When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry Part 6

Its eyes traveled in a silent pathos from the sight of sagging jaw and hunched shoulders to the unresponsive majesty of the calm hills as if beseeching comfort there. In his only son's spirit had seemed to burn a fire of promise which even he could not understand. Was that fire to be quenched into the stale ashes of habitual drunkenness?

A groan rumbled in his throat.

Yet, had he remembered his Scriptures, Samson, the Mighty, had surrendered in his moment of weakness to the allurements and the shears of Delilah! Afterward, he had pulled down the pillars of the temple.

These hills that had stood upright in days when the Alps and the Himalayas had not yet stirred in conception, looked down placid, and unsympathetic. Perhaps the eternal spirit of the range was not ashamed of this erring child, asleep on its bosom. Perhaps, cognizant alike of tempest and calm, it recognized this son's kinship with itself. The prophecy which dwells in the immemorial may have foreseen gathering powers of hurricane and might, which should some day make him rise, above lesser summits. Possibly as he slept the great, silent voices were crooning a lullaby over offspring destined for mastery.

When Ratler Webb had turned away from the tub-mill his brain was still half stunned from the jarring punishment of battle. He was thoroughly conscious only of deep chagrin and a gnawing hunger for reprisal.

From childhood he retained no tender memories.

There was no one upon whom he had a claim of blood, and neighborhood report had not let him forget that he was a woodscolt. In hill parlance a woodscolt signifies one whose birth has been sanctioned by no prior rites of matrimony.

Since he could remember he had existed only by virtue of the same predatory boldness which gives the lean razor-back strength and innate craftiness to live.

Just now his whole abundant capacity for hatred was centered on Bear Cat Stacy, yet since Bear Cat's kinsmen peopled every creek and spring-branch of this country he could not be casually murdered.

Any word slipped to the ear of the revenue man might be traced back to him and after that he could no longer live among his native hills.

Still, he reflected as he slowly rubbed his fingers along his uneven nose, time brings changes and chances. The possession of definite evidence against his enemy might some day bear fruit.

So Ratler did not ride home after his encounter at the mill. He took refuge instead in an abandoned cabin of which he knew, strategically located within a mile of the place where he had surmised the Stacy family were making illicit whiskey. While the storm raged, threatening to bring down the sagging roof timbers about his ears, he sat before its dead and ruined hearth, entertaining bitter thoughts.

Between midnight and dawn he stepped over the broken threshold and began his reconnaissance. For two hours he crouched, wet and cramped, in the laurel near enough to throw a stone against the kettle of the primitive distillery--waiting for that moment of relaxed vigilance, when the figure that moved in the shadows should permit a ray from the fire to fall upon its features.

When dawn had almost come his vigil was rewarded and he had turned away again.

Blossom Fulkerson knew none of these things at noon of the day following the fight at the mill when, in the road, she encountered Lone Stacy making his way back to his house for his midday dinner, but as the old man stopped and nodded she read trouble in his eyes.

"Air ye worrited about somethin', Mr. Stacy?" she demanded, and for a little s.p.a.ce the man stood hesitantly silent.

At last he hazarded, "Little gal, thar's a thing I'd like ter name ter ye. I reckon if anybody kin holp me hit mout be you."

The girl's eyes lighted with an instinctive sympathy--then shadowed with a premonition of what was coming.

"Is. .h.i.t--about--Turner?"

The father nodded his head gravely. His eyes wore the hara.s.sed disquiet of a problem for which he knew no solution.

"Does ye mean thet he's--he's----" She broke off abruptly and Lone Stacy answered her with unrelieved bluntness.

"He's a-layin' up thar drunk ergin, an' he's got a gash on one shoulder thet's powder burned. I reckon he's been engagin' in some manner of ruction."

For a moment the girl did not speak, but her cheeks paled and tears swam abruptly in her eyes. She raised one hand and brushed them fiercely away.

She had awakened this morning with a new and unaccountable happiness in her heart. In all the lilt and sparkle of the world and all the tunefulness of the young summer there had seemed a direct message to herself. In her memory she had been hearing afresh the crude but impa.s.sioned eloquence with which the boy had talked to her yesterday.

Now he lay up there at the distillery in the heavy sleep of the drunkard.

"Ther boy's all I've got," announced Lone Stacy with an unaccustomed break in his voice. "I reckon mebby ef I hadn't been so harsh I mout hev more influence with him." Then he turned abruptly on his heel and trudged on.

Blossom Fulkerson slipped into the woods and came to a sun-flecked amphitheater of rock and rhododendron where the ferns grew lush and tall, by the sparkle of water. There she sank down and covered her face with her hands. Her sobs shook her for a while, and then washing the tears away, she knelt and prayed with a pa.s.sionate simplicity.

Sometimes she lifted a pale face and her lips twisted themselves pathetically in the earnestness of her prayer.

The Almighty to Whom she made her plea, and Who knew everything, must know, even as she knew, that Turner Stacy was not like those rowdy youths who habitually disgraced the hills. That occasional smile which lurked with its inherent sweetness under his affected sullenness must mean _something_.

Turner had always been her willing va.s.sal, and "sometime" she had supposed, though hitherto that had always seemed a vaguely distant matter like the purple haze on the horizon, they would be avowed sweethearts.

Yesterday, though, as she walked back from the meeting on the ridge it had seemed as if she had spent a moment in that languourous land where the far mists drouse,--and yet the glamour had not faded. She hadn't sought to a.n.a.lyze then, she had only felt a new thrill in her heart as she instinctively broke cl.u.s.ters of pink-hearted bloom from the laurel.

She left the woods after a while and as she came out again to the high road, she heard a voice raised in the high-pitched, almost falsetto, minors of mountain minstrelsy.

It was not a pleasing voice, nor was the ballad a cheery one. As for the singer himself, the twisting of the way still concealed him from view, so that his song proclaimed him like a herald in advance.

"He s...o...b..d her to ther heart an' she fell with a groan.

He threw a leetle dirt _ov_-er her, an' started fer home,"

wailed the dolorous voice of the traveler. There was a splashing of hoofs in shallow water, then a continuation

"His debt ter ther devil now William must pay, Fer he fell down an' died afore break of day."

Thus announced, a mule plodded shortly into sight, and upon his back, perching sidewise, sat a tow-headed lout of a boy with staring, vacant eyes and a mouth which hung open, even when he desisted from song.

With an access of callow diffidence he halted his mount at sight of Blossom, staring with a nod and a bashful "Howdy."

"Howdy, Leander," accosted the girl. "How's all your folks?"

Leander White, of Crowfoot Branch, aged fifteen, gulped twice with prodigious and spasmodic play of his adam's apple, before he eventually commanded voice to reply:

"They're all well.... I'm obleeged ... ter ye." Then, however, rea.s.sured by the cordial smile on the lips of Blossom Fulkerson, his power of speech and his hunger for gossip returned to him in unison.

"But old Aunt Lucy Hutton, over acrost ther branch, she fell down yistiddy an' broke a bone inside of her, though."

"Did she?" demanded the girl, readily sympathetic, and Leander, thus given sanction as a purveyor of tidings, nodded and gathered confidence. "Huh-huh, an' Revenuers raided Joe Simmons's still-house on ther headwaters of Skinflint an' cyarried off a _beau_tiful piece o'

copper--atter they'd punched hit full o' holes."

"Revenuers!" Into the girl's voice now came a note of anxiety.

"Huh-huh, revenuers. Folks says they're gittin' bodaciously pesky these days."

"Ye ain't--ye ain't seen none of 'em yourself, have ye, Leander?" The question came a bit breathlessly and the boy forgot his bashfulness as he expanded with the importance of his traveler's tales.

"Not to know 'em fer sich," he admitted, "but I met up with a furriner a few leagues back along ther highway. He was broguein' along mighty brash on his own two feet. La! But he was an elegant party ter be a-ridin' on shoe-leather, though!"

"What manner of furriner was he, Leander?" demanded Blossom with a clutch of fright at her heart, but the boy shook his head stupidly.

"Wa'al he was jest a feller from down below. Ter tell hit proper, I didn't hev much speech with him. We jest met an' made our manners an'