The Purple Heights Part 5

"Ah, Gawd Almighty! Gawd Almighty! Whah is You dis night? Whah is You?" cried the old man. And of a sudden he began to weep dreadfully; heart-broken cries of pain and of protest, the tortured cries of one suffering inhumanly.

"And all this while G.o.d said not a word."

Shaken to the soul, full of sick horror, and loathing, and rage, Peter Champneys yet had a swift, intuitive understanding of old Neptune; and as if through him he had caught a glimpse of the naked and suffering soul of the black people, the boy began to weep with him. With understanding merging into pity he crept nearer and put his slender, boyish arm around the big, shaking, agonized figure, and the old man turned his head and looked long and sorrowfully into the white child's face. He put out the big, seamed, work-hardened hand that had labored since it could hold an implement to labor with, and laid it on the child's shoulder.

Then, bareheaded and empty-handed, Neptune sat down on his cabin steps to wait for what should happen, and Peter Champneys sat beside him, the gun between his knees. Over there by the fowl-house lay Jake, a horrid blotch in the moonlight.

Presently, echoing through the River Swamp, the hunting hounds set up their thrilling, deep-mouthed belling. They were closing in on their quarry and the nearness of it excited them. A few minutes later, and here they were, a posse of some thirty or forty mounted men struggling pell-mell after them. One great hound leaped forward, stood rigid by that which lay in a heap in the cabin clearing, pointed his nose, and gave tongue. Other dogs bunched around him, sniffed, and joined in.

The mounted men came to an abrupt standstill, the horses, like the dogs, bunching together. Neptune had risen and Peter Champneys stood on the top step, his head about level with the old man's shoulder.

He looked in vain for the sheriff; evidently, this was an independent posse. One of the men rode up to the door, shouting to make himself heard above the din of the dogs, and Peter recognized him, with a sinking of the heart--a tenant farmer named Mosely, of a violent and quarrelsome disposition.

"Shet up them d.a.m.n dogs!" he yelled. And to Neptune, savagely: "Now then, n.i.g.g.e.r, talk! What's been doin' here?"

It was Peter Champneys who answered.

"Daddy Neptune's been worried by something or somebody stealing his fowls. He's been on the watch. So when he saw that--that n.i.g.g.e.r over there running by the chicken-house, he just blazed away. Got him between the shoulder-blades."

A yell so ferocious that Peter's marrow froze, burst from the posse, which had dismounted.

"It's him!" howled a farm-hand, and kicked the corpse in the face.

"What in h.e.l.l did that big n.i.g.g.e.r shoot him for, anyhow?" he roared.

"He'd ought to be strung up himself, the old black--" And he cursed Neptune vilely. He felt swindled. There would be no burning, with interludes of unspeakable things. Nothing but senseless carrion to wreak vengeance upon. And all through a d.a.m.ned old meddling n.i.g.g.e.r's fault! A n.i.g.g.e.r taking the law into his own hands!

Somebody, discovering Daddy Neptune's woodpile, had kindled a fatwood torch. Others followed his example, and the red, smoky light flared over enraged faces and glaring eyes of maddened men; over the sweating horses, the baying dogs, and the black corpse with its bruised face. The guinea-hens, after their insane fashion, kept up a deafening potracking, flapping from limb to limb of the tree in which they roosted. The indifferent swamp chorus joined in, katydids and crickets shrilling all the while. And over it all the moon went about its business; the awful depths of the sky were silent. The wind from the swamp, the night, the earth, didn't care.

Somebody whipped out a knife and bent over Jake's body. A yell greeted this. Dogs and men moved confusedly around the thing on the ground, in a sort of demoniac circle upon which the hissing, flaring pitch-pine torches danced with infernal effect. Peter Champneys watched it, his soul revolting. He had no sympathy for Jake; he felt for him nothing but hatred. He couldn't think of that gay and innocent girl coming down the corn-field path, unafraid--to meet what she had met--without a suffocating sense of rage. She had been, Peter remembered, a very pretty girl, a girl who, as Neptune had said, used to sing, and laugh, and say her prayers, and trust Almighty G.o.d.

But Peter was seeing now the other side of that awful cloud which darkens the horizon of the South--the brute beast mob-vengeance that follows swiftly upon the heels of the unpardonable sin. There must be justice. But what was happening now wasn't justice. It was stark barbarism let loose.

Neptune, who had "helped raise" Jake, had meted out to him justice full and sure. He had avenged both the wronged white and the wronged black people. Peter looked at the men in the cabin clearing, and saw the thing nakedly, and from both angles. For instance, consider Mosely, who had done things--with a clasp-knife. And that other man, the farm-hand, shifty-eyed and mean, always half drunk, a bad citizen: _they_ would be sure to be foremost in affairs like this.

They had precious little respect for the law as law. And here they were, making the holy night indecent with b.e.s.t.i.a.l behavior. Again a sick qualm shook Peter: Mosely was calmly putting four severed black fingers into his coat pocket. Oh, where was the sheriff? Why didn't the sheriff come?

Peter caught a glimpse of a shapeless, battered, gory ma.s.s under trampling feet. Maddened by the little they were able to accomplish, and with the torture-l.u.s.t that is as old as humanity itself roused to fury by frustration, the posse turned from that which had been Jake, to old Neptune, standing motionless by his doorway. Neptune had not moved or spoken since Peter had answered the posse's questions. He had not even appeared to hear the vile abuse heaped upon him. He was not in the least afraid for his life: He was beyond that. That which had happened, which was happening, had dealt the stern, simple-hearted old man so mighty a blow that his faculties were stunned. He couldn't think. He could only suffer a bewildered, baffled torment. He stood there, dumb as a sheep before the slaughterers, and the sight of his black face maddened the men who were out to avenge a black man's monstrous crime.

"Hang the d.a.m.n n.i.g.g.e.r!" screamed Mosely, and the crowd surged forward ominously. You could see, by the shaking torch-light, faces in which the eyes glared wolf-like, brandished fists, glints of guns. Neptune, without a flicker of fear, regarded them with his sorrowful gaze. But Peter Champneys stepped in front of him, and thrust the cold muzzle of the shot-gun against Mosely's face. The man, a coward at heart, leaped back, trampling upon the toes of those behind him, who cursed him shrilly and vindictively.

Then spoke up small Peter Champneys, standing barefooted and bareheaded, clothed in a coa.r.s.e blue blouse and a pair of patched and faded denim trousers, but for all that heir to a long line of dead-and-gone Champneyses who had been, whatever their faults, fearless and gallant gentlemen.

"Get back there, you, Mosely!" Peter Champneys spoke in the voice his grandfather had on a time used to a recalcitrant field-hand.

"Chuck that little n.i.g.g.e.r-lover in the swamp!"

"Knock him down an' git the n.i.g.g.e.r, Mosely!"

"Burn down the house!"

But the shot-gun in that steady young hand held them in check for a breathing-s.p.a.ce. They knew Peter Champneys.

"Mosely!" snapped Peter. "You, too, Nicolson! Stand back, you white-livered hounds! First one of you lays a hand on me or Daddy Nep gets his head blown off! d.a.m.n you, Mosely! don't make me tell you again to get back!"

And Mosely saw that in the boy's eyes that drove him back, swearing.

The huge farm-hand, who had shifted and squirmed his way to the back of the crowd, now lifted his arm. A rope with a noose at the end snaked over the tossing heads, and all but settled over black Neptune's. It slipped, writhing from the old man's shoulder and down his shirt. The mob set up a disappointed and yet hopeful howl.

"Try it again! Try it again!" they shrieked. Then a sort of waiting hush fell upon them. The farm-hand, to whom the rope had been tossed, was again making ready for a throw, measuring the distance with his eyes. Peter, his lips tightening, waited too. The farm-hand was a tall man, and the posse had shifted to allow him s.p.a.ce. His arm shot up, the noosed rope whizzed forward. But even as it did so Peter Champneys's trigger-finger moved. The report sounded like a clap of thunder, and was followed by a roar of rage and pain. The rope-thrower, with the rope tripping his feet and impeding his movements, danced about wildly, shaking the hand from which three fingers had been cleanly clipped. At that instant another posse rode up, with a baying of hounds to herald it. One saw the sheriff on a large bay horse, a Winchester in the crook of his arm. With a merest glance at what had been Jake, he pushed his way through the throng, and was confronted by Peter Champneys standing in front of old Neptune Fennick, with a smoking shot-gun in his hands.

"You better do something, quick! If you let anything happen to Daddy Nep, you've got to kill me first," panted Peter.

"He'd ought to be shot for a n.i.g.g.e.r-lover, Sheriff!" shouted the farm-hand.

"All right. Do it. But you'll get your neck stretched for it! My name's _Champneys_," shouted Peter.

The sheriff moved restlessly on his bay. A Champneys had fed his parents. Chadwick Champneys had given him his first pair of shoes.

The sheriff was stirred to the depths by the crime that had been committed, and he had no love for a n.i.g.g.e.r, but--

He turned to the menacing crowd. "Here, boys, enough o' this! The right n.i.g.g.e.r's dead, and that's all there is to it. No, you don't do no hangin'! I'm sheriff o' this county, an' I aim to keep the law.

Let that old n.i.g.g.e.r alone, Mosely! If that young h.e.l.l-cat puts a bullet in your chitlin's, it'll be your own funeral."

He straightened in the saddle, touched the rein, and in a second the big bay had been swung around to stand between Neptune and the white men. The muzzle of Peter's gun touched the sheriff's leg.

"Put that pop-gun up, Son," said he, turning his head to look down into the boy's face. Their eyes met, in a long look.

"I knew that girl since she was bawn," he said, and his hard face quivered. "h.e.l.l!" swore the sheriff, and the hand on his bridle shook. He knew old Neptune, too, and in his way liked him. But it was hard for the sheriff, who had seen the dead little girl, to look into any black face that night and retain any feeling of humanity.

"Yes, sir. I knew her, too," said Peter Champneys, gulping. "But--I know Neptune, too. And--what happened--wasn't his fault. It's got nothing to do with Neptune--and--and things that Mosely--" His voice broke.

"h.e.l.l!" swore the sheriff again. And he whispered, more gently, "All right, Peter. An' I reckon you better stay by the old n.i.g.g.e.r for a day or two until this thing dies down." After all, the sheriff thought relievedly, Neptune's swift action, actuated by whatsoever motive, had saved the county and himself from a rather frightful episode. Turning to the crowd, he yelled:

"Get them dogs started for home! They're goin' plum crazy! Get on your hawse, Mosely! You, over there, with your fist shot up, ride next to me. Mount, all o' you! Mount, I say! No, I'll come last.

"What's that you're sayin', Briggs? No, suh, not by a d.a.m.n-sight you won't! Not while I'm sheriff o' this county an' upholdin' law an'

order in it, you won't drag no dead n.i.g.g.e.r behind _my_ hawse--nor yet in front of him, neither! Let the n.i.g.g.e.r lay where he is and rot--what's left of him."

"Do you want us to bury--it?" quavered Peter.

"Bury it or burn it. What the h.e.l.l do I care what you do with it?"

growled the sheriff. "He's dead, that's all I got to think about."

He ran his shrewd eyes over the posse, saw that not one straggler remained to do further mischief, and drove them before him, w.i.l.l.y-nilly. In five minutes the trampled yard was clear, and the sound of the horses' hoofs was already dying in the distance. In the sky all other stars had paled to make room for the morning star.

Peter and Neptune, left alone, looked at each other dumbly. A thing remained to be done. The sun mustn't rise upon the horror that lay in the cabin yard. Neptune went to his small barn and trundled out a wheelbarrow, in which were several gunny-sacks, a piece of rope, and a spade.

Peter turned his head away while the old man covered the thing on the ground with sacking, rolled it over, floppily, and tied it as best he could. The sweat came out on them both as they saw the stains that spread on the clean sacking. Neptune heaped the bundle into his wheelbarrow. At a word from him Peter went into the house and returned with a lighted lantern, for the River Swamp was still very dark. The sun wouldn't be up for an hour or two yet. Peter held the lantern in one hand, and carried spade and shot-gun over the other shoulder. In the ghostly light they entered the swamp, every turn and twist of whose wide, watery acreage was known to Neptune, and was fairly familiar to Peter. They had to proceed warily, for the ground was treacherous, and at any moment a jutting tree-root might upset the clumsy barrow. Despite Neptune's utmost care it b.u.mped and swayed, and the shapeless bundle in it shook hideously, as if it were trying to escape. And the stains on the coa.r.s.e shroud grew, and spread.

In a small and fairly dry s.p.a.ce among particularly large cypresses, Neptune stopped. At one side was a deep pool in whose depths the lantern was reflected. About it ferns, some of a great height, grew thickly. Neptune began to dig in the black earth. Sometimes he struck a cypress root, against which the spade rang with a hollow sound. It was slow enough work, but the hole in the swamp earth grew with every spade-thrust, like a blind mouth opening wider and wider.

Peter held the lantern. The trees stood there like witnesses.

Presently Neptune straightened his shoulders, moved back to the barrow, and edged it to the hole. Swiftly and deftly he tipped it, and the shapeless bundle slid into the open mouth awaiting it. It was curiously still just then in the River Swamp.