Judith of the Cumberlands Part 11

"Yo' cold!" he said. "Let me take my coat off and put it around ye--I don't need it. You got overheated playing back there, and now you'll catch a cold."

"Oh, no," disclaimed Judith, whose little shudder had been as much from excitement as from the sharp chill of the night air after the heated play-room. "I reckon somebody jest walked over my grave--I ain't cold."

But he had pulled off the coat while he spoke, and now he turned to put it about her, and drew her back to the doorstep. Judith was full of a strange ecstasy as she slipped her arms into the sleeves. The lover's earliest and favourite artifice--the primitive kindness of wrapping her in his own garment! Even Creed, unready and unschooled as he was, felt stir within him its intimate appeal.

A nebulous lightening which had been making itself felt behind the eastern line of mountains now came plainly in view, late moon, melancholy and significant, as the waning moon always is. By its dim illumination Creed saw Judith Barrier standing at the door of his own house, smiling at him tremulously, with the immemorial challenge in her dark eyes. To that challenge the native man in him--the lover--so long usurped by the zealot, the would-be philanthropist, rose thrilling, yet still bewildered and uncertain, to respond. Something heady and ancient and eternally young seemed to pa.s.s into his soul out of the night and the moonlight and the shining of her eyes. He was all alive to her nearness, her loveliness, to the sweet sense that she was a young woman, he a young man, and the loveliness and the dearness of her were his for the trying--for the winning. His breath caught in his throat.

"Wait a minute," he whispered hurriedly, though she had not moved. With eager hands he wrapped the coat close about her. "Let's sit here on the doorstep and talk awhile. There are a heap of things I want to ask you about--that I want to tell you."

Young beauty and belle that she was, Judith had been sought and courted, in that most primitive society, since she was fourteen. She was love's votary by birthright, and her wit and her emotions were schooled in love's game: to lure, to please, to exploit, to defend, evade, deny; in each postulant seeking, testing, trying for the right man to whom should be made love's final surrender. But Creed, always absorbed in vague altruistic dreams, had no boyish sweethearting behind him to have taught him the ways of courtship.

Fire-flies sparkled everywhere, thickest over the marshy places. A mole cricket was chirring in the gra.s.s by the old doorstone. Sharp on the soft dark air came the call of that woodland night bird which the mountain people say cries "chip-out-o'-white-oak," and which others translate "chuck-wills-widow."

"I--" he began, hesitated momentarily, then daunted, grasped at the familiar things of his life--"I don't get on very well up here. I'm afraid I've made a failure of it; but"--he turned to her in a curious, groping entreaty, his hat in his hands, the dim moonlight full on his fair head and in his eager eyes--"but if you would help me--with you--I think I ought to----"

"I say made a failure!" cooed Judith in her rich, low tones. "You ax me whatever you want to know. You tell me what it is that you're aimin' to do--I say made a failure!"

Her trust was so hearty, so wholesale, she filled so instantly the position not only of sweetheart but of mother to a small boy with an unsatisfactory toy--that would always be Judith Barrier--that Creed's heart--the man's heart--a lonely one, and beginning to feel itself misunderstood and barred out from its kind--melted in his bosom. There was silence between them, a silence vibrant with the coming utterance.

But even as the dark, fond, inviting eyes and the troubled, kindling blue ones encountered, as Creed lifted the girl's hand timidly, and essayed speech, the voice of that one who had stepped on her grave harshly aroused them both.

"I vow--I thort it was thieves, an' I was a-goin' to see could I pick off you-all," drawled Blatchley Turrentine's level tones from the shadow of the garden. Mutely, with a sense of chill and disappointment that was like the shock of a physical blow to each, the two young creatures got to their feet and turned to leave the place, preparing to go by the high road, without consultation. As they pa.s.sed him near the gate, Blatch Turrentine fell in on the other side of the girl and walked with them silently for a time.

"Iley sont me over," he said finally. "She was skeered you-all wouldn't bring any plates."

Neither Judith nor Creed offered any explanation. Instead:

"Well, I don't see how you're goin' to help anything," said the girl bitterly--any presence must have been hateful to her which interrupted or forestalled what Creed would certainly have said, that for which her whole twenty years had waited.

"Oh, I've got the plates," chuckled Blatch, jingling a bulky package under his arm.

"Why, how did you----" began Judith in amazement.

"Uh-huh, I've got my own little trick of gittin' in whar I choose to go,"

declared Turrentine. He leaned around and looked meaningly at the man on her other side, then questioned, "How long do you-all reckon I'd been thar?" and examined them keenly in the shadowy half light.

But neither hastened to disclaim or explain, neither seemed in any degree embarra.s.sed, though to both his bearing was plainly almost intolerable.

Thereafter they walked in silence which was scarcely broken till they reached the gate and Iley came shrilling out to meet them demanding,

"Did you get them thar plates from Miz. Lusk's, you Blatch Turrentine?"

Judith looked at him with angry scorn. It was the old tyrannical trick which she had known from her childhood up, the attempt to maintain an ascendency over her by appearing to know everything and be everywhere--"like he was the Lord-a'mighty Hisself," she muttered indignantly, as Creed joined a group of young men, and she pa.s.sed in to her necessary activities as hostess.

Judith Barrier's play-party won to its close with light hearts and light feet, with heavy hearts which the weary body would fain have denied, with love and laughter, with jealousy and chagrin, with the slanted look of envy, of furtive admiration, or of disparagement, from feminine eyes at the costumes of other women, just as any ball does.

The two who had trembled upon the brink of some personal revelation, a closer communion, were not again alone together that evening. Amid the moving figures of the others, now to his eyes as painted automatons, Creed Bonbright watched with strong fascination in which there was a tincture that was almost terror, the beautiful girl who had suddenly emerged from her cla.s.s and become for him the one woman.

So adequate, so competent, Judith dominated the situation; pa.s.sing among her guests, the thick dark lashes continually lowered toward her crimson cheeks. Some subtle sense told her that the spell was working. Smiles from this sweet inner satisfaction curved her red lips. No need to look--she knew how his eyes were following her. The exultant knowledge of it sang all through her being. Gone were her perturbations, her chilling uncertainties. She was at once stimulated and quieted.

Their good-byes were said in the most public manner, yet one glance flashed between them which asked and promised an early meeting.

Chapter IX

Foeman's Bluff

It was near midnight when Creed sought his patient mule at the rack, to find that Doss Provine had ridden the animal away.

"He said you was a-goin' to stay at yo' own house to-night, an' he 'lowed ye wouldn't need the mule, an' he was mighty tired. He 'lowed hit was a mighty long ja'nt out to the Edge whar he was a-goin'," contributed Blev Straley, who seemed to have been admitted to Provine's confidence.

"Mighty long ja'nt--I say long ja'nt!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed old man Broyles, who was engaged in saddling his ancient one-eyed mare. "Ef I couldn't spit as fur as from here to the Edge I'd never chaw tobacker agin! Plain old fashioned laziness is what ails Doss Provine. I'd nacher'ly w'ar him out for this trick, Bonbright, ef I was you."

"Well, I did aim to stay over at my house to-night," said Creed, "But I can't. I've got a case to try in the morning, soon, that I've got to look up some points on yet to-night. I reckon I'll have to foot it out to Aunt Nancy's."

As Creed spoke a fellow by the name of Taylor Stribling, a sort of satellite of Blatchley Turrentine's came slouching from the shadows of the nearby smoke-house. He watched old man Broyles ride away, and Blev Straley take a leisurely departure.

"Mighty bad ye got to hoof it, Creed," he observed. "Ef you've a mind to come with me I can show you a short cut through the woods by Foeman's Bluff. Hit's right on the first part of my way."

Creed had been long out of the mountains or he would have known that a short cut which led by Foeman's Bluff would certainly be a strange route toward Nancy Card's cabin; but it was characteristic of the man that without question or demur he accepted the proffered friendly turn at its face value, and he and Stribling at once took the way which led across the gulch to the still. They walked for some time, Stribling leading, Creed following, deep in his own thoughts.

"Looks like this is a queer direction to be going," he roused himself to comment wonderingly as they dipped into the sudden hollow.

"The trail turns a piece up yon," explained the guide briefly.

Again they toiled on in silence, crossing the dry boulder-strewn bed of a stream, travelling always in the dense darkness of the tall timber, finally striking the rise, which was so abrupt and steep that they had to catch by the path-side bushes to pull themselves up. It was lighter here, as the trail mounted toward a region of rocky bluffs where there was no big timber, running obliquely across the great promontory that had got the name of Foeman's Bluff, from old Ab Foeman whose hideout, still unknown, was said to be somewhere in its front.

"Ain't it mighty curious to be goin' up so?" Creed panted. "Aunt Nancy's place lies lower than the Turrentines'. By the road it's down hill mighty near all the way."

"Thishyer's a short cut," growled the other evasively. "Mind how you step. Hit's a fur ways down thar ef a body was to fall."

With the words they came out suddenly on the Bluff itself where the trail widened into a natural terrace, and the great rock, solemn with majestic peace, faced an infinity of sky with bared brow. As they emerged into the light Creed took off his hat and lifted his countenance, inhaling the beauty of the summer night. The late moon had climbed a third of the way up the heavens; now she looked down with a chastened, tarnished light, yet with a dusky, diminished beauty that held a sort of mild pathos. Great timbered slopes, inky black in this illumination, fell away on every hand down to where the mists lay death-white in the valley; behind them was a low, irregular bulk of brush-grown rock; and all about the whirr of katydids, a million voices blended into one. From a nearby thicket came to them the click and liquid gurgle, "Chip-out-o'-white-oak!" It sent Creed's heart and fancy questing back to the past hour with the girl on the doorstone. What would he have asked, she answered, if Blatch had not interrupted them? He scarcely heard the wavering cry of a screech-owl that followed hard upon the remembered notes. Stribling, however, noted the latter promptly, and began edging toward the shadow as his companion spoke.

"This is mighty sightly," said Creed, looking about him musingly; "I do love a moonshiny night."

For a moment there was only the noise of the katydids, backgrounded and enfolded by the deep silence of the great mountains. Then someone broke out into what was evidently a forced laugh, a long-drawn, girding, mirthless haw-haw, the laboured insult of which stung Creed into a certain resentment of demeanour.

"What's the joke?" he inquired dryly, turning toward Taylor Stribling.

But Stribling had silently melted away among the shadows of distant trees along the trail. It was Blatchley Turrentine who stood before him thrusting forward a jeering face in the uncertain half light, while three vaguely defined forms moved and shouldered behind him. The apparition was sinister, but if Blatch looked for demonstrations of fear he was disappointed.

"What's the joke?" Creed repeated.

"I couldn't hold in when I heared your pretty talk," drawled Blatch, setting his hands on his hips and barring the way. "Whar might you be a-goin', Mr. Creed Bonbright?"

"Home," returned Creed briefly. "Get out of my road, and I'll be obliged to you."

"Yo' road--_yo'_ road!" echoed Blatch. "Well, young feller, besides this here road runnin' acrosst the south eend o' the property that I've rented on a five-year lease, ef so be that yo're a-goin' to Nancy Cyard's house this is a mighty curious direction for you to be travellin' in."