The Heart of the Hills Part 2

"Yes, an' you air a-helpin' the furriners to rob yo' own kin; you air a-doin' hit yo'self."

"Jason!"

The old man spoke sternly and the boy stopped, flushed and angry, and a moment later slipped from the room.

"Well!" said the colonel, and he laughed good-humoredly to relieve the strain that his host might feel on his account; but he was amazed just the same--the bud of a socialist blooming in those wilds! Arch Hawn's shrewd face looked a little concerned, for he saw that the old man's rebuke had been for the discourtesy to strangers, and from the sudden frown that ridged the old man's brow, that the boy's words had gone deep enough to stir distrust, and this was a poor start in the fulfilment of the purpose he had in view. He would have liked to give the boy a cuff on the ear. As for Mavis, she was almost frightened by the outburst of her playmate, and Marjorie was horrified by his profanity; but the dawning of something in Gray's brain worried him, and presently he, too, rose and went to the back porch. The rain had stopped, the wet earth was fragrant with freshened odors, wood-thrushes were singing, and the upper air was drenched with liquid gold that was darkening fast. The boy Jason was seated on the yard fence with his chin in his hands, his back to the house, and his face toward home. He heard the stranger's step, turned his head, and mistaking a puzzled sympathy for a challenge, dropped to the ground and came toward him, gathering fury as he came. Like lightning the Blue-gra.s.s lad's face changed, whitening a little as he sprang forward to meet him, but Jason, motioning with his thumb, swerved behind the chimney, where the stranger swiftly threw off his coat, the mountain boy spat on his hands, and like two diminutive demons they went at each other fiercely and silently. A few minutes later the two little girls rounding the chimney corner saw them--Gray on top and Jason writhing and biting under him like a tortured snake. A moment more Mavis's strong little hand had the stranger boy by his thick hair and Mavis, feeling her own arm clutched by the stranger-girl, let go and turned on her like a fury. There was a piercing scream from Marjorie, hurried footsteps answered on the porch, and old Jason and the colonel looked with bewildered eyes on the little Blue- gra.s.s girl amazed, indignant, white with horror; Mavis shrinking away from her as though she were the one who had been threatened with a blow; the stranger lad with a bitten thumb clinched in the hollow of one hand, his face already reddening with contrition and shame; and savage little Jason biting a b.l.o.o.d.y lip and with the l.u.s.t of battle still shaking him from head to foot.

"Jason," said the old man sternly, "whut's the matter out hyeh?"

Marjorie pointed one finger at Mavis, started to speak, and stopped. Jason's eyes fell.

"Nothin'," he said sullenly, and Colonel Pendleton looked to his son with astonished inquiry, and the lad's fine face turned bewildered and foolish.

"I don't know, sir," he said at last.

"Don't know?" echoed the colonel. "Well--"

The old man broke in:

"Jason, if you have lost yo' manners an' don't know how to behave when thar's strangers around, I reckon you'd better go on home."

The boy did not lift his eyes.

"I was a-goin' home anyhow," he said, still sullen, and he turned.

"Oh, no!" said the colonel quickly; "this won't do. Come now--you two boys shake hands."

At once the stranger lad walked forward to his enemy, and confused Jason gave him a limp hand. The old man laughed. "Come on in, Jason--you an' Mavis--an' stay to supper."

The boy shook his head.

"I got to be gittin' back home," he said, and without a word more he turned again. Marjorie looked toward the little girl, but she, too, was starting.

"I better be gittin' back too," she said shyly, and off she ran.

Old Jason laughed again.

"Jes' like two young roosters out thar in my barnyard," and he turned with the colonel toward the house. But Marjorie and her cousin stood in the porch and watched the two little mountaineers until, without once looking back, they pa.s.sed over the sunlit hill.

IV

On they trudged, the boy plodding st.u.r.dily ahead, the little girl slipping mountain-fashion behind. Not once did she come abreast with him, and not one word did either say, but the mind and heart of both were busy. All the way the frown over-casting the boy's face stayed like a shadow, for he had left trouble at home, he had met trouble, and to trouble he was going back. The old was definite enough and he knew how to handle it, but the new bothered him sorely. That stranger boy was a fighter, and Jason's honest soul told him that if interference had not come he would have been whipped, and his pride was still smarting with every step. The new boy had not tried to bite, or gouge, or to hit him when he was on top--facts that puzzled the mountain boy; he hadn't whimpered and he hadn't blabbed--not even the insult Jason had hurled with eye and tongue at his girl-clad legs. He had said that he didn't know what they were fighting about, and just why they were Jason himself couldn't quite make out now; but he knew that even now, in spite of the hand-shaking truce, he would at the snap of a finger go at the stranger again. And little Mavis knew now that it was not fear that made the stranger girl scream--and she, too, was puzzled. She even felt that the scorn in Marjorie's face was not personal, but she had shrunk from it as from the sudden lash of a whip. The stranger girl, too, had not blabbed but had even seemed to smile her forgiveness when Mavis turned, with no good-by, to follow Jason. Hand in hand the two little mountaineers had crossed the threshold of a new world that day. Together they were going back into their own, but the clutch of the new was tight on both, and while neither could have explained, there was the same thought in each mind, the same nameless dissatisfaction in each heart, and both were in the throes of the same new birth.

The sun was sinking when they started up the spur, and unconsciously Jason hurried his steps and the girl followed hard.

The twin spirals of smoke were visible now, and where the path forked the boy stopped and turned, jerking his thumb toward her cabin and his.

"Ef anything happens"--he paused, and the girl nodded her understanding--"you an' me air goin' to stay hyeh in the mountains an' git married."

"Yes, Jasie," she said.

His tone was matter-of-fact and so was hers, nor did she show any surprise at the suddenness of what he said, and Jason, not looking at her, failed to see a faint flush come to her cheek. He turned to go, but she stood still, looking down into the gloomy, darkening ravine below her. A bear's tracks had been found in that ravine only the day before. "Air ye afeerd?" he asked tolerantly, and she nodded mutely.

"I'll take ye down," he said with sudden gentleness.

The tall mountaineer was standing on the porch of the cabin, and with a.s.surance and dignity Jason strode ahead with a protecting air to the gate.

"Whar you two been?" he called sharply.

"I went fishin'," said the boy unperturbed, "an' tuk Mavis with me."

"You air gittin' a leetle too peart, boy. I don't want that gal a- runnin' around in the woods all day."

Jason met his angry eyes with a new spirit.

"I reckon you hain't been hyeh long."

The shot went home and the mountaineer glared helpless for an answer.

"Come on in hyeh an' git supper," he called harshly to the girl, and as the boy went back up the spur, he could hear the scolding going on below, with no answer from Mavis, and he made up his mind to put an end to that some day himself. He knew what was waiting for him on the other side of the spur, and when he reached the top, he sat down for a moment on a long-fallen, moss-grown log.

Above him beetled the top of his world. His great blue misty hills washed their turbulent waves to the yellow sh.o.r.e of the dropping sun. Those waves of forests primeval were his, and the green spray of them was tossed into cloudland to catch the blessed rain. In every little fold of them drops were trickling down now to water the earth and give back the sea its own. The dreamy-eyed man of science had told him that. And it was unchanged, all unchanged since wild beasts were the only tenants, since wild Indians slipped through the wilderness aisles, since the half-wild white man, hot on the chase, planted his feet in the footsteps of both and inexorably pushed them on. The boy's first Kentucky ancestor had been one of those who had stopped in the hills. His rifle had fed him and his family; his axe had put a roof over their heads, and the loom and spinning-wheel had clothed their bodies. Day by day they had fought back the wilderness, had husbanded the soil, and as far as his eagle eye could reach, that first Hawn had claimed mountain, river, and tree for his own, and there was none to dispute the claim for the pa.s.sing of half a century. Now those who had pa.s.sed on were coming back again--the first trespa.s.ser long, long ago with a yellow doc.u.ment that he called a "blanket- patent" and which was all but the bringer's funeral shroud, for the old hunter started at once for his gun and the stranger with his patent took to flight. Years later a band of young men with chain and compa.s.s had appeared in the hills and disappeared as suddenly, and later still another band, running a line for a railroad up the river, found old Jason at the foot of a certain oak with his rifle in the hollow of his arm and marking a dead- line which none dared to cross.

Later still, when he understood, the old man let them pa.s.s, but so far n.o.body had surveyed his land, and now, instead of trying to take, they were trying to purchase. From all points of the compa.s.s the "furriners" were coming now, the rock-p.e.c.k.e.r's prophecy was falling true, and at that moment the boy's hot words were having an effect on every soul who had heard them. Old Jason's suspicions were alive again; he was short of speech when his nephew, Arch Hawn, brought up the sale of his lands, and Arch warned the colonel to drop the subject for the night. The colonel's mind had gone back to a beautiful woodland at home that he thought of clearing off for tobacco--he would put that desecration off a while. The stranger boy, too, was wondering vaguely at the fierce arraignment he had heard; the stranger girl was curiously haunted by memories of the queer little mountaineer, while Mavis now had a new awe of her cousin that was but another rod with which he could go on ruling her.

Jason's mother was standing in the door when he walked through the yard gate. She went back into the cabin when she saw him coming, and met him at the door with a switch in her hand. Very coolly the lad caught it from her, broke it in two, threw it away, and picking up a piggin went out without a word to milk, leaving her aghast and outdone. When he came back, he asked like a man if supper was ready, and as to a man she answered. For an hour he pottered around the barn, and for a long while he sat on the porch under the stars. And, as always at that hour, the same scene obsessed his memory, when the last glance of his father's eye and the last words of his father's tongue went not to his wife, but to the white-faced little son across the foot of the death-bed:

"You'll git him fer me--some day."

"I'll git him, pap."

Those were the words that pa.s.sed, and in them was neither the asking nor the giving of a promise, but a simple statement and a simple acceptance of a simple trust, and the father pa.s.sed with a grim smile of content. Like every Hawn the boy believed that a Honeycutt was the a.s.sa.s.sin, and in the solemn little fellow one purpose hitherto had been supreme--to discover the man and avenge the deed; and though, young as he was, he was yet too cunning to let the fact be known, there was no male of the name old enough to pull the trigger, not even his mother's brother, Babe, who did not fall under the ban of the boy's deathless hate and suspicion. And always his mother, though herself a Honeycutt, had steadily fed his purpose, but for a long while now she had kept disloyally still, and the boy had bitterly learned the reason.

It was bedtime now, and little Jason rose and went within. As he climbed the steps leading to his loft, he spoke at last, nodding his head toward the cabin over the spur:

"I reckon I know whut you two are up to, and, furhermore, you are aimin' to sell this land. I can't keep you from doin' it, I reckon, but I do ask you not to sell without lettin' me know. I know somet'n' 'bout it that n.o.body else knows. An' if you don't tell me--" he shook his head slowly, and the mother looked at her boy as though she were dazed by some spell.

"I'll tell ye, Jasie," she said.

V

Down the river road loped Arch Hawn the next morning, his square chin low with thought, his shrewd eyes almost closed, and his straight lips closed hard on the cane stem of an unlighted pipe.

Of all the Hawns he had been born the poorest in goods and chattels and the richest in shrewd resource, restless energy, and keen foresight. He had gone to the settlements when he was a lad, he had always been coming and going ever since, and the word was that he had been to far-away cities in the outer world that were as unfamiliar to his fellows and kindred as the Holy Land. He had worked as teamster and had bought and sold anything to anybody right and left. Resolutely he had kept himself from all part in the feud--his kinship with the Hawns protecting him on one side and the many trades with old Aaron Honeycutt in cattle and lands saving him from trouble on the other. He carried no tales from one faction to the other, condemned neither one nor the other, and made the same comment to both--that it was foolish to fight when there was so much else so much more profitable to do. Once an armed band of mounted Honeycutts had met him in the road and demanded news of a similar band of Hawns up a creek. "Did you ever hear o' my tellin' the Hawns anything about you Honeycutts?" he asked quietly, and old Aaron had to shake his head.

"Well, if I tol' you anything about them to-day, don't you know I'd be tellin' them something about you to-morrow?"