A Pagan of the Hills Part 12

"I reckon," he a.s.serted, "I won't tarry no longer. Mebby I'll come back again." But before he had reached the threshold the operator and his companion stood looking on from the baggage room door. Even unlettered Machiavellis must have their flashes of inspiration, premonition, "hunch," or whatever you may choose to call it. Suddenly, into the telegrapher's consciousness flashed the suspicion that in the departure of this unknown observer lurked some hidden menace. In what that danger lay he was all at sea but it was a thing he felt and upon which he acted. The knight of the ticker jerked his head and raised a hand, and before Halloway's own arms had descended from the heights to which his yawn had stretched them, he found two pistols squarely presented to his broad chest, and heard a voice instruct with unmistakable finality, "Keep them hands up!"

Keeping them up, Halloway could still see across the shoulders of his captors the distant figure of Jerry O'Keefe but with him he could not communicate.

As he stood, rapidly thinking, it occurred to him that his strength and agility might perhaps even yet avail him. With a lunge he might carry down the two armed figures and escape, but before undertaking that he turned his head for a backward glance and decided against the experiment. Besides the Station Agent stood the third fellow, also with a drawn and leveled weapon.

The Operator spoke again somewhat nervously. He had acted so strenuously on pure impulse and not without a certain misgiving. Now he felt the need of some explanation.

"Boys, when that instrument ticked a while back," he mendaciously a.s.serted, "hit was ther town marshal at Coal City talkin'. He described this man an' said he was wanted thar fer settin' ther hotel on fire day before yesterday. We hain't got no choice but ter hold him."

Going to the drawer of his desk the speaker produced a pair of handcuffs and rattled them as he explained, "Ther revenue man left these hyar. Put 'em on him, Joe."

With the two pistols still pressed close Halloway slowly lowered his wrists and submitted to the indignity of their shackling. Had any human possibility of a break for freedom presented itself he would have embraced it, but the three guns had the look of business and the three faces back of them were flinty with purpose.

As the locks snapped into the grooves of the bracelets the telegrapher commented in sardonic afterthought.

"Ther revenuer fergot ter leave ther key. I don't know how we'll ever git them things loose ergin."

They led him at once back into a dark corner of the baggage room and bestowed him there in a chair, where with a revolver against his temple, they gagged him and lashed him by waist and legs. His hands being sufficiently manacled they did not bind further.

Alexander had, when she came to a place which was rocky enough to leave no footprints, slipped from her saddle, taken her rifle and saddle-bags from their fastenings and disappeared into the timber. The mule she knew would sooner or later be recognized and returned to the stable, but she did not want it recognized too promptly so she led it with her into the woods and turned it loose well up on the mountain side. From that moment she disappeared with a completeness which attested her woodcraft. It was as though she had been and then had ceased to be.

The way she elected to go followed the crests, since it is better when "hiding-out" to look down than to be looked down upon.

The sodden woods gave a quieter footing than had they been frosty and brittle underfoot, but even had it been otherwise she had the art of silent movement.

She knew that sooner or later her ruse would be discovered by the watchers of the conspiracy, but she asked only two hours of freedom.

After that she would be as difficult to find as the rabbit that has gained the heart of the briar patch.

Once lying high up on a sheer and poroused precipice, she had seen a party of hors.e.m.e.n ride by, far below, and she laughed inwardly to herself, guessing at their purpose and object.

She came eventually to the sharp spur where that particular stretch of ridge ended in a precipitous break. That meant that she must for awhile go down to lower and more perilous levels. This was the final, dubious stage of her journey and with it behind her, she would feel that she had won through to security.

Because she was young and strong enough to laugh at fatigue and bold enough to find a certain joy in recklessness, her spirits began to mount. There are huntsmen who will tell you that the wily and experienced fox comes to relish the chase more keenly than the pack which courses him. Alexander went on with a smile in her eyes.

But when she had gone down into the cloistered shadows of the valley her spirits descended too and when she slipped through the thickets and reached a certain point, something like despair tightened about her heart. Across the line of her march boiled a freshet which might as well have been a river. To swim it with her impediments was impossible and though it might carry her dangerously close to the road which she sought to avoid, she had no choice. She must follow it until a crossing developed.

As a woodsman, Alexander acknowledged few peers but this was to her, unfamiliar country. She was moreover pitting her skill against one who was her equal if not her superior, and who knew every trail and by-way hereabouts. He was a youth with a vacuous, almost idiotic face, whom she had that same day encountered. He had left her sight, but had never been too remote to follow or gauge her course and what he learned he relayed to others. In due time he had known without going further just where she must bring up--for he knew the condition of that stream--and its crossings.

The girl came, in due course, upon a broken litter of giant boulders, each the size of a small house, which lay scattered where at last the water grew shallow. She could even make out a point where one might cross dryshod by leaping from rock to rock.

It was in a fashion a place of mystery and foreboding, for each of those t.i.tanic rocks, with its age-long smoothness and greenness was a screen whose other side might harbor things only to be guessed. There one must risk an ambuscade, trusting to one's star, and Alexander loosened her pistol and shifted her saddle-bags to her left shoulder and her rifle to her left hand.

Then she started forward---and one by one left the boulders behind her until she came to the last. As she rounded the final shoulder of sandstone her hand was knocked up and her pistol fell clattering.

Her ambuscaders had known a thing which she had not--that for all the roomy freedom of the woods she must come out at last through this one pa.s.sage--as wine must come out through the neck of the bottle.

About her closed a tightly grouped handful of men whose faces were masked and whose bodies were covered by the uniformity of black rubber coats.

Alexander did not surrender tamely. With the strength and the desperation of a tigress she gave them battle, until the sheer force of their numbers had smothered her into helplessness. Her coat was ripped and her shirt hung in tatters from one curved shoulder before they pinioned her and silenced her lips with a bandage.

After that they blind-folded her and carried her up and down hill, twisting beyond all chance of guessing the course, to a place where the air was cool with that freshness of quality that characterizes a cavern. There they stood her upright and removed the bandage.

About her was a flare of torches and the grotesque play of shadows between the grotto-like walls of an abandoned coal mine. About her too ranged in the spectral formality of masked faces and black rubber coats; of peaked hats with low turned brims, stood the circle of her captors.

"Now, Alexander McGivins," proclaimed a deep and solemnly pitched voice, "ye stands before ther dread an' awful conclave of ther order of ther Ku-Klux; ther regulators of sich as defies proper an' decorous livin'. We charges ye with unwomanly shamelessness an' with ther practicin' of witchcraft."

CHAPTER X

For a moment as she turned observant eyes about the walls of the place to which she had been brought, Alexander almost hoped that the astonishing statement of the spokesman was a true one--that in store for her, instead of robbery and possible outrage, lay only the judgment of the punitive clan. Such punishment might be brutally severe but she could face it in such fashion as would vindicate her claim of playing a man's game in a man's way.

So she stood there meeting the eyes that glared at her through the slit masks with a splendid a.s.sumption of scorn and defiance. She was keyed to that mood which makes it possible for martyrs to acquit themselves, even at the stake, with a victorious disdain.

Through this section of the mountains there had never been, since reconstruction days, any survival of the Ku-Klux in a true sense, but now and then, as in all wild and violent countries, sporadic "regulations" occurred in which masked men took a faltering law into their own less faltering hands. Sometimes it was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d Ku-Klux in the original meaning of the term, a Vigilance Committee operating against abuses which the law failed to check. Oftener it was a masquerade behind which moved designs of personal hatred and vengeance.

Sometimes the wife-beater or the harlot was punished. Sometimes the stronger enemy persecuted the weaker.

While Alexander waited for the next development, her captors prolonged the silence in order that the suspense of unguessed things should sap her courage.

The entrance through which they had come showed only as a darker spot in the shadowed vagueness of a far wall of rock, but there was a squareness about it which suggested a mineshaft. The walls themselves were streaked with black seams of coal and dug into tunnels that led in unknown directions.

The place was lighted by several lanterns of feeble power and a number of pine torches, and between the spot where they had stationed her and the crescent of dark figures that stood as silent accusers and judges, ran a trickling rivulet of water. At that detail Alexander smiled, for she knew that it was part and parcel of the absurdity contained in the allegation of witchcraft. The black art is powerless, by mountain tradition, to cross running water.

A bat fluttered zig-zag about the place brushing her cheek, but Alexander was not the sort of woman to be frightened by a bat.

When the calculated silence had held for perhaps five full minutes, the standing men meanwhile remaining as motionless as though they were themselves carved from coal, Alexander spoke.

"Why don't ye say somethin'," she demanded. "I've got friends thet'll be s'archin' these hills fer me right vigorous ef I don't git ter Viper in good time."

It was a bold and provocative speech, but it failed to tempt the silent men out of the pose they had a.s.sumed. They knew the effect of protracted silence and impending danger to sap even an a.s.sertive courage and for five other minutes they stood wordless and motionless.

Only their shadows moved under the torch-light, wavering fitfully from small to large, from light to dark like draperies in a wind.

Finally the man at the center who appeared to exercise a sort of command moved a step forward and raised both hands. The others lifted high their right arms and in a sepulchral voice the spokesman demanded, "Does ye all solemnly sw'ar, by ther dreadful oath ye've done tuck, with yore lives forfeit fer disloyalty or disobedience, ter try this wench on ther charge of outragin' decorum--an' practicin' ther foul charms of witchcraft? Does ye all sw'ar ter deal with her in full an'

unmitigated jestice despite thet she s'arves Satan with a comely face and a comely body? Does ye all sw'ar?"

The raised hands, with a unanimous and solemn gesture, fell over the hearts of the questioned and then came aloft once more, still as if with a single nerve impulse. In a unison out of which no separate voice emerged sounded the reply: "We does!"

Alexander laughed, but it must be confessed that that was pure bravado.

She knew that on the backwaters of many creeks were cabins where simple folks invoked charms against witchcraft and did so with genuine dread.

She knew that many others, less candid, laughed at old superst.i.tions yet acknowledged them in their hearts. In her case the witchcraft charge was of course a cloak for subterfuge, but it was a jest which might bear bitterly serious results.

"Alexander McGivins," began the spokesman afresh, "we charges ye with these weighty matters; thet ye glories in callin' yoreself a he-woman--refusin' ter accept G.o.d's mandate an' castin' mortification on yore own s.e.x by holdin' on ter shameless notions. We charges ye with settin' ther example of unwomanly behavior before ther eyes of young gals, an' we aims ter make a sample of ye.

"We furthermore charges ye with practicin' witchcraft; with castin'

spells an' performin' devil's work." He wheeled and demanded suddenly; "Number Thirteen, I calls on ye ter step forward an' testify. How does witches gain thar black powers?"

The answering voice, was plainly disguised, and it came with the lugubrious quality of calculated awesomeness.