The Red Debt Part 36

"Slab, I am not fooling you. How could I know about the turtle and old Hickamohawk if I had not seen Colonel Tennytown? And he wants you down thah, Slab."

"Li'lle Amos--li'lle Amos?" he repeated, measuring the imaginary height of a boy with his hand. "Li'lle Amos--he want Slab?"

All doubt vanished.

"Hallalujah--hallalujah--hallalujah!"

Intermittently, Slab advanced stout volumes of oral matter to demonstrate that the long-looked-for millennium had arrived at last.

At the witch-elm block the old blind hound staggered exultantly about.

Obeying the instinct of his lonely dog-heart, he yelped and yelped with joy at the vision his senses pictured for him, though which his blank, sightless eyes could not behold. Belle-Ann fell on her knees and took his old head to her, stroking his gray face and kissing his ears.

One of the girl's first acts was to gather two great sheaves of forget-me-nots. These she carried to the orchard. Lem walked beside her, and now they both fell silent. Dividing the flowers equally, Belle-Ann knelt down and arranged them with infinite care.

"Maw loved these," she whispered. "Maw loved these best of all, didn't she, Lem?" She looked up through a film of mist. Their eyes met, and Lem turned his back and walked slowly away and did not answer.

For half an hour the girl lingered there between these two graves with her memories. When she finally got to her feet and lifted her swollen eyes, she saw Slab standing looking at her. The tears were streaming down his ancient, creased visage. His lips moved helplessly, but no words crossed them. He could only point to numberless withered flowers, and seared wreaths scattered hard by, which he had discarded to replace with fresh ones.

"Yes, Slab--you-all did not forget, did you?" she managed to say.

The old negro shook his white head, too overcome to respond.

Belle-Ann and Lem then made the rounds of the place, followed by little Buddy, lugging his father's rifle. They walked out beneath the magnolias, and the giant pines, and visited their old haunts, each of which stirred memories of hours agone.

When they returned to the house, Slab had a most tasteful meal prepared for them. The menu consisted of two kinds of bread, hoe-cake, and hot b.u.t.ter-milk biscuits with honey. It also embraced baked yams with fresh b.u.t.ter, fried spring chicken, poached eggs, rich, fresh milk, and blackberries and cream.

As Belle-Ann lingered over this repast, she felt that she had not, during her absence, tasted anything quite so delicious. Near dusk, Slab took up his hybrid banjo and repaired to the witch-elm block, followed by the others. There, with the blind hound's aged head in her lap, Belle-Ann joined in the chorus of "Kitty Wells." And as the shadows stole down and put their arms about them, the day lifted, and the thread-like note of the mock-thrush ebbed away from the blossomed sides of the mountain. The plaintive callings of the Bob White ceased, and the forest birds folded their wings. And another choir of voices awoke to cross and re-cross the void of twilight.

The katydids began to purl. A symphony of crickets trilled away in the darkling rhododendron thickets. The tree-frogs piped an avalanche of pleading notes amid the ruby-throated magnolias. The silvery treble of the nightingale floated down from afar, and the hilarious killdeers, king of all-night revelers, screamed aloft and flapped their speckled wings in the early starlight. And above this, in soughing, alternate waves of sound, a t.i.tanic rhythm trailed into this medley of wilderness voices--the savage, deathless music of the cascade ranting in the rock-barbed throat of h.e.l.lsfork, dying, swelling, reverberating like the barbaric boom of a tom-tom.

That night Belle-Ann occupied her own little crude apartment in the four-room cabin. She slept soundly and sweetly in this little wooden bed, which Slab had reverently preserved unaltered for her coming. And the night air drifted in upon her face, pungent with the scent of pine, and the old sweet odors that summoned a hundred memories to vivid life.

There were the self-same multiplicity of night enunciations, consolidated and merged into a soothing litany, harping a pulsing consonance that lured the girl's senses away to the fantastic shoals of dreamdom. And betimes, the same great, friendly moon that had followed her abroad, came now and stood at her window.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

THE GHOST-MAN

Lem had said little, but upon his honest, pleasing face there was now etched the momentous outlines of the most serious, profound problem that had ever confronted his tempestuous life. With the sober, solemn realization of this vital issue that had come upon him, he found himself mentally reaching out for sustenance. Seemingly he stood upon the pinnacle of an epochal summit, with all the threads governing his life, past and future, dangling limply beneath him. It was the tensest hour of his existence.

They sat in the moonshine on the witch-elm block, and the whip-poor-will was calling. They came here in the whispering gloaming ere twilight and night had parted. They still sat there; the girl talking incessantly.

Time galloped by unheeded with the flight of an affrighted Pegasus.

Phantom shadows grew and gesticulated and stretched their wraith-like arms out toward them. And the moon slipped over the spur and laved them with an effulgent benediction. Lem sat non-committal and stoic.

Belle-Ann's curls bobbed in the moonlight as she tossed them back restlessly. For more than an hour she had been pouring into his ears all the things that lay in her heart which had been re-cast in a new mould of understanding and burnished with ethics of education. The t.i.tanic moment she had antic.i.p.ated had arrived. The dawn of the morrow was to part them forevermore, or it was to bind their lives together irrevocably. He had again begged her to promise to marry him, and this was her answer. Her low, dulcet tones rippled on and on. Her little hands fluttered appealingly in their flights of emphasis. Her violet orbs were starry with the truths that hurried across her lips, and her whole being throbbed with the vibrant force of this conquest. He spoke for the first time.

"Ef yo' keep on a talkin' thet away, Belle-Ann,--yo'll make me lie t'

yo'," he predicted dolefully, casting yearning eyes upon her. As yet not once had he kissed that red-mouthed, dimpled face. Not yet had he clasped that withy, supple form to him. The price now of that treasured kiss, and that longed-for embrace, and her priceless love, was his whole and complete repudiation of his b.l.o.o.d.y creed of feudalism.

"I am not afraid of your deceiving me, Lem--you have never lied to me in the past, and I'll trust you-all in the future. I mean to lift you up,"

she went on earnestly,--"to show you a worthy goal that I know is thah awaiting your acknowledgment. As I have said over and over, Lem, I do not expect you to understand it all now, but I hoped that you would believe me, who have gone through it all with its blighting misery. Your whole life is now and always will be made furtive and fear-ridden, while you cling to this blood-dogma of revenge--always looking for the blood of your enemies, and when at last you get that blood and delude yourself into the thought that you are satisfied, you find springing out of that very act other enemies waiting in your path. It is an endless chain of fight and flight and blood that is harrowing. I saw an example of it yesterday before my very eyes, because I know you would have killed Sap McGill had I not been thah. It is all fundamentally wicked. Oh, Lem! It is all hideously wrong. Now that I am rid of that awful sting, I cannot and will not link my life to one who harbors these awful things to drag us both down.

"Won't you put this life behind you, Lem, and come down where G.o.d has granted a paradise--a paradise of peace? Down where nature has unfurled a gra.s.sy, level land and men walk in the open and can see each other's faces? Down thah, Lem, where hearts beat uncontaminated beyond the maelstrom of feudal hate, and where all men are brothers--down in the land of hope--hope that makes a song of life--in the land of hope, Lem,--a cloudless, sunshiny fairy world--where dreams come true?

"You said you would love to go to Lexington to my grandfather, but you won't leave the mountains until you have killed the revenuer and Sap McGill. Is that evidence that you love me, Lem? To-morrow morning I'll ride Rajah back alone. I don't believe that you love me, Lem--I can't believe it----"

Lem got to his feet. He was very white in the moonlight now. He picked up a stick off the ground. He rested the b.u.t.t of his rifle against the block and, placing the muzzle of the gun against his breast, he reached down and touched the trigger with the end of the stick before Belle-Ann realized what he was up to.

"Belle-Ann, say that I don't love yo' agin an' I'll blow my heart out."

Gently and quickly she took the stick out of his hand in alarm.

"Lem, there is a way out for you--there is a sustaining power that will help you, if you will only have faith," she pleaded. "'Know ye the truth and the truth shall make ye free.'"

"But he kilt my old pap,--an' my good old maw, Belle-Ann. I'd alers heer their spirits a cryin' ef I went away an' didn't git th' revenuer's blood," he protested for the twentieth time. "An' didn't McGill try t'

kill me jest yisterday?"

"Lem," she said, "I tell you what we'll do. We'll go down to the church--we'll go down thah--you and me and Buddy--down thah by the altar where your father died. G.o.d won't deny you thah. We will offer up a little prayer for pap and maw, and you will ask G.o.d to show you the truth of my words--that it is wrong for you to hang back and sacrifice your future for the blood of your enemies. Take my word for it, Lem--G.o.d will surely lay His hand on those who have harmed you. Will you go, Lem--come now--will you go with Belle-Ann?"

For the first time Lem's face lost a measure of its despair. His eyes lighted up with the advent of an emollient hope, and a half-smile touched his lips.

"Come 'long, Belle-Ann," he agreed, "let's do thet." And a prayer mounted in Belle-Ann's breast as she called to Buddy to come along and bring a lantern. Then hand in hand they wound their way down the moonlit mountain-side toward the deserted church. And up from the girl's heart a spa of hope was abubble. The joy of life was again strong upon her.

There was a song in her soul and the blithesome days of yore were rippling in her veins.

The forsaken church stood out big and white, magnified in a pool of moonlight, like a runic tomb guarding the memory of a martyr. With a ruthless swish, the laurel wall that hemmed the clearing suddenly parted, and the next instant the scathed, battered semblance of a man-being crawled out into the silver moonshine.

A wound-burnt, sinister shape, half naked. The revengeful way-path rocks had bitten into his inflamed knees. The vicious thorns had torn and stabbed maledictions into his hands. The clawing underbrush had stripped his clothing away, and the poison ivy and skunk-viper had sprung upon and spat their gangrene acid against his nakedness. There was misery in each lift of knees and hands, as though weighted with ball and chain. In his zigzag wake there was a lesion of nauseous mocking horror. This thing panted like a spent buffalo, as with popped, blood-rimmed eyes it stared at the church.

It was the revenuer come back in the hour of his extremity.

With wabbling head, he focused his blighted face upon the church--a shrine all in white beckoning to him, insistently. Foot by foot he forged his tortuous way across the open and onward. His corporal being, ruined, ravished and wrecked, his derelict spirit was blindly upstanding. Excruciatingly and piteously he moved across the sea of wild honey clover and foxtail with the slowness of a sh.o.r.e-viewed water craft, stationary only while the eye held it, but with a trick to move when the gaze is lifted.

When this odious, strange apparition had gained a point midway to the church, then it was that a lithe, agile, uncertain shape, a sp.a.w.n from the matrix of the shadowless gulch below, slid up out of the dark, halted on the verge of the shades and then as lightly as air sprung its haunches upward to a great spruce stump. It was the male panther who owned a mate and cubs, and who patrolled the darkling hours with a dare-all note in his minor night-squall; who dominated the animal kingdom and held in subservient fear all the lesser pantomimic pirates of the forest.

At first his eyes widened curiously as they settled upon the audacious trespa.s.ser in the clearing. Had this thing under his quizzical gaze walked upright, he could have understood and would have skulked hastily away, but now a quick challenge crowded into his feline breast, as he realized that an alien, hairy creature, that stalked on four legs, had dared to invade the night that belonged to him and the province that was his.

Straightway a keen and malignant resentment seized and traversed his bristling spine, and his long tail began to lash the ground menacingly.

It wagged him into a great fury. As noiselessly as a moccasin slides into the water, he dropped from the dark spruce stump into the velvet mullein leaves, and skirted the whiteness of the moon. He leaped lightly through the s.p.a.ce and landed in the shade of the church. With a sudden wary flash, he darted forward. Then, boldly and ready, he turned sharply and advanced in the forefront of this new enemy that now was his prey.

Stealth was in his padded paws as he lowered his ermine belly to the ground and crept sneakingly to meet the newcomer.

When a mere six feet separated the two, the panther's hairy, spotted lips parted thirstily. He choked back the growl of savage exultation that welled up in his chest, his yellow eyes all afire with l.u.s.t. He gathered his steel-like thews under him with a mighty tenseness to spring. His wagging tail stopped and stiffened. As he made to leave the ground, the thing before him jerked its gory head suddenly upward, looked, and thrust a laugh in the brute's face.

Such a laugh! The splintering, squawking reiterations of petered-out echoes, bubbling up into a mundane night from the precincts of the eternally d.a.m.ned. That laugh splashed upon the serene night like the plunge of a boulder into a placid pool. It drove the pith out of the panther's militant cat-heart. It curdled the will to kill that had blazed from the beast's agate eyes. Instantly the brute, dazed with terror, wrenched his round head askew, to shut from his tan eyes and black ears the sight and the sound of this monstrous, unknown antagonist.

The brute's tail went limp as he hurtled obliquely through the air, landed in the bull-gra.s.s, plunged into the inky shadows and fled away from this moonlit spot with its hideous blot of terror, and hurried toward the pitchy brakes that hemmed the river, with panic curdling his jungle blood.

The maimed, bedraggled hulk careened; then at the end of a panting struggle fell over the door block and tumbled heavily against the church portal. The dilapidated, weather-scarred door gave way unresistingly to him and his bedlam cry as though it had boded this unholy visitation. He stopped on the threshold, sprawling half in, half without. The uncouth noise of his breathing hissing through a ragged ruin of teeth, cut the sepulchral stillness of the church room with the portent of some awful prediction. His haggled, bleeding hand stamped its red curse upon the door panel. Then, with a mad, mighty will, he lashed his flagging spirit to another effort and broke into a pitiable, wabbling, four-legged trot.