gash on one shoulder thet's powder burned. I reckon he's been engagin' in some manner of ruction."

For a moment the girl did not speak, but her cheeks paled and tears swam abruptly in her eyes. She raised one hand and brushed them fiercely away.

She had awakened this morning with a new and unaccountable happiness in her heart. In all the lilt and sparkle of the world and all the tunefulness of the young summer there had seemed a direct message to herself. In her memory she had been hearing afresh the crude but impassioned eloquence with which the boy had talked to her yesterday. Now he lay up there at the distillery in the heavy sleep of the drunkard.

"Ther boy's all I've got," announced Lone Stacy with an unaccustomed break in his voice. "I reckon mebby ef I hadn't been so harsh I mout hev more influence with him." Then he turned abruptly on his heel and trudged on.

Blossom Fulkerson slipped into the woods and came to a sun-flecked amphitheater of rock and rhododendron where the ferns grew lush and tall, by the sparkle of water. There she sank down and covered her face with her hands. Her sobs shook her for a while, and then washing the tears away, she knelt and prayed with a passionate simplicity.

Sometimes she lifted a pale face and her lips twisted themselves pathetically in the earnestness of her prayer.

The Almighty to Whom she made her plea, and Who knew everything, must know, even as she knew, that Turner Stacy was not like those rowdy youths who habitually disgraced the hills. That occasional smile which lurked with its inherent sweetness under his affected sullenness must mean something.

Turner had always been her willing vassal, and "sometime" she had supposed, though hitherto that had always seemed a vaguely distant matter like the purple haze on the horizon, they would be avowed sweethearts.

Yesterday, though, as she walked back from the meeting on the ridge it had seemed as if she had spent a moment in that languourous land where the far mists drouse, – and yet the glamour had not faded. She hadn't sought to analyze then, she had only felt a new thrill in her heart as she instinctively broke clusters of pink-hearted bloom from the laurel.

She left the woods after a while and as she came out again to the high road, she heard a voice raised in the high-pitched, almost falsetto, minors of mountain minstrelsy.

It was not a pleasing voice, nor was the ballad a cheery one. As for the singer himself, the twisting of the way still concealed him from view, so that his song proclaimed him like a herald in advance.

"He stobbed her to ther heart an' she fell with a groan.

He threw a leetle dirt ov-er her, an' started fer home,"

wailed the dolorous voice of the traveler. There was a splashing of hoofs in shallow water, then a continuation

"His debt ter ther devil now William must pay,

Fer he fell down an' died afore break of day."

Thus announced, a mule plodded shortly into sight, and upon his back, perching sidewise, sat a tow-headed lout of a boy with staring, vacant eyes and a mouth which hung open, even when he desisted from song.

With an access of callow diffidence he halted his mount at sight of Blossom, staring with a nod and a bashful "Howdy."

"Howdy, Leander," accosted the girl. "How's all your folks?"

Leander White, of Crowfoot Branch, aged fifteen, gulped twice with prodigious and spasmodic play of his adam's apple, before he eventually commanded voice to reply:

"They're all well… I'm obleeged … ter ye." Then, however, reassured by the cordial smile on the lips of Blossom Fulkerson, his power of speech and his hunger for gossip returned to him in unison.

"But old Aunt Lucy Hutton, over acrost ther branch, she fell down yistiddy an' broke a bone inside of her, though."

"Did she?" demanded the girl, readily sympathetic, and Leander, thus given sanction as a purveyor of tidings, nodded and gathered confidence. "Huh-huh, an' Revenuers raided Joe Simmons's still-house on ther headwaters of Skinflint an' cyarried off a beautiful piece o' copper – atter they'd punched hit full o' holes."

"Revenuers!" Into the girl's voice now came a note of anxiety.

"Huh-huh, revenuers. Folks says they're gittin' bodaciously pesky these days."

"Ye ain't – ye ain't seen none of 'em yourself, have ye, Leander?" The question came a bit breathlessly and the boy forgot his bashfulness as he expanded with the importance of his traveler's tales.

"Not to know 'em fer sich," he admitted, "but I met up with a furriner a few leagues back along ther highway. He was broguein' along mighty brash on his own two feet. La! But he was an elegant party ter be a-ridin' on shoe-leather, though!"

"What manner of furriner was he, Leander?" demanded Blossom with a clutch of fright at her heart, but the boy shook his head stupidly.

"Wa'al he was jest a feller from down below. Ter tell hit proper, I didn't hev much speech with him. We jest met an' made our manners an' went our ways. He 'lowed ter go ter Lone Stacy's house."

"Lone Stacy's house," echoed the girl faintly.

"Reckon' I'll be a-ridin' on," drawled the young horseman nonchalantly. "Reckon I've done told ye all ther tidings I knows."

Blossom stood, for a while, rooted where he had left her, listening to the splash of the mule's feet along the creek. If a prying eye should discover the Stacy still to-day it would find not only "a beautiful piece of copper" but Bear Cat lying there incapacitated and helpless!

Her heart missed its beat at the thought. The hills seemed to close in on her stiflingly with all their age-old oppression of fears and impending tragedies, and she sat down by the roadside to think it out. What should she do?

After a while she saw the tall figure of the elder Stacy climbing the mountainside, but he was taking a short cut – and would not come within hailing distance. Her eye, trained to read indications, noted that a rifle swung in his right hand.

Bitterly she had been taught by her father to resent the illicit business to which Turner's service was grudgingly given. But above all ethical hatred of law-breaking rose the very present danger to Turner himself. Laws were abstract things and Turner was Turner!

There was only one answer. She must watch and, if need arose, give warning.

Just where the brook that trickled down from the still gushed out to the creek and the road which followed its course, lay a steeply sloping field of young corn. Along its back grew rows of "shuckybeans," and here Blossom took her station for her self-appointed task of sentry duty.