The Young Mountaineers Part 23

The sun had barely shown the rim of his great red disk above the sombre woods and snow-crowned crags of the opposite ridge, when Rick Herne, his rifle in his hand, stepped out of his father's log cabin, perched high among the precipices of Old Windy Mountain. He waited motionless for a moment, and all the family trooped to the door to a.s.sist at the time-honored ceremony of firing a salute to the day.

Suddenly the whole landscape catches a rosy glow, Rick whips up his rifle, a jet of flame darts swiftly out, a sharp report rings all around the world, and the sun goes grandly up--while the little tow-headed mountaineers hurrah shrilly for "Chris'mus!"

As he began to re-load his gun, the small boys cl.u.s.tered around him, their hands in the pockets of their baggy jeans trousers, their heads inquiringly askew.

"They air a-goin' ter hev a pea-fow_el_ fur dinner down yander ter Birk's Mill," Rick remarked.

The smallest boy smacked his lips,--not that he knew how pea-fowl tastes, but he imagined unutterable things.

"Somehows I hates fur ye ter go ter eat at Birk's Mill, they air sech a set o' drinkin' men down thar ter Malviny's house," said Rick's mother, as she stood in the doorway, and looked anxiously at him.

For his elder sister was Birk's wife, and to this great feast he was invited as a representative of the family, his father being disabled by "rheumatics," and his mother kept at home by the necessity of providing dinner for those four small boys.

"Hain't I done promised ye not ter tech a drap o' liquor this Chris'mus day?" asked Rick.

"That's a fac'," his mother admitted. "But boys, an' men-folks ginerally, air scandalous easy ter break a promise whar whiskey is in it."

"I'll hev ye ter know that when I gin my word, I keeps it!" cried Rick pridefully.

He little dreamed how that promise was to be a.s.sailed before the sun should go down.

He was a tall, sinewy boy, deft of foot as all these mountaineers are, and a seven-mile walk in the snow to Birk's Mill he considered a mere trifle. He tramped along cheerily enough through the silent solitudes of the dense forest. Only at long intervals the stillness was broken by the cracking of a bough under the weight of snow, or the whistling of a gust of wind through the narrow valley far below.

All at once--it was a terrible shock of surprise--he was sinking! Was there nothing beneath his feet but the vague depths of air to the base of the mountain? He realized with a quiver of dismay that he had mistaken a huge drift-filled fissure, between a jutting crag and the wall of the ridge, for the solid, snow-covered ground. He tossed his arms about wildly in his effort to grasp something firm. The motion only dislodged the drift. He felt that it was falling, and he was going down--down--down with it. He saw the trees on the summit of Old Windy disappear. He caught one glimpse of the neighboring ridges. Then he was blinded and enveloped in this cruel whiteness. He had a wild idea that he had been delivered to it forever; even in the first thaw it would curl up into a wreath of vapor, and rise from the mountain's side, and take him soaring with it--whither? How they would search these bleak wintry fastnesses for him,--while he was gone sailing with the mist!

What would they say at home and at Birk's Mill? One last thought of the "pea-fow_el_," and he seemed to slide swiftly away from the world with the snow.

He was unconscious probably only for a few minutes. When he came to himself, he found that he was lying, half-submerged in the great drift, on the slope of the mountain, and the dark, icicle-begirt cliff towered high above. He stretched his limbs--no bones broken! He could hardly believe that he had fallen unhurt from those heights. He did not appreciate how gradually the snow had slidden down. Being so densely packed, too, it had buoyed him up, and kept him from dashing against the sharp, jagged edges of the rock. He had lost consciousness in the jar when the moving ma.s.s was abruptly arrested by a transverse elevation of the ground. He was still a little dizzy and faint, but otherwise uninjured.

Now a great perplexity took hold on him. How was he to make his way back up the mountain, he asked himself, as he looked at the inaccessible cliffs looming high into the air. All the world around him was unfamiliar. Even his wide wanderings had never brought him into this vast, snowy, trackless wilderness, that stretched out on every side. He would be half the day in finding the valley road that led to Birk's Mill. He rose to his feet, and gazed about him in painful indecision.

The next moment a thrill shot through him, to which he was unaccustomed. He had never before shaken except with the cold,--but this was fear.

For he heard voices! Not from the cliffs above,--but from below! Not from the dense growth of young pines on the slope of the mountain,--but from the depths of the earth beneath! He stood motionless, listening intently, his eyes distended, and his heart beating fast.

All silence! Not even the wind stirred in the pine thicket. The snow lay heavy among the dark green branches, and every slender needle was encased in ice. Rick rubbed his eyes. It was no dream. There was the thicket; but whose were the voices that had rung out faintly from beneath it?

A crowd of superst.i.tions surged upon him. He cast an affrighted glance at the ghastly snow-covered woods and sheeted earth. He was remembering fireside legends, horrible enough to raise the hair on a sophisticated, educated boy's head; much more horrible, then, to a young backwoodsman like Rick. On this, the most benign day that ever dawns upon the world, was he led into these endless wastes of forest to be terrified by the "harnts"?

Suddenly those voices from the earth again! One was singing a drunken catch,--it broke into falsetto, and ended with an unmistakable hiccup.

Rick's blood came back with a rush.

"I hev never hearn tell o' the hoobies gittin' boozy!" he said with a laugh. "That's whar they hev got the upper-hand o' humans."

As he gazed again at the thicket, he saw now something that he had been too much agitated to observe before,--a column of dense smoke that rose from far down the declivity, and seemed to make haste to hide itself among the low-hanging boughs of a clump of fir-trees.

"It's somebody's house down thar," was Rick's conclusion. "I kin find out the way to Birk's Mill from the folkses."

When he neared the smoke, he paused abruptly, staring once more.

There was no house! The smoke rose from among low pine bushes. Above were the snow-laden branches of the fir.

"Ef thar war a house hyar, I reckon I could see it!" said Rick doubtfully, infinitely mystified.

There was a continual drip, drip of moisture all around. Yet a thaw had not set in. Rick looked up at the gigantic icicles that hung to the crags and glittered in the sun,--not a drop trickled from them. But this fir-tree was dripping, dripping, and the snow had melted away from the nearest pine bushes that cl.u.s.tered about the smoke. There was heat below certainly, a strong heat, and somebody was keeping the fire up steadily.

"An' air it folkses ez live underground like foxes an' sech!" Rick exclaimed, astonished, as he came upon a large, irregularly shaped rift in the rocks, and heard the same reeling voice from within, beginning to sing once more. But for this baccha.n.a.lian melody, the noise of Rick's entrance might have given notice of his approach. As it was, the inhabitants of this strange place were even more surprised than he, when, after groping through a dark, low pa.s.sage, an abrupt turn brought him into a lofty, vaulted subterranean apartment. There was a great flare of light, which revealed six or seven muscular men grouped about a large copper vessel built into a rude stone furnace, and all the air was pervaded by an incomparably strong alcoholic odor. The boy started back with a look of terror. That pale terror was reflected on each man's face, as on a mirror. At the sight of the young stranger they all sprang up with the same gesture,--each instinctively laid his hand upon the pistol that he wore.

Poor Rick understood it all at last. He had stumbled upon a nest of distillers, only too common among these mountains, who were hiding from the officers of the Government, running their still in defiance of the law and eluding the whiskey-tax. He realized that in discovering their stronghold he had learned a secret that was by no means a safe one for him to know. And he was in their power; at their mercy!

"Don't shoot!" he faltered. "I jes' want ter ax the folkses ter tell me the way ter Birk's Mill."

What would he have given to be on the bleak mountain outside!

One of the men caught him as if antic.i.p.ating an attempt to run. Two or three, after a low-toned colloquy, took their rifles, and crept cautiously outside to reconnoitre the situation. Rick comprehended their suspicion with new quakings. They imagined that he was a spy, and had been sent among them to discover them plying their forbidden vocation.

This threatened a long imprisonment for them. His heart sank as he thought of it; they would never let him go.

After a time the reconnoitring party came back.

"Nothin' stirrin'," said the leader tersely.

"I mis...o...b..s," muttered another, casting a look of deep suspicion on Rick. "Thar air men out thar, I'm a-thinkin', hid somewhar."

"They air furder 'n a mile off, ennyhow," returned the first speaker.

"We never lef' so much ez a bush 'thout sarchin' of it."

"The off'cers can't find this place no-ways 'thout that thar chap fur a guide," said a third, with a surly nod of his head at Rick.

"We're safe enough, boys, safe enough!" cried a stout-built, red-faced, red-bearded man, evidently very drunk, and with a voice that rose into quavering falsetto as he spoke. "This chap can't do nothin'. We hev got him bound hand an' foot. Hyar air the captive of our bow an' spear, boys! Mighty little captive, though! hi!" He tried to point jeeringly at Rick, and forgot what he had intended to do before he could fairly extend his hand. Then his rollicking head sank on his breast, and he began to sing sleepily again.

One of the more sober of the men had extinguished the fire in order that they should not be betrayed by the smoke outside to the revenue officers who might be seeking them. The place, chilly enough at best, was growing bitter cold. The strange subterranean beauty of the surroundings, the limestone wall and arches, scintillating wherever they caught the light; the shadowy, mysterious vaulted roof; the white stalact.i.tes that hung down thence to touch the stalagmites as they rose up from the floor, and formed with them endless vistas of stately colonnades, all were oddly incongruous with the drunken, bloated faces of the distillers. Rick could not have put his thought into words, but it seemed to him that when men had degraded themselves like this, even inanimate nature is something higher and n.o.bler. "Sermons in stones"

were not far to seek.

He observed that they were making preparations for flight, and once more the fear of what they would do with him clutched at his heart. He was something of a problem to them.

"This hyar cub will go blab," was the first suggestion.

"He will keep mum," said the vocalist, glancing at the boy with a jovially tipsy combination of leer and wink. "Hyar is the persuader!" He rapped sharply on the muzzle of his pistol. "This'll scotch his wheel."

"Hold yer own jaw, ye drunken 'possum!" retorted another of the group.

"Ef ye fire off that pistol in hyar, we'll hev all these hyar rocks"--he pointed at the walls and the long colonnades--"answerin' back an'

yelpin' like a pack o' hounds on a hot scent. Ef thar air folks outside, the noise would fotch 'em down on us fur true!"

Rick breathed more freely. The rocks would speak up for him! He could not be harmed with all these tell-tale witnesses at hand. So silent now, but with a latent voice strong enough for the dread of it to save his life!

The man who had put out the fire, who had led the reconnoitring party, who had made all the active preparations for departure, who seemed, in short, to be an executive committee of one,--a long, lazy-looking mountaineer, with a decision of action in startling contrast to his whole aspect,--now took this matter in hand.

"Nothin' easier," he said tersely. "Fill him up. Make him ez drunk ez a fraish b'iled ow_el_. Then lead him to the t'other eend o' the cave, an' blindfold him, an' lug him off five mile in the woods, an' leave him thar. He'll never know what he hev seen nor done."

"That's the dinctum!" cried the red-bearded man, in delighted approval, breaking into a wild, hiccupping laugh, inexpressibly odious to the boy.