The Ordeal Part 4

"Don't let me stand between you and your friends," she sobbed, weeping now in the reaction of sentiment. "Don't let me drive you away."

"Why not?" He sought relief from the pressure of the circ.u.mstances by affecting a lighter tone. "By your own account, you have stampeded three men this afternoon. I shall be the fourth! The fugitives are counting up like Falstaff's 'rogues in buckram.' Are you ready to go now? We are leaving Mrs. Briscoe alone."

He did not offer to a.s.sist her to rise. Somehow, he could resist aught, all, save the touch of that little hand. It brought back to him as nothing else the girl he had loved, and who had loved him. Oh, he was sure of it once! This woman was a changeling in some mystic sort--the same in aspect, yet how alien to his ideal of yore!

She did not seem to mark the lapse of courtesy. She sat still, with her broad gray hat tilted back on her head, a soft and harmonious contrast with her golden hair and roseate face. Her ungloved hands were clasped in her lap, her eyes were melancholy, meditative, fixed on the distant mountains. "I wish we might reach some mutual calm thought of the past, like the tranquil unimpa.s.sioned brightness of the close of this troubled, threatening day. We don't care now for the clouds that overcast the morning. To attain some quiet sentiment of forgiveness----"

"_I_ ask no pardon," he said curtly.

"Oh!"--she gazed up at him with all her soul in her eyes--"_you_ have no need!"

Had she been warned in a dream, she could have compa.s.sed no surer method of reducing his pride than this self-abnegating generosity. But suddenly an alien sound impinged on the quietude. The sharp note of a rifle shattered the silence, the fragmentary echoes clamoring back from the rocks like a volley of musketry.

"How startling that was!" she exclaimed, turning to look in the opposite direction over the placid valley commanded by the observatory, with the purple mountains encircling the horizon. "How this clear air carries the sound!"

"That was not distant," Bayne observed. "Damp air is a better conductor of sound than a clear atmosphere."

"It was like blasting," she submitted.

"It was a rifle-shot," he discriminated. "A still-hunter, probably. The deer come down from the coverts toward evening to drink. Some rock may have fallen along the river-bank, dislodged by the concussion."

A sense of melancholy was in the air, gathering with the gathering darkness. The light was fading out of the west, and the early autumnal dusk was at hand. Lillian was sensible of an accession of la.s.situde, a realization of defeat in a cause which she felt now it was futile to have essayed. Why should he forgive? How was reparation possible? She could not call back the Past--she could not a.s.suage griefs that time had worn out long ago, searing over the wounds. She was quite silent as she rose and together they took their way down toward the bungalow. While she flagged now and again, she walked without a.s.sistance, though he kept close and ready at her side.

Gladys watched their progress expectantly, but her face fell as they drew near and she could discern their listless expression and manner. She did not await their arrival, but turned, disappointed, within. It was already time to dress for dinner, the ladies habitually observing this formality, although Briscoe often went in knickerbockers till midnight. Lillian paused on the veranda and gazed down the road, winding away into the dusky red flare of the fading west, for the drive must needs be short in this season of early nightfall. There was no sign of approach along its smooth and shadowy curves, and at the end of the long vista, where the jagged verges of crags serrated the serene green sky a star shone, white and splendid, amidst the vanishing vermilion suffusions of the sunset-tide.

V.

In the light of after events, one might wonder if the genial, care-free Edward Briscoe remembered any detail of the discarded arrangement of the previous evening for the transportation of his transitory guest, Frank Dean, to Shaftesville; if he realized that at the moment when the revenue officer would have been starting on the journey, as the host had insistently planned it, he was himself at the turn of the road and just beyond the jutting crag; if he divined that the vibrations of the telephone wire had betrayed the matter to a crafty listening ear on the party-line in the vacant hotel across the ravine--or was the time too short for the consideration? Did he even recognize the significance of the apparition when a swift, erect figure stepped openly from under the shadowy boughs of the balsam firs into the middle of the road, that the bead might be drawn straight? Did he appreciate that the flash is sooner sped than the missile and know his fate before the rifle-ball crashed into his skull!--or was the instant all inadequate and did he enter eternity ere he was well quit of this world?

Frightened by the sudden appearance of the man in the middle of the thoroughfare, the funnel-shaped flare of light, the sharp report of the weapon, the mare, trotting at full speed, swerved, plunged, backed, the reins hanging loose about her heels, her driver having fallen forward upon the dashboard. The dog-cart began to careen to one side as the animal continued to back and rear, deterred from flight by the figure standing still directly in the road. Suddenly she sought to turn in the restricted narrow s.p.a.ce, and instantly the wheels were over the verge of the precipice.

All useless were the convulsive efforts of the creature to maintain her footing on the rocky brink, the clutching hoofs, the elastic bounds. With the weight of the vehicle, the dead man leaning heavily on the dashboard, it was but a moment of suspense--then like a thunderbolt the whole went crashing down into the valley, the depth to be conjectured by the considerable interval of time before the sound of rending boughs and surging foliage in the air gave token that the wreck was hurtling through the trees on the levels a thousand feet below.

Two other men, armed with rifles, had sprung from among the firs and stood aghast and listening on the verge of the crag. There was no longer a sound. The tragedy was complete, irrevocable, before a word was uttered.

"'T warn't _him_!" gasped the youngest--hardly more than a boy indeed.

His broad, beardless face was ghastly white, and his lips trembled as violently as his shaking hand.

"Lawd! That was _Edward Briscoe_! What a pity, _sure_! It war a plumb mistake, Copenny," plained an elder man, whose rifle had not been fired.

There was a regretful cadence in his voice akin to tears, and he held his long, ragged red beard in one hand as he peered down into the unresponsive depths.

"You oughter hev made sure afore ye teched the trigger, Copenny, that he _war_ the revenuer!" cried the young fellow, Alvin Holvey, with a sudden burst of petulance, despite the tragic realization expressed in his quivering face. "Ye're sech a dead shot that ye could hev spared a minute ter make sure of the revenuer, afore _he_ could hev pulled a shooting-iron."

The man who had fired the fatal shot had seemed hitherto stunned, silent and motionless. Now he exclaimed in self-justification: "Why, I war sure, plumb sure, I thought. We-uns chased that man Dean clear to Briscoe's house last night--his horse went lame and he got lost from his posse--but when I fund he hed sheltered with Briscoe, we-uns went into the empty hotel ter wait and watch fur him ter go. Not knowin' how many men Briscoe hev got thar, we-uns didn't want ter tackle the house. An' whilst at the hotel the Briscoes' tellyfun-bell rung--ye know it's on a party line with the hotel connection--an' I tuk down the thing they call the receiver an'

listened. An' that's jes' the way Briscoe planned it: ter send the revenuer down an hour by sun with the dog-cart an' his fine mare. Shucks!

Ef Briscoe war minded ter step into Frank Dean's shoes, he hev jes' hed ter take what war savin' up fur the revenuer, that's all!" Once more he relapsed into silent staring at the brink, balked, dumfounded, and amazed.

Suddenly he seemed to respond to some inward monition of danger, of responsibility. "I be enough of a dead shot ter stop all that dad-burned talk of yourn!" he drawled in a languid, falsetto, spiritless voice, but with an odd intimation of a deadly intention. "Ye both done the deed the same ez ef ye hed pulled the trigger; ye holped ter plan it, an' kem along ter see it done an' lend a hand ef needed. Ye both done the deed the same ez me--that's the law, an' ye know it. That is sure the law in Tennessee."

"Waal, now, Phineas Copenny, 't warn't right nor fair ter we-uns ter clumsy it up so," protested the young mountaineer. "Ef it hed been the revenuer, I'd hev nare word ter say. I'd smack my lips, fur the deed would taste good ter me, an' I'd stand ter it. But this hyar Mr.

Briscoe--why, we-uns hev not even got a gredge agin him."

"No, nor n.o.body else that ever I hearn of. Mr. Briscoe war a plum favor_ite_, far an' nigh," said old Jubal Clenk, the eldest of the party.

"But shucks!" he continued, with a change of tone and the evident intention of preserving harmony among the conspirators. "'Twar jes' an accident, an' that's what it will pa.s.s fur among folks ginerally. Mr.

Briscoe's mare skeered an' shied an' backed off'n the bluff--that air whut the country-side will think. Whenst his body is fund his head will be mashed ter a jelly by the fall, an' n.o.body kin say he kem otherwise by his death--jes' an accident in drivin' a skittish horse-critter."

Whether it was a sound, whether it was a movement, none of the group was accurately aware. It may have been merely that mesmeric influence of an intently concentrated gaze that caused them suddenly to turn. They beheld standing in the road--and they flinched at the sight--a witness to all the proceedings. A small, a simple, object to excite such abject terror as blanched the faces of the group--a little boy, a mere baby, staring at the men with wide blue eyes and unconjecturable emotions. He had doubtless been enveloped in the rug which had fallen from the vehicle as it first careened in the road, and which now lay among the wayside weeds.

His toggery of the juvenile mode made him seem smaller than he really was; his scarlet cloth coat, embroidered in Persian effects, was thick and rendered his figure chubby of aspect; his feet and legs were encased in bulky white leggins; he wore a broad white beaver hat, its crown encircled by a red ribbon, and his infantile jauntiness of attire was infinitely incongruous with the cruel tragedy and his piteous plight.

Although perhaps stunned at first by the shock of the fall, he was obviously uninjured, and stood st.u.r.dily erect and vigilant. He looked alert, inquiring, anxious, resolved into wonder, silently awaiting developments. His eyes shifted from one speaker to another of the strange party.

"Lord! He'll tell it all!" exclaimed Alvin Holvey, appalled and in hopeless dismay.

"Naw, he won't, now," snarled Copenny rancorously. "Thar will be a way ter stop his mouth."

"Why, he is too leetle ter talk. He don't sense nuthin'," cried old Clenk, with an eager note of expostulation, attesting that he was human, after all. "Don't do nuthin' else rash, Phineas Copenny, fur the love of G.o.d!"

Jubal Clenk dropped on one knee in front of the little boy, and the two were inscrutably eyeing each other at close quarters. "h.e.l.lo, Bubby!

Whar's yer tongue? Cat got it?" he asked in a grandfatherly fashion, while the other men looked on, grim and anxious, at this effort to gauge the mentality of the child and their consequent danger from him.

Still staring, the little boy began slowly to shake his head in negation.

"What's yer name, Squair? What's yer name?"

But the child still stared silently, either uncomprehending or perceiving that his safety lay in incompetency.

Clenk rose to his feet in sudden relief. "He don't sense nuthin'! He's too little to talk. He can't tell wuth shucks! We will jes' leave him hyar in the road, an' the folks that find what's down thar in the valley will find him too. I wonder somebody ain't pa.s.sed a'ready. An' sure we-uns oughter be a-travellin'."

But Holvey revolted against this offhand a.s.sumption of confidence. He made a supplemental effort on his own account. "Why don't ye tell yer name, Bubby?" he asked cajolingly.

"'Tause," the child answered abruptly, "I tan't talk."

Copenny burst into sudden sardonic laughter, with wondrous little mirth in the tones, and the other miscreants were obviously disconcerted and disconsolate, while the small schemer, whose craft had failed midway, looked affrighted and marvelling from one to another, at a loss to interpret the mischance.

"Dadburn it!" said the mercurial Clenk, as depressed now as a moment earlier he had been easily elated. "We-uns will jes' hev ter take him along of us an' keep him till he furgits all about it."

"An' when will ye be sure o' that?" sneered Copenny. "He is as tricky as a young fox."

Half stunned by the tremendous import of the tragedy he had witnessed, the child scarcely entered into its true significance in his concern for his own plight. He realized that he was being riven from his friends, his own, and made a feeble outcry and futile resistance, now protesting that he would tell nothing, and now piteously a.s.suring his captors that he could not talk, while they gathered him up in the rug, which covered head and feet, even the flaunting finery of his big, white beaver hat.

In the arms of the grandfatherly Clenk he was carried along the bridle-path in the dulling sunset, and presently dusk was descending on the austere mountain wilderness; the unmeasured darkness began to pervade it, and silence was its tenant. As the party went further and further into the woods, the struggles of the child grew fitful; soon he was still, and at last--for even Care must needs have pity for his callow estate--he was asleep, forgetting in slumber for a time all the horror that he had seen and suffered.

But when he came to himself he was a shivering, whimpering bundle of homesick grief. He wanted his mother--he would listen to naught but a.s.surances that they were going to her right away--right away! It was a strange place wherein he found himself--all dark, save for flaring torches. He could not understand his surroundings, and indeed he did not try. He only rubbed his eyes with his fists and said again and again that he wanted his mother. He was seated on a small stone pillar, a stalagmite in a limestone cavern, where there were many such pillars and pendants of like material hanging from the roof, all most dimly glimpsed in the torch-light against an infinitude of blackness. The men who had brought him hither, and others whom he had not heretofore seen, were busied about a dismantled stone furnace, gathering up such poor belongings as had escaped the wreckings of the revenue force. Now and then a glitter from the fragments of the copper still and the sections of the coils of the worm marked the course their ravages had taken, and all the chill, cavernous air was filled with the sickly odor of singlings and the fermenting mash adhering to the broken staves of the great riven tanks, called the beer-tubs. The moonlight came into this dark place at the further end, for this was one of the many caves among the crags that overhang the Little Tennessee River, and once, looking toward the jagged portal, Archie saw a sail, white in the beams on the l.u.s.trous current, and asked if they were going in that boat to his mother, for, he said, he knew that she did not live in this cellar.

"Yes, yes," Clenk a.s.sured him. They were making ready to leave now, though not in that boat. "An' look-a-hyar! What a pretty! Ye kin hev this ter play with ef ye will be good."