When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry Part 10

"Gentlemen," said the host in a matter-of-fact voice, "ef you'll excuse me, I'll rest yore guns."

Then in observance of a quaint and ancient ceremonial, each armed guardian pa.s.sed in, surrendering his rifle at the threshold. In r.e.t.a.r.ded Appalachia so runs the rule. To fail in its fulfilment is to express distrust for the honesty and ability of the householder to protect his guests, and such an implication const.i.tutes a grave discourtesy.

Inside a fire roared on the hearth, for even in June, the mountain nights are raw.

Henderson, watching the small cavalcade troop in, smiled inwardly. He was not unmindful of the ident.i.ty or the power of this modern baron, and he was not without suspicion that he himself was the cause of the visit.

"I chanced ter be farin' by, Lone," Kinnard Towers enlightened his host easily, "an' I 'lowed I'd light down an' rest a little spell."

"Ye're welcome," was the simple reply. "Draw up ter ther fire an' set ye a cheer."

The talk lingered for a s.p.a.ce on neighborhood topics, but the host had found time, between hearing the shout outside and replying to it, to say in a low voice to his guest: "I reckon atter Kinnard Towers comes in we won't talk no more erbout my still--jest stills in gin'ral," and that caution was religiously observed.

The kitchen tasks had been finished now and while the men sat close to the smoking hearth the faces of the women looked on from the shadowed corners of the room, where they sat half obscured upon the huge four-poster beds.

The man who had crossed Cedar Mountain lighted his pipe from the bed of coals and then, straightening up, he stood on the hearth where his eyes could take in the whole semicircle of listening faces. They were eyes that, for all their seeming of a theorist's engrossment, missed little.

This house might have been a pioneer abode of two hundred years ago, standing unamended by the whole swelling tide of modernity that had pa.s.sed it by untouched.

The leaping blaze glittered on the metal of polished rifles stacked in a corner, and on two others hanging against the smoke-dimmed logs of the walls. Red pods of peppers and brown leaves of tobacco were strung along the rafters. Hardly defined of shape against one shadowy wall, stood a spinning wheel.

Henderson knew that the room was pregnant with the conflict of human elements. He realized that he himself faced possibilities which made his mission here a thing of delicate manipulation; even of personal danger.

The blond man with the heavy neck, who sat contemplatively chewing at the stem of an unlighted pipe, listened in silence. He hardly seemed interested, but Henderson recognized him for the sponsor and beneficiary of lawlessness. He more than any other would be the logical foe to a new order which brought the law in its wake--and the law's reckonings.

Near to the enemy whom he had heretofore faced in pitched battle, sat old Lone Stacy, his brogans kicked off and his bare feet thrust out to the warmth; bearded, shrewd of eye, a professed lover of the law, asking only the exemption of his illicit still. He, too, in the feud days had wielded power, but had sought in the main to wield it for peace.

And there, showing no disposition to draw aside the skirts of his raiment in disgust, sat the preacher of the hills whose strength lay in his ability to reconcile antagonisms, while yet he stood staunch, abating nothing of self-sacrificial effort. It was almost as though church and crown and commoner were gathered in informal conclave.

But luminous, like fixed stars, gleamed two other pairs of eyes. As he realized them, Henderson straightened up with such a thrill as comes from a vision. Here were the eyes of builders of the future--agleam as they looked on the present! Blossom's were wide and enthralled and Turner Stacy's burned as might those of a young crusader hearing from the lips of old and seasoned knights recitals of the wars of the Sepulchre.

Bear Cat Stacy saw in this stranger the prophet bearing messages for which he had longed--and waited almost without hope. But Kinnard Towers saw in him a dangerous and unsettling agitator.

"You said," declared Henderson, when the theme had swung back again to economic discussion, "that your cornfield was good for a few crops and then the rains would wash it bare, yet as I came along the road I saw an out-cropping vein of coal that reached above my head, and on each side of me were magnificent stretches of timber that the world needs and that is growing scarce."

"Much profit thet does me," Lone Stacy laughed dryly. "Down at Uncle Israel's store thar's a dollar bill thet looks like hit's a-layin' on ther counter--but when ye aims to pick hit up ye discarns thet hit's pasted under ther gla.s.s. Thet coal an' timber of mine air pasted ter ther wrong side of Cedar Mounting."

"And why? Because there are few roads and fewer schools. It's less the cost and difficulties of building wagon roads than something else that stands in the way. It's the laurel."

"The laurel?" repeated Lone Stacy, but the preacher nodded comprehendingly, and the visitor went on:

"Yes. The laurel. I've been in Central American jungles where men died of fever because the thick growth held and bred the miasma. Here the laurel holds a spirit of concealment. If there wasn't a bush in all these hills big enough to hide a man, the country would be thrown open to the markets of the world. It's the spirit of hiding--that locks life in and keeps it poor."

"I presume ye means on account of ther blockade licker," replied the host, "but thet don't tech ther root of ther matter. How erbout ther fields thet stand on end; fields thet kain't be plowed an' thet ther rains brings down on yore head, leavin' nuthin 'thar but ther rock?"

Henderson had the power of convincing words, abetted by a persuasive quality of voice. As a mountain man he preached his faith in the future of the hills. He spoke of the vineyards of Madeira where slopes as incorrigibly steep as these were redeemed by terracing. He talked of other lands that were being exhausted of resources and turning greedy eyes upon the untapped wealth of the c.u.mberlands. He painted the picture glowingly and fervently, and Turner Stacy, listening, bent forward with a new fire in his eyes: a fire which Kinnard Towers did not fail to mark.

"When ther railroad taps us," interpolated Lone Stacy, in a pause, "mebby we kin manage ter live. Some says ther road aims ter cross Cedar Mounting."

"Don't deceive yourself with false hopes," warned the visitor. "This change must be brought about from inside--not outside. The coming of the railroad lies a decade or two away. I've investigated that question pretty thoroughly and I know. The coal-fields are so large that railroads can still, for a long time to come, choose the less expensive routes. Cedar Mountain balks them for the present. It will probably balk them for the length of our lives--but this country can progress without waiting for that."

"So ye thinks thet even without no railroad this G.o.d-forsaken land kin still prosper somehow?" inquired the host skeptically, and the visitor answered promptly:

"I do. I am so convinced of it that I'm here to buy property--to invest all I have and all my mother and sisters have. I think that by introducing modern methods of intensive farming, I can make it pay a fair return in my own time--and when I die I'll leave property that will ultimately enrich the younger generations. I _don't_ think it can make me rich in my lifetime--but _some_ day it's a certainty of millions."

"Why don't ye buy yoreself property whar ther railroad will come in yore own day, then? Wouldn't thet pay ye better?"

The suggestion was the first contribution to the conversation that had come from Kinnard Towers, and it was proffered in a voice almost urbane of tone.

Henderson turned toward him.

"That's a straight question and I'll answer it straight. To buy as much property as I want along a possible railway line would cost too much money. I'm gambling, not on the present but on the future. I come here because I know the railroad is _not_ coming and for that reason prices will be moderate."

As he made this explanation the newcomer was watching the face of his questioner almost eagerly. What he read there might spell the success or failure of his plans. Any enterprise across which Kinnard Towers stamped the word "prohibited" was an enterprise doomed to great vicissitude in a land where his word was often above the law.

But the blond and florid man granted him the satisfaction of no reply.

He gazed pensively at the logs crackling on the hearth and his features were as inscrutably blank as those of the Sphinx.

After a moment Towers did speak, but it was to his host and on another topic.

"Lone," he said, "thet firewood of yourn's right green an' sappy, hain't it? Hit pops like ther fo'th of July."

Brother Fulkerson spoke reflectively: "We needs two more things then we've got in these hills--an' one thing less then we've got. We wants roads an' schools--and the end of makin' white licker."

Henderson saw Blossom slip from the bed and flit shadow-like through the door, and a few moments later he missed, too, the eagerly attentive presence of the boy. Blossom had escaped from the reek of tobacco smoke inside, to the soft cadences of the night-song and the silver wash of the moonlight.

Turner Stacy found her sitting, with her face between her palms, under a great oak that leaned out across the trickle of the creek, and when he spoke her name, she raised eyes glistening with tears.

"Blossom," he began in a contrite voice, "ye're mad at me, ain't ye?

Ye've done heerd about--about last night." Then he added with moody self-accusation, "G.o.d knows I don't blame ye none."

She turned her head away and did not at once answer. Suddenly her throat choked and she broke into sobs that shook her with their violence. The young man stood rigid, his face drawn with self-hatred and at last she looked up at him.

"Somehow, Turner," she said unsteadily, "hit wouldn't of been jest ther same ef hit had been any other time. Yestiddy--up thar on ther ridge--ye promised me thet ye'd be heedful with licker."

"I knows I did," he declared bitterly. "Ye've got a right ter plumb hate me."

"Ef I'd a-hated ye," she reminded him simply, "I wouldn't sca'cely have watched ther road all day." Then irrelevantly she demanded, "How did ye git yore shoulder hurt?"

The wish to defend himself with the palliations of last night's desperate fatigue and the chill in his wound was a strong temptation, but he repressed it. Knowledge of his encounter with Ratler Webb would only alarm her and conjure up fears of unforgiving vengeance.

"Hit war just a gun thet went off accidental-like," he prevaricated. "I wasn't harmed none, Blossom." Then in a tense voice he continued: "I only aimed ter drink a leetle--not too much--an' then somehow I didn't seem ter hev ther power ter quit."

He felt the lameness of that plea and broke off.

"I'd been studyin' about what you said on ther ridge," she told him falteringly, and the tremor of her voice electrified him. Again the mountains on their ancient foundations grew unsteady before his eyes.

"Does ye mean thet--thet despite last night--ye keers fer me?"