The Red Debt Part 19

While the keys were grating on the tiers above, Last Time hustled up to Lem's cell with a bucket of water and a mop, and in silence washed every vestige of the blood-stain away. As he took up the bucket to go, he turned to Lem.

"He's over in the dead-room now. Ain't it h.e.l.l, though?--and him only a kid at that. He had a fine face, too,--he cut his throat with a broken pocket mirror. There comes the bull for the count--so-long."

As the cracksman went, Lem saw a film of moisture glisten in his eyes.

CHAPTER XIV

"THE ONLYEST LUTTS"

Up on Eagle Crown, dim crest of his benighted world, Buddy Lutts' small shape made a vague shadow, fusing with the dawn-mists that dipped and lifted and swathed the peaks like a nun's veil. The boy crawled far out on this majestic point that divided night from day. On one side the sun had poised its jewelled lance against the east. On the other, the vanquished morning moon was hiding his pallid face amidst the naked peaks.

Buddy crawled farther along the dew-chilled brink of the ledge like a young, lean catamount whelp. Here he sprawled at full length upon his stomach with his thin face propped up between his hands. Here, alone on the sanctum-rock of Eagle Crown, he lay, his moody eyes gazing beneath and across the limitless expanse of purple fog.

There was a great ache in his heart, and he was lonelier than any boy could well be and live. By and by he discerned the top of the church belfry floating on the sea of fog like a buoy, and the mere sight of this replenished the fires of vengeance that had reduced his puerile being to a hard cinder of hate.

No human foot had ventured across the door block of that death place since that serene Sabbath morning, more than a year since, when they had lifted the dead body of his father off the virgin altar and laid him on the pyramid of flowers built up in the clearing by the hundreds who had come to witness the dedication of the church. Although this deed stood foremost and fresh and even more vivid now in his memory, still, the calendar day of its enactment, seemingly, held a grim unforgettable spot on the apex of a grievous avalanche of immeasurable vengeance.

The boy wearily withdrew his truculent gaze and his eyes softened with an unutterable sadness as he fixed them on the tops of the apple trees, behind the log barn, grouped about the two sodden graves of his father and mother--both dead at the hands of the despised law. His heart was dead to all else save one hope--to avenge the death of his parents and his brother Lem, whom he now believed to have been murdered by Sap McGill. He would not count his young life amiss with all its hardships and heart-aches, if only he could see the dawn of this triumphant day for which he lived. He was hoping and waiting and watching--waiting evermore.

It seemed that the torturous days, weeks and months that he wandered through the hills furtively and alone, waiting and watching since his father's killing and since Lem and Belle-Ann had slipped away and out of his life, was time enough to make a decrepit, aged man. An insufferable loneliness had wrapped its tentacles around his being, and had, like a cruel tourniquet, crushed all the joy out of his soul. At times in retrospective indulgence he felt that his soul could not endure. Tears might have alleviated the misery within him, but Buddy's grievous repining and loneliness was of a tearless brand.

Buddy Lutts was a boy in size and in years only, for it was with an adult stoicism that he valiantly fought this creeping madness. In his weaker moments this brooding would seize him and drag him back to the brink of utter hopelessness and despair; but always his purpose would fly to his rescue and beckon a renewed promise, and he would awake out of these lethargies armed with a buoyant sense of patience and inspired with a mighty will to wait and watch.

In these periodical relapses it was his wont to humor his fevered fancy with lurid and extravagant sequences to his protracted term of espionage. Among these vagaries was a pet dream representing the revenuer and Sap McGill creeping upon him in single file; whereupon, he fired and his single ball tore both their hearts out and made him dance and clap his hands with sheer joy, and he was merrier than any orphan had ever been before him. His conscience acquitted him blithely, and his spirits soared skyward.

Deprived of these monopolistic creations of reprisal to alleviate the tension of his hate, the bonds of his perverse reason would have burst asunder and left him bereft.

But now again, there arose a cheering prophecy in the advent of spring.

Since Lem Lutts had dropped out of the mountain so mysteriously, the bitter nights and days had rolled into weary months. And the brooding months had waxed into riotous winter tempests and had dragged in endless, eternal deluges of ice and snow, adding cold agony to Buddy's already misanthropic heart. But finally the crows rode up on the soft winds out of the South, and a benign sun broke the grip of these frost-bound hills, and gradually emptied their pockets of snow. The ridges and coves, and the emerald hulks of the mountains smiled gratefully back. And through this expanse of tangled scenic splendor, the rhododendrons and laurels wove a banner of multicolored tones. The sa.s.safras and poplar and dogwood bloomed and the cascade sang a new ode.

The calling of the lark came up from the lowland, mingled with the blatant scream of jay-birds in the orchard. And the warble of the blue-birds filled the odoriferous somnolent air.

Buddy lay motionless out on the crag with his thoughts, and watched the sun unveil the spurs below him. Then he divided his gaze between the distant splash of water that marked Boon's Ford, shining back like the glint of a sun-perch, and the yellow length of trail across h.e.l.lsfork that marked the path to Sap McGill's stronghold. Then he twisted his head around unconsciously, and his eyes caressed the rifle that rested behind him--his father's rifle. And an inarticulate muttering answered the reiterated avowal in his heart, inspired each time he looked at this, his father's rifle--a sacred relic bequeathed to him and vested with a stupendous responsibility. He reasoned that now as he was the last of the Luttses, he was rightfully the Captain of the faction. In view of this heritage he argued that he should at least have a voice in the counsel of the clan.

But Johnse Hatfield had a smooth, persuasive mien with him, and while he and all the men facetiously recognized young Buddy as their "Captain,"

they had, through Johnse, kept Buddy artfully in the background. The disgruntled boy did not relish this lack of due recognition and these periods of inaction. He did not favor postponements. Time and again he had appealed to Johnse Hatfield to issue a call and muster every man and boy in the Moon mountains range, and cross h.e.l.lsfork and storm the McGills, win or lose. Ultimately, Johnse always twisted this sanguine project away from him, through flattery and cajolery; making amendments bit by bit, until Buddy's pet scheme had petered down to another postponement to which he readily acquiesced at the time. But always his truant ac.u.men told him later that Johnse Hatfield did not consider him "fitten."

This morning Buddy crawfished backward away from the brink of the overhanging rock. He threw the rifle-strap over his shoulder, and as he made the dangerous descent, there was etched on his grim little face the outlines of some new, inexorable resolution.

The type of man who now stood as dictator and leader by proxy, of the Lutts' faction in the Moon mountain range, was an individual possessing a peculiarly complex and many-sided nature. In stature Johnse Hatfield was of medium height. He was deep-chested and thick of neck, but his legs were straight and incongruously slender in comparison with his shoulders. His face was a mask of black, close-cropped hair, save the complete exposure of the mouth.

The hair growth halted below the lower lip and, from constant biting or use of the shears, the hair on his upper lip held aloof; hence, the mouth, thick-lipped and wide and tilted upward at the corners, bore the aspect of one perpetual smile. But, oddly enough, the eyes were a total and surprising antonym of this smiling mouth. They were markedly small, close set, and of a singular amber hue, glinting like needle points and carrying the fire of direct and instant demand. Thus, these closely coupled, unwinking eyes contradicted and specifically denied the smiling, placatory, diplomatic mouth so prominent across his black visage.

It was said of Johnse Hatfield that at the moment marking his advent into the world he had interrupted his mother who was working a pump-gun from behind a grind-stone, in her will to help the men-folks repulse an attack upon their home cabin. She claimed that she "sho' wud a fetched thet 'onery Tod McCoy," whose head she was angling for behind a turnip mound, "ef little Johnsie hed a waited an' hadn't bin so all-fired anxious t' git hisse'f into th' rumpus."

As a lad Johnse had carried arms with his notorious father and brothers against the McCoys. Then he had drifted up Hazard way and had, through blood relationship, become entangled in the French-Eversole war. Eight years since he had come up to Moon mountain to visit "Maw" Lutts, who was a blood cousin, and he never went back.

While his life had been practically one prolonged fight, there was, nevertheless, a commiserating, gentle side to his nature. This incorruptible fealty and trustworthiness was an element that had attracted old Cap Lutts, and in time Johnse Hatfield had become the old man's first lieutenant. He had since served gallantly through many fierce sorties with the McGills and the revenuers.

Johnse's friends pretended that he was a source of deep anxiety to them when near the water, because if he unfortunately fell in, there was enough lead in him to take him to the very bottom and keep him there.

Hatfield had a smattering of education, and was reputed as upstanding as a mountain fighter could well be. Certainly, Johnse did not stand up and invite hot pellets of lead. He did not scorn a rock or a tree any more than did his opposing belligerents. But throughout his life the value of his given word was equal to a fulfillment. Those who bargained for this man's word felt that on the spot where Johnse defaulted they would find his dead body.

When Lem Lutts had disappeared so inexplicably from the mountains, Hatfield had, after a hasty search, hied himself out and visited every calaboose and county jail in the surrounding country. He knew the cunning of Burton, the revenuer, well enough, but little did he antic.i.p.ate such a flagrant irregularity as the transfer of a "moonshiner" to the capital of the State, with a dozen counties separating the place of offense. Such a procedure was depriving a defendant of all const.i.tutional rights, and an effrontery to county jurisprudence, the enormity of which Hatfield could not ascribe to the power of even the wily, murderous revenuer.

CHAPTER XV

BUDDY FORCES AN ISSUE

After getting authentic information from the offices of the six Federal commissioners in the eastern district, and finding, to his deep chagrin, absolutely no trace of Lem Lutts, Johnse returned, and calling fifty men, he inst.i.tuted a search that lasted for weeks. He beat every mountain side up to its crest. He scoured every cave and cove, and creek bottom. There was not a square yard of rock or earth or tangled brush that had escaped his search for Lem. But they did not find Lem's bones, and finally, Hatfield had resumed the regular routine amidst daily conjectures and prophecies, and dire maledictions from the men, directed toward the McGills.

While Johnse made no outward preparations for hostilities, his mind was busy. This disappearance of Lem Lutts was not a closed incident to be relegated to forgetfulness. On the contrary, as the months pa.s.sed, the temper of the Lutts' faction waxed to such a stage of suppressed fury that Hatfield knew it was only a matter of time, and a brief time at that, before he would be compelled to head a ma.s.sacre over in Southpaw.

It was while Johnse was making preparations after careful deliberations, to force a fight with the McGills and square for the supposed annihilation of Lem Lutts, that an unlooked-for incident occurred which hastened the conflict, but changed the site of battle.

Prior to the death of old Cap Lutts, he had moved his distillery to a new site. Some fifty yards distant from the blind mouth of a cave he drilled a hole downward through forty feet of rock and earth and into a cave. Then he ran a channel pipe up through this hole and directly over the outlet he built a two-room cabin. This pipe was merged into the structure behind the fireplace in the cabin and continued upward some feet to where it opened out into the chimney proper; wherefore all the pungent odors and smoke from the distillery in the cave beneath the cabin followed this pipe and issued into the atmosphere through the chimney in a most natural manner.

Nothing short of destruction of the cabin could have disclosed the presence of this ingenious device. Moreover, in the improbable event that prying eyes had been permitted to scrutinize these premises, it is highly doubtful that the mouth to the cave would have been discovered after the most minute and careful search. Because the entrance to this underground region was barely s.p.a.cious enough to admit one man on his hands and knees.

Furthermore, this entrance would be wholly and snugly closed by a huge boulder several tons in weight, or more than twenty men could displace.

This great rock had the innocent appearance of a hundred other rocks all about it, and was so trussed up and balanced that one man could knock the prop out with a single blow, thereby releasing it and allowing it to drop back with its concave side fitting over the mouth of the cave in a manner that defied detection. When this precaution was resorted to, it required the labor of thirty men and two steers to truss it up again.

It was here in this cabin that Johnse Hatfield kept "bachelor's hall"

and maintained a "residence."

When Buddy Lutts climbed down from his solitary reverie on Eagle Crown, he made for Johnse Hatfield's cabin as straight as crooked trails that "back tracked" themselves could take him.

When he arrived at the "still," the "night force" was just crawling out of the cave to repair to their respective shacks. Buddy stepped within the cabin and cast about for Johnse. He stepped toward the adjoining room, but halted inquiringly, when he saw Hatfield's broad back and the profile of a man he did not know.

Johnse looked behind him, got to his feet, and as he closed the door between, tossed a meaning gesture to Buddy, who rolled into a split-bottom chair to wait, opposite a row of ten Winchester rifles along the wall.

The men from the cave now pushed into the cabin. They all wore holsters with twin Colts, but had stepped in to get their rifles. As they lagged about, got their guns, and straggled out again, they all in turn had an indulgent look or a playful nudge or respectful pleasantry for "little Cap Lutts." Their manner, however, made it plain that they did not expect any effervescent response from Buddy.

Bud was known to be not a voluble lad. Some had ventured that "little Cap wus jest a pinch tuck in th' haid," but down in their rough hearts they pitied and loved him, for who knew better than they the train of barb-tipped circ.u.mstances that had crushed down upon this boy to harrow his young life with their eating misery?

Hatfield soon appeared, followed by the strange man, who continued out the door without words. Johnse faced Buddy.

"Howdy, little Cap--how's pickin's?"

Buddy sat speechless with the newcomer in his mind, and questioning eyes upon Johnse's face, but Hatfield volunteered no enlightenment, and his hairy mask with its naked, smiling lips and frowning eyes was unreadable.

"Foller me in, Buddy--I'm aimin' to kick up some breakfast 'bout now--maybe yo'll have a snack, eh?"