The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories Part 11

"Let's see it, Nick," he said, tearing it open; "it's the money sure enough."

Old Persimmon Sneed turned his head with a certain alert interest.

Perhaps he himself had doubted whether his wife would think him worth the money. There was a general flutter of good-natured gratulation, and it seemed at the moment only some preposterous mistake that Con Hite should put it into Persimmon Sneed's lean paw and close his trembling fingers over it.

"Now, scoot!" he bawled out at the top of his voice, the little den ringing with the echoes of his excitement, a second revolver drawn in his left hand. "I'll gin ye a day's start o' these fellers." He presented the muzzle of one pistol to Peters's head, and with the other he covered one of the two henchmen in the recess of the little rock house. The other sprang up from a barrel where he sat wiping his mouth with the back of his hand; but Jerry, suddenly realizing the situation, put out a dexterous foot, and the horse-thief fell full length upon the floor, his pistol discharging as he went down. In the clamor of the echoes, and the smoke and the flare, Persimmon Sneed disappeared, hearing as he went a wild protest, and a nimbleness of argument second hardly to his own, as Nick Peters cried out that he was robbed, his hard earnings were wrested from him, the money was his, paid him as a price, and Con Hite had let Mr. Persimmon Sneed run off with it, allowing him nothing for his trouble.

"It war his money," Con Hite averred, when they had grown calmer, and Jake Glenn had returned from a reconnoissance with the news that Hite's father had lent the fleeing Persimmon a horse, and he was by this time five miles away in the Cove. "_He_ could have paid you for yer trouble in ketchin' him ef he had wanted ter."

"It war _not_ his money," protested Peters, with tears in his eyes.

"It war sent ter me willingly, fur a valid consideration, an' ye let him hev the money, an' his wife hev got the valid consideration--an'

hyar I be lef' with the bag ter hold!"

It may be that Peters had absorbed some of the craft of argument by mere propinquity to Persimmon Sneed, or that Con Hite's conscience was unduly tender, for he long entertained a moral doubt touching his course in this transaction,--whether he had a right to pay the ransom money which Nick Peters had extorted from Persimmon Sneed's wife to Persimmon Sneed himself, thereby defrauding Nick Peters of the fruit of his labor. Perhaps this untoward state of dubitation came about from Narcissa's scornful comment.

"Ye mought hev known that old man Persimmon Sneed would have made off with the money," she said, remembering his reproving glare at her. "I wouldn't hev trested him with a handful o' cornfield peas."

"But I expected him ter make off with it," protested the amazed Con; "that's why I gin it ter him."

"Then ye air jes' ez bad ez he is," she retorted coldly.

And thus it was he examined his conscience.

Persimmon Sneed had no doubts whatever as to the ownership of the money in his pocket, when one fine morning he walked into his own door, as dictatorial, as set in his own opinion as ever; the only change to be detected in his manners and conversation thereafter was the enigmatical a.s.sertion at times that he was a "ransomed saint,"

followed by a low chuckle of enjoyment. Those who heard this often made bold to say to one another that he "didn't act like it," and this opinion was shared by the sheriff who futilely sought some information from him touching the lair of the horse-thieves, looking to brilliant exploits of capture. Such details as he could secure were so uncertain and contradictory as to render him suspicious that the truth was purposely withheld.

"Ye oughter remember these men air crim'nal offenders agin the law, Mr. Sneed," he said.

"Mebbe so," a.s.sented Persimmon Sneed, "mebbe so;" but the situation of Con Hite's still was the only locality which he had visited of which he was sure, and in grat.i.tude to his rescuer he held his peace.

That he was not so softened to the world at large was manifested in the fact that he threatened to plead usury against the money-lender, and forthwith brought him down with a run to the beggaries of the legal rate. He was wont, moreover, to go to the teller of the bank at Colbury and demand of that distracted man such of his papers as were from time to time lost or mislaid, having learned from his wife that she had made the official the custodian of his valuables, these being his bank-book, the ancient returned checks, and the unused check-book.

The points which he had so laboriously made plain to the jury of view proved a total loss of perspicacious reasoning, for the land was forthwith condemned and the road opened, any oil-boring company being allowed by law a right of way thirty feet wide. The heavy hauling of the oil company had already made a tolerable wagon track, and the pa.s.sing back and forth of the men and teams and machinery added an element of interest and excitement to the thoroughfare such as Narcissa's wildest dreams had never prefigured. She had no heart for it now. When the creak of wheels on the frozen ground, and the cries of the drivers, and the thud of the hoofs of the straining four-horse teams heralded an approach, she was wont to draw close the batten shutter of the window and sit brooding over the fire, staring with moody eyes into the red coals, where she saw much invisible to the simple Ben. He knew vaguely that her grief was for the fair-haired stranger, but he could not dream in what remorseful wise. She had not failed to perceive her own agency in the betrayal of his secret, when the story of the discovery of the oil was blazoned to all the world by those mystically flaring waters in the deeps of the mountain night. It was she who had idly kindled them; she who had robbed him of his rights, of the wealth that these interlopers were garnering. She had sent him to his grave baffled, beaten, forlorn, wondering at the mystery of the hand that out of the dark had smitten him. She kept her own counsel. Her white face grew set and stern. Her words were few.

She had no tears. And Ben, who found his tyrant only the harder and the colder, scarcely remonstrated, and could only marvel when one keen, chill afternoon she sprang up, throwing her brown shawl over her head, and declared that she was going to the oil wells to see for herself what progress was making there.

All sylvan grace had departed from the spot. As the two stood on the verge of the clear s.p.a.ce, now gashed deep in every direction in the woods and larger by a hundred acres, grim derricks rose sharply outlined against the wintry sky. It was barred with strata of gray clouds in such sombre neutrality of tint that one, in that it was less gloomy than the others, gave a suggestion of blue. Patches of snow lay about the ground. Cinders and smoke had blackened them here and there.

The steam-engine, with its cylindrical boiler, seemed in the dusk some uncanny monster that had taken up its abode here, and rejoiced in the desolation it had wrought, and lived by ill deeds. It was letting off steam, and now and then it gave a puffing sigh as if it were tired after its day's work. The laborers were of a different type from the homely neighbors, and returned the contempt with which the mountaineers gazed upon them. Great piles of wood showed how the forests were being rifled for fuel. Many trees had been felled in provident foresight, and lay along the ground in vast lengths, awaiting the axe; so many that adown the avenues thus opened toward the valley a wan glimmering caught the girl's eye, and she recognized the palings of the little mountain graveyard.

She clutched her brother's arm and pointed to it. Her eyes grew dilated and wild, her face was pale and drawn; her hand trembled as she held it out.

"Ye see, Ben, he's close enough ter view it all--an' mebbe he does--an' he knows now who he hev got ter thank fur it all--an' I wisht he war hyar, whar I am, an' I war thar, whar he is."

Her brother thought for the moment that she was raving. The next she caught her shawl over her head, hoodwise, the wind tossing her bright hair, and declared that she was cold, and upbraided him for bringing her on this long, chilling tramp, and protested that she would come never again.

He came often afterward. The spot seemed to have a fascination for him. And within sound of the cheerful hubbub and busy whir of the industry he would lean over the palings and look at the grave, covered sometimes with a drift of leaves, and sometimes with a drift of snow, and think of the two men that it had successively housed, and nurse his grudge against the company. With an unreasoning hatred of it, Hanway felt that both were victims of the great strong corporation that was to reap the value of the discovery which was not its own save by accident. He could not appraise the justice of the dispensation by which the keen observation of the one man, and the science and experience that the other had brought to the enterprise, should fall so far short of achievement, while an idle story, the gossip of the day, should fill the hands of those who were strangers to the very thought. He grudged every augury of success; he welcomed every detail of difficulty. As time went on, the well was said to be of intermittent flow, and new borings resulted in naught but vast floods of sulphur water. Finally, when the admitted truth pervaded the community,--that the oil was practically exhausted, that it had long since ceased to pay expenses, that the company was a heavy loser by the enterprise,--he was as a man appeased.

The result was succeeded by a change in Narcissa so radical and immediate that Constant Hite could but perceive the fact that it was induced by the failure and abandonment of the work. She grew placid as of yore, and was softened, and now and again the gentle melancholy into which she fell suggested sad and reminiscent pleasure rather than the remorseful and desperate sorrow that she had known. He began to realize that it was no sentimental and love-stricken grief she had felt for Selwyn, but a sympathy akin to his own and to her brother's; and since the disappointment of the hope of fortune must needs have come to Selwyn at last, they made shift to resign themselves, and were wont to talk freely of the dead with that affectionate and immediate interest which seems to prolong the span of a mortal's day on earth, like the tender suffusive radiance of the afterglow of a sunken sun.

The road fell quickly into disuse after the abandonment of the work.

In the storms of winter, trees were uprooted and thrown athwart the way; overhanging rocks, splitting in the freeze, precipitated obstructive avalanches upon the dim serpentine convolutions; the wind piled drifts of dead leaves above the turns; and in the spring gra.s.s began to grow in the tracks of the wheels.

It held no woeful memories now for Narcissa. She loved to sit on the step of the stile and watch through the leafless sunlit trees the silver haze shimmering in the valley, where the winter wheat was all of an emerald richness, and the blue mountains afar off so near akin to the aspect of heaven that one might hardly mark where the horizon line merged the sweet solitudes of earth into the solitary sky. Many a day, the spring, loitering along the shadow-flecked vistas, with the red maple-blooms overhead and violets underfoot, was the only traveler to be seen on the deserted road. And the pensive dusk was wont to deepen into the serene vernal night, sweet with the scent of the budding wild cherry, and astir with timorous tentative rustlings as of half-fledged breezes, and illumined only with the gentle l.u.s.tre of the white stars; for never again was the darkness emblazoned with that haggard incandescence so long the mystery of Witch-Face Mountain.

TAKING THE BLUE RIBBON AT THE COUNTY FAIR.

Jenks Hollis sat on the fence. He slowly turned the quid of tobacco in his cheek, and lifting up his voice spoke with an oracular drawl:--

"Ef he kin take the certif'cate it's the mos' ez he kin do. He ain't never a-goin' ter git no premi-_um_ in this life, sure 's ye air a born sinner."

And he relapsed into silence. His long legs dangled dejectedly among the roadside weeds; his brown jeans trousers, that had despaired of ever reaching his ankles, were ornamented here and there with ill-adjusted patches, and his loose-fitting coat was out at the elbows. An old white wool hat drooped over his eyes, which were fixed absently on certain distant blue mountain ranges, that melted tenderly into the blue of the noonday sky, and framed an exquisite mosaic of poly-tinted fields in the valley, far, far below the grim gray crag on which his little home was perched.

Despite his long legs he was a light weight, or he would not have chosen as his favorite seat so rickety a fence. His interlocutor, a heavier man, apparently had some doubts, for he leaned only slightly against one of the projecting rails as he whittled a pine stick, and with his every movement the frail structure trembled. The log cabin seemed as rickety as the fence. The little front porch had lost a puncheon here and there in the flooring--perhaps on some cold winter night when Hollis's energy was not sufficiently exuberant to convey him to the wood-pile; the slender posts that upheld its roof seemed hardly strong enough to withstand the weight of the luxuriant vines with their wealth of golden gourds which had clambered far over the moss-grown clapboards; the windows had fewer panes of gla.s.s than rags; and the chimney, built of clay and sticks, leaned portentously away from the house. The open door displayed a rough, uncovered floor; a few old rush-bottomed chairs; a bedstead with a patch-work calico quilt, the mattress swagging in the centre and showing the badly arranged cords below; strings of bright red pepper hanging from the dark rafters; a group of tow-headed, grave-faced, barefooted children; and, occupying almost one side of the room, a broad, deep, old-fashioned fireplace, where winter and summer a lazy fire burned under a lazy pot.

Notwithstanding the poverty of the aspect of the place and the evident sloth of its master, it was characterized by a scrupulous cleanliness strangely at variance with its forlorn deficiencies. The rough floor was not only swept but scoured; the dark rafters, whence depended the flaming banners of the red pepper, harbored no cobwebs; the grave faces of the white-haired children bore no more dirt than was consistent with their recent occupation of making mudpies; and the sedate, bald-headed baby, lying silent but wide-awake in an uncouth wooden cradle, was as clean as clear spring water and yellow soap could make it. Mrs. Hollis herself, seen through the vista of opposite open doors, energetically rubbing the coa.r.s.e wet clothes upon the resonant washboard, seemed neat enough in her blue-and-white checked homespun dress, and with her scanty hair drawn smoothly back from her brow into a tidy little knot on the top of her head.

Spare and gaunt she was, and with many lines in her prematurely old face. Perhaps they told of the hard fight her brave spirit waged against the stern ordering of her life; of the struggles with squalor,--inevitable concomitant of poverty,--and to keep together the souls and bodies of those numerous children, with no more efficient a.s.sistance than could be wrung from her reluctant husband in the short intervals when he did not sit on the fence. She managed as well as she could; there was an abundance of fine fruit in that low line of foliage behind the house--but everybody on Old Bear Mountain had fine fruit. Something rarer, she had good vegetables--the planting and hoeing being her own work and her eldest daughter's; an occasional shallow furrow representing the contribution of her husband's plough.

The althea-bushes and the branches of the laurel sheltered a goodly number of roosting hens in these September nights; and to the pond, which had been formed by damming the waters of the spring branch in the hollow across the road, was moving even now a stately procession of geese in single file. These simple belongings were the trophies of a gallant battle against unalterable conditions and the dragging, dispiriting clog of her husband's inertia.

His inner life--does it seem hard to realize that in that uncouth personality concentred the complex, incomprehensible, ever-shifting emotions of that inner life which, after all, is so much stronger, and deeper, and broader than the material? Here, too, beat the hot heart of humanity--beat with no measured throb. He had his hopes, his pleasure, his pain, like those of a higher culture, differing only in object, and something perhaps in degree. His disappointments were bitter and lasting; his triumphs, few and sordid; his single aspiration--to take the premium offered by the directors of the Kildeer County Fair for the best equestrian.

This incongruous and unpromising ambition had sprung up in this wise: Between the country people of Kildeer County and the citizens of the village of Colbury, the county-seat, existed a bitter and deeply rooted animosity manifesting itself at conventions, elections for the legislature, etc., the rural population voting as a unit against the town's candidate. On all occasions of public meetings there was a struggle to crush any invidious distinction against the "country boys," especially at the annual fair. Here to the rustics of Kildeer County came the tug of war. The population of the outlying districts was more numerous, and, when it could be used as a suffrage-engine, all-powerful; but the region immediately adjacent to the town was far more fertile. On those fine meadows grazed the graceful Jersey; there gamboled sundry long-tailed colts with long-tailed pedigrees; there greedy Berkshires fattened themselves to abnormal proportions; and the merinos could hardly walk, for the weight of their own rich wardrobes.

The well-to-do farmers of this section were hand-in-glove with the town's people; they drove their trotters in every day or so to get their mail, to chat with their cronies, to attend to their affairs in court, to sell or to buy--their pleasures centred in the town, and they turned the cold shoulder upon the country, which supported them, and gave their influence to Colbury, accounting themselves an integrant part of it. Thus, at the fairs the town claimed the honor and glory. The blue ribbon decorated cattle and horses bred within ten miles of the flaunting flag on the judges' stand, and the foaming mountain-torrents and the placid stream in the valley beheld no cerulean hues save those of the sky which they reflected.

The premium offered this year for the best rider was, as it happened, a new feature, and excited especial interest. The country's blood was up. Here was something for which it could fairly compete, with none of the disadvantages of the false position in which it was placed. Hence a prosperous landed proprietor, the leader of the rural faction, dwelling midway between the town and the range of mountains that bounded the county on the north and east, bethought himself one day of Jenkins Hollis, whose famous riding had been the feature of a certain dashing cavalry charge--once famous, too--forgotten now by all but the men who, for the first and only time in their existence, penetrated in those war days the blue mountains fencing in their county from the outer world, and looked upon the alien life beyond that wooded barrier. The experience of those four years, submerged in the whirling rush of events elsewhere, survives in these eventless regions in a dreamy, dispa.s.sionate sort of longevity. And Jenkins Hollis's feat of riding stolidly--one could hardly say bravely--up an almost sheer precipice to a flame-belching battery came suddenly into the landed magnate's recollection with the gentle vapors and soothing aroma of a meditative after-dinner pipe. Quivering with party spirit, Squire Goodlet sent for Hollis and offered to lend him the best horse on the place, and a saddle and bridle, if he would go down to Colbury and beat those town fellows out on their own ground.

No misgivings had Hollis. The inordinate personal pride characteristic of the mountaineer precluded his feeling a shrinking pain at the prospect of being presented, a sorry contrast, among the well-clad, well-to-do town's people, to compete in a public contest. He did not appreciate the difference--he thought himself as good as the best.

And to-day, complacent enough, he sat upon the rickety fence at home, oracularly disparaging the equestrian accomplishments of the town's noted champion.

"I dunno--I dunno," said his young companion doubtfully. "Hackett sets mighty firm onto his saddle. He's ez straight ez any shingle, an' ez tough ez a pine-knot. He come up hyar las' summer--war it las' summer, now? No, 't war summer afore las'--with some o' them other Colbury folks, a-fox-huntin', an' a-deer-huntin, an' one thing an' 'nother. I seen 'em a time or two in the woods. An' he kin ride jes' ez good 'mongst the gullies and boulders like ez ef he had been born in the hills. He ain't a-goin' ter be beat easy."

"It don't make no differ," retorted Jenks Hollis. "He'll never git no premi-_um_. The certif'cate's good a-plenty fur what ridin' he kin do."

Doubt was still expressed in the face of the young man, but he said no more, and, after a short silence, Mr. Hollis, perhaps not relishing his visitor's want of appreciation, dismounted, so to speak, from the fence, and slouched off slowly up the road.

Jacob Brice still stood leaning against the rails and whittling his pine stick, in no wise angered or dismayed by his host's unceremonious departure, for social etiquette is not very rigid on Old Bear Mountain. He was a tall athletic fellow, clad in a suit of brown jeans, which displayed, besides the ornaments of patches, sundry deep gra.s.s stains about the knees. Not that piety induced Brice to spend much time in the lowly att.i.tude of prayer, unless, indeed, Diana might be accounted the G.o.ddess of his worship. The green juice was pressed out when kneeling, hidden in some leafy, gra.s.sy nook, he heard the infrequent cry of the wild turkey, or his large, intent blue eyes caught a glimpse of the stately head of an antlered buck, moving majestically in the alternate sheen of the sunlight and shadow of the overhanging crags; or while with his deft hunter's hands he dragged himself by slow, noiseless degrees through the ferns and tufts of rank weeds to the water's edge, that he might catch a shot at the feeding wild duck. A leather belt around his waist supported his powder-horn and shot-pouch,--for his accoutrements were exactly such as might have been borne a hundred years ago by a hunter of Old Bear Mountain,--and his gun leaned against the trunk of a chestnut-oak.

Although he still stood outside the fence, aimlessly lounging, there was a look on his face of a half-suppressed expectancy, which rendered the features less statuesque than was their wont--an expectancy that showed itself in the furtive lifting of his eyelids now and then, enabling him to survey the doorway without turning his head. Suddenly his face rea.s.sumed its habitual, inexpressive mask of immobility, and the furtive eyes were persistently downcast.

A flare of color, and Cynthia Hollis was standing in the doorway, leaning against its frame. She was robed, like September, in brilliant yellow. The material and make were of the meanest, but there was a certain appropriateness in the color with her slumberous dark eyes and the curling tendrils of brown hair which fell upon her forehead and were cl.u.s.tered together at the back of her neck. No cuffs and no collar could this costume boast, but she had shown the inclination to finery characteristic of her age and s.e.x by wearing around her throat, where the yellow hue of her dress met the creamy tint of her skin, a row of large black beads, threaded upon a shoe-string in default of an elastic, the bra.s.s ends flaunting brazenly enough among them. She held in her hand a string of red pepper, to which she was adding some newly gathered pods. A slow job Cynthia seemed to make of it.

She took no more notice of the man under the tree than he accorded to her. There they stood, within twelve feet of each other, in utter silence, and, to all appearance, each entirely unconscious of the other's existence: he whittling his pine stick; she, slowly, slowly stringing the pods of red pepper.

There was something almost portentous in the gravity and sobriety of demeanor of this girl of seventeen; she manifested less interest in the young man than her own grandmother might have shown.