CHAPTER XXI
Three times along the way, as the new crusader trudged on to Dog Tate's cabin, the late-setting moon glinted on queerly twisted things suspended from road-side trees – things unlike the fruit of either hickory or poplar.
A grim satisfaction enlivened his tired eyes, but it lingered only for a moment. Before them rose the picture of a girl sitting stricken by a bedside, and his brows contracted painfully with the memory.
From the window of Tate's cabin came a faint gleam of light, and, as he drew cautiously near, a figure rose wearily from the dark doorstep.
"I've been settin' up fer ye," announced Dog. "I mistrusted ye'd done met with mishap."
Inside the cabin crowded with sleeping and snoring figures, the host pointed to a loft under the shingles. "Ye'll hev ter bed in up thar," he said. "Don't come down ter-morrer twell I gives ye ther word. Right likely thar'll be folks abroad sarchin' fer ye. Me an' Joe aims ter blackguard ye no end fer bustin' up our still."
"Thet's what I 'lowed ter caution ye ter do," acquiesced Turner. "All I'm askin' now air a few hours of slumber."
He climbed the ladder with heavy limbs, and, falling on the floor among its litter of household effects, was instantly asleep.
It was the habit of Kinnard Towers to rise early, even for a people of early risers, and on this morning he followed his customary routine. Last night he had slept restlessly because the events of the day had been stressful and uncertain, even if, in their summary, there had been an element of satisfaction.
So Kinnard pulled on his trousers and boots, still thinking of yesterday, and crossed the hall to the room where Black Tom Carmichael slept.
Black Tom's bed had not been disturbed, and his door swung open. Towers roused two other members of his household and the three went out into the first mists of dawn to investigate. At the hitching-rack they halted in dismay and their jaws sagged.
The light was yet dim and ghostly, and at first the body that hung unconscious with hours of chilling and cramp had every appearance of lifelessness. A bitter anger broke out in Kinnard's face and for a time none of them spoke. Then from the chief's lips escaped an oath so fierce and profane that his men paused in their attempt at resuscitating the corpse-like figure, and following his eyes they saw the fresh insult which he had just discovered – a still-worm demolished and hanging high.
"Hell's clinkers!" stormed the leader. "What manner of deviltry air this?"
Restored, an hour later, by hot coffee and whiskey, Black Tom told his story, colorfully embellished with profane metaphor, and a squad went riding "hell-fer-leather" to the still of "Little" Jake Kinnard.
When the sun was fully revealed they were back again, with another man, feeble and half-frozen of body, but molten-hot of spirit to vouchsafe indignant evidence.
The cup of Towers' fury was brimming over, but before its first bitterness had been quaffed yet other heralds of tribulation arrived to pour in fresh wormwood. "Thar's still-house quiles hangin' all up an' down ther high-road," they lamented.
Kinnard looked at his henchman out of eyes somberly furious and his florid face turned a choleric purple.
"Thar hain't but one way ter treat sech a damn' pest es thet," he said slowly with the implacable manner of one passing final sentence. "He's got ter be kilt – an' kilt quick." But a sudden reflection obtruded itself, snarling the simple edict with complication. "Hold on!" he added with a less assured finality. "Hev any stills been tampered with among his own folks – or air hit jest over hyar?"
"We hain't heered much from ther yon side yit," admitted the news-bearers. "Thar's one thet Dog Tate used ter run, though, thet's hangin' high as Haaman. Dog's a kinsman of his'n but he dwells nigh ter hyar."
"Hev some fellers ride over thar an' talk with him," commanded Towers with prompt efficiency. "Ef I war sure they wouldn't all stand behind him, I'd take a crowd of men over thar an' hang him in front of his own house. Yestiddy they didn't seem ter hev much use fer him."
Of one thing, however, he failed to take adequate cognizance. That turning away of the clan, yesterday, in cool or angry repudiation had been less unanimous than it seemed. There were elders among them who had for years deplored the locked-in life of their kind and to whom this boy's effrontery secretly appealed. None of their own heritage and breed had ever before dared to raise his voice against forcible scourging out of a tolerated practice – but that did not mean that all men sanctioned it in their hearts.
So as the Stacys had scattered they had discussed the matter, guardedly save where the speaker was sure of his auditor, and Kinnard would have been astonished to know how many of them said, "I reckon mebby ther boy is fittified – but ef he could do what he seeks ter, hit would sartain sure be a God's blessin' ter these hills."
"I don't see no diff'rence atween what he aims at, an' what them damn' revenuers seeks ter do," suggested a young man who had fallen in with Joe Stacy after the gathering and rode knee to knee with him. "Myself I don't foller nuther makin' hit ner drinkin' hit. Hit kilt my daddy an' my maw raised me up ter hate ther stuff – but I'm jest tellin' how hit looks ter me."
"Sim," said Joe Stacy gravely, "I counseled Turner ter put aside this notion – because I misdoubted hit would mean his death, but ef ye don't see no difference atween him an' a revenuer ye're jest a plain idjit – an' I don't mean no offense neither. Ther revenuer works fer blood money. Bear Cat hain't seekin' no gain but ter bring profit ter his people. Ther revenuer slips up with knowledge thet he gains by busted faith an' spies. Bear Cat's done spoke out open an' deeclared hisself."
The young man reined in his horse abruptly.
"I'm obleeged ter ye fer enlightenen' me," he said with blunt directness. "I'll ask ye ter hold yore counsel about this matter. I aims ter go back thar an' work with him."
A slow smile spread over the ragged lips of Bear Cat's uncle. He made no criticism, but one might have gathered that he was not displeased.
Back at Lone Stacy's house on the morning that Kinnard Towers was awakening to conditions, were gathered a handful of men. They lounged shiftlessly as though responding to no object save casual curiosity. They were cautious to express neither approbation nor disapproval, but intangibly the threads of sympathy and hostility were unraveling. Those who were the steadier of gaze, clearer of pupil and fitter of brawn, inclined toward Bear Cat and his crusade, and, conversely, those who wore the stamp of reddened eye and puffed socket gave back sneering scowls to the mention of his name.
But all alike crowded around, when a traveler, who had elected to cross the mountain from Marlin Town by night, paused, puffed with the importance of one bearing news.
"Hev ye folks done heered ther tidin's?" he demanded, shifting to a sidewise position in his saddle. "Bear Cat Stacy's been raidin' stills. Thar's a copper worm hangin' right at ther Quarterhouse door – an' trees air bloomin' with others all along ther high road."
The murmur was half a growl – for the group was not without its blockader or two – and half pure tribute to prompt achievement.
"Nor thet hain't all by half," went on the traveler, relating with the gusto of a true climax how Black Tom had been bound to a hitching-rack and Jake Kinnard staked out by his demolished mash kettle. This was pure exploit – and whatever its motive the mountain man loves exploit.
Moreover, these sufferers from Bear Cat's wrath were men close to the hated Kinnard Towers. Faces that had brooded yesterday grinned to-day.
Kinnard's squad reached the house of Dog Tate while the morning was yet young, searching each cabin along the way, in the hope that last night's raider might be still hiding in their own terrain.
They found Joe Sanders sitting on the doorstep, with the morose aspect of a man deprived of his avocation in life. The wintry hillsides were no moodier than his eyes, and the sullen skies no more darkly lowering.
But Dog Tate himself was loquacious to a fault. He raved with a fury so unbridled that it suggested lunacy. Bear Cat had come to his place wounded and had been succored. Twenty-four hours later he had come there again treasonably to repay that service by ripping out an unguarded still. Henceforth the Stacy call might remain eternally unanswered, and be relegated to perdition for all of him.
"Dog," suggested the leader of the squad, "we've done been askin' leave ter kinderly hev a look inter dwellin' houses – in case Bear Cat's still layin' concealed over hyar. I reckon ye hain't hardly got no objection, hev ye?"
"Does ye 'low thet I'd be hidin' out ther man thet raided me?" The host put his question with a fine irony, and the reply was apologetic.
"Not sca'cely. Hit's jest so thet we kin tell Kinnard, we didn't pass no house by, thet's all."
The speaker and the ex-moonshiner were standing at the threshold of the log shack. It was a place of a single, windowless room with a lean-to kitchen – and above was the loft reached by a trap and ladder.
"Come right in then," acceded Dog Tate with disarming readiness. "I hain't got no excess of love fer Kinnard – but I've got yit less fer still-busters."
Far back where the shingle roof dropped steeply from ridge pole to edge was a murky recess hidden behind a litter of old bedding, piled up potatoes and onions. Silently listening and mercifully blotted into shadow there, Bear Cat Stacy crouched with rifle-barrel thrust forward and his finger caressing the trigger.
The squad-leader looked about the place with perfunctory eye and then, seeing the ladder, set his foot upon its lowest rung.
Dog Tate felt a sudden commotion of hammering pulses, but his lids did not flicker nor his mouth alter its line. Quite unostentatiously, however, his wife moved toward the front door and stood there blankly expressionless. Also, Dog laid his hand idly on the ladder as the visitor climbed upward. If the search proved embarrassing he meant to kick the support from under the Towers minion, and his wife meant to bar the door for siege.
But the intruder went only high enough to thrust his head into the overhead darkness while a match flared and went out. He had seen nothing, and as he stumped down again the poised finger relaxed on the rifle trigger, and the Tates breathed free.
"I'm obleeged ter ye," said the searching lieutenant. "Ef ye wants ter start up yore still ergin, I reckon ye'll be safe. He won't be runnin' wild fer long nohow."
The Quarterhouse emissaries were raking the hills with an admirable thoroughness, running like a pack in full cry on the man trail, but they did not again come so near the fringes of success as when they missed the opportunity at Dog Tate's house.
In spite of a watchfulness that gave eyes to the hills and ears to the timber, their quarry left that house and went to his own.
He had no intention of making the mad effort to remain there. The wild tangle of cliff and forest was his safest refuge now – but there were two things to be done at home. He wished to have for companionship in exile his "Lincoln, Master of Men," and he wished to learn if out of the wholesale desertion of yesterday there had not come back to him even one or two followers.
So that afternoon he slipped, undetected by his trailers, into and out of his father's house; and there followed him, though each went singly and casually to escape detection, some eight or ten men, who henceforth were to be his secret followers and, he hoped, the nucleus of a larger force.
The next morning in both Stacy and Towers territory, hickories and walnuts and sycamores burst into copper fruitage. The hills were alive with armed search-parties, liquor-incited and vowing vengeance, yet through their cordons he moved like some invisible and soundless creature, striking and escaping while they raged.
At ever-changing points of rendezvous he met and instructed his mysterious handful of faithful supporters, struck telling blows – made fresh raids and seemingly evaporated.
From all that Towers could learn, it appeared that Bear Cat Stacy was operating as a lone bandit. Yet the ground he seemed to cover single-handed was so wide of boundary and his success so phenomenal that already he was being hallowed, in country-side gossip, with legendary and heroic qualities. In that Towers read a serious menace to his own prestige; until he ground his teeth and swore sulphurously. He organized a larger force of human hounds and fired them more hotly with the incentive of liquor and greed for promised reward. The doors of Old Lone Stacy's house, tenanted now only by the wife of the prisoner and the mother of the refugee, were endlessly watched by unseen eyes. Around the cabin where Jerry Henderson lay lingering with a tenuous hold on life, lounged the men posted there by Joe Stacy, and back in the timbered slopes that frowned down upon its roof crouched yet other shapes of butter-nut brown; shapes stationed there at the behest of the Quarterhouse.
Going in and out among these would-be avengers and learning all their plans, by dint of a pretendedly bitter hatred of Bear Cat Stacy, were such men as Dog Tate and Joe Sanders, spying upon the spies.
Old Bud Jason at his little tub-mill and Uncle Israel at his general store secretly nodded their wise old heads and chuckled. They knew that, hushed and undeclared, a strong sentiment was being born for the boy who was outwitting scores of time-seasoned murder hirelings. But they shook their heads, too – realizing the deadly odds of the game and its tragic chances.
One afternoon after a day sheeted in cold rain that sometimes merged into snow, Bear Cat crept cautiously toward the sagging door of the abandoned cabin which had, on another night, housed Ratler Webb. It had been a perilously difficult day for the man upon whose head Towers had set the price of a river-bottom farm. Like a hard-run fox he had doubled back and forth under relentless pursuit and gone often to earth. The only things they needed with which to harry him further were bloodhounds.
Now in the later afternoon he came to the cabin and sought a few minutes' shelter there against the penetrating misery of rain and sloppy snow that thawed as it fell. He dared not light a fire, and must not relax the vigilance of his outlook.
Just before sunset Bear Cat saw a man edging cautiously through the timber, moving with a shadowy furtiveness – and recognized Joe Sanders.
The newcomer slipped through the rotting lintels, bringing a face stamped with foreboding.
"Ye kain't stay hyar," announced the excited voice. "I don't hardly know whar ye kin go to nuther, onlessen' ye kin make hit back ter Dog Tate's dwellin'-house by ther hill-trail."
"Tell me all ye knows, Joe," directed Stacy with a steadying calmness, and the other went on hurriedly:
"They've done picked up yore trail – an' lost hit ergin – a couple of miles back. They 'lows ye hain't fur off, an' thar's two score of 'em out huntin' – all licker-crazed but yit not disabled none. Some of 'em 'lows ter come by hyar. I'm with a bunch thet's travelin' a diff'rent route. They're spreadin' out like a turkey gobbler's tail feathers an' combin' this territory plumb close. Above all don't go to'rds home. Hit's thet way thet they's most numerous of all. I surmised I'd find ye hyar an' I slipped by ter warn ye."
"I'm obleeged ter ye, Joe. What's thet ye've got thar?" The last question was prompted by the gesture with which Saunders, as if in afterthought, thrust his hand into his coat pocket.
"Hit hain't nuthin' but a letter Brother Fulkerson bid me give ter ye – but thar hain't no time ter read hand-write now. Every minute's wuth countless letters."
But Turner Stacy was ripping the envelope. Already he had recognized the clear, precise hand which had been the fruit of Blossom's arduous efforts at self-education.
"Don't tarry, man! I cautions ye they're already makin' ready ter celebrate yore murder," expostulated the messenger, but Bear Cat did not seem to hear him. In the fading light he was reading and rereading, forgetful of all else. Joe Sanders, fixing him with a keen and impatient scrutiny, noticed how gaunt were his cheeks and how hollow-socketed his eyes. Yet as he began the letter there was a sudden and eager hopefulness in his face which faded into misery as he finished.
"A famed doctor came up from Louisville," wrote Blossom. "He's done all that could be done. He says now that only Jerry's great courage keeps life in him and that can't avail for long. He hasn't been able to talk – except for a few words. The longest speech was this: 'Send word to Bear Cat – that I'm honester than he thinks… I want to die with his friendship … or I can't rest afterwards…' He looked like he wanted to tell something else and he named your father and your Uncle Joe Stacy, but he couldn't finish. He keeps saying 'Stacy, you don't understand.' What is it, that you don't understand, Turney? Can't you slip over just long enough to shake hands with him? He wants you to do it – and he's dying – and I love him. For my sake can't you come? Your mother says you came once just to get a book – won't you do that much for me? Blossom Henderson."
Joe Sanders shuffled his feet in poignant disgust for the perilous procrastination. Here was a man whose life hung on instant flight, yet he stood with eyes wide and staring, holding before them a silly sheet of paper. His lips whispered, "Blossom Henderson —Henderson– not Fulkerson no more!"
Then a wave of black resentment swept Bear Cat's face and he licked his dry lips. "Joe," he said absently, "I hates him! I kain't shake his hand. I tells ye I kain't do hit."
"Whose hand? – don't shake hit, then," retorted Sanders irritably, and, with a sudden start as though he had been rudely awakened while prattling in his sleep, Bear Cat laughed bitterly.
"Hit don't make no difference," he added shortly. "I war kinderly talking ter myself. I reckon I'd better be leavin'."
Hurrying through the timber, toward Dog Tate's house, Turner's mind was in a vexed quandary and after a little he irresolutely halted. His forehead was drawn and his lips were tight. "Blossom Henderson!" he muttered. "God knows I took plentiful risks thet ye mout w'ar thet name – an' yit – yit when I reads hit, seems like hit drives me plumb ravin' mad!"
From the tangle of dead briars the cold rain dripped desolately. A single smear of lurid red was splashed across the west beyond the silhouetted ridges.
"They're aimin' ter head me off ef I goes to'rds home," he reflected in a bitter spirit. "An' he wants thet I should fight my way through all them enemies ter shake his hand – so thet he kin die easy. I reckon hit don't make no manner of diff'rence how hard I dies myself."
He covered his face with his hands and when he took them away he altered his course, setting his steps in the direction of his own house.
"She said – fer her sake," he repeated in a dazed voice, touched with tenderness. "I reckon I've got ter undertake hit."
Never before had the woods been so efficiently picketed. Never had the net of relentless pursuit been so tight-drawn and close of mesh. For a long distance he eluded its entanglement though at times, as it grew dark, he saw the glimmer of lanterns whose portent he understood.
But finally the clouds broke and a cold moon shone out to aid the pack and cut to a forlorn hope the chances of the quarry.
As Bear Cat went creeping from shadow to shadow he could hear faint sounds of pursuit closing in upon him. He came at length upon a narrow road that must be crossed and for a while he bent low, listening, then stole forward, reassured.
But as he reached the farther side, the black solidity of a hill-side broke not in one but in several tongues of flame and the bark of three rifles shattered the quiet.
Bear Cat doubled back and cut again into the timber which he had left, running now to put a margin of distance between himself and the greater numbers. That fusillade and its echoes would bring other rifles and reinforcements.
After a few pantingly stressful minutes he found himself standing at the lip of a steep bluff, and a roar of water beneath warned him that the creek, some twenty feet below, had been swollen from a trickling thread to a seething caldron.
He gazed questioningly about, gauging his chances with swift calculation, since there was no time for indecision.
"I aimed ter come, Blossom," he breathed between his teeth, "but I've done failed!" He stepped out to look over the ledge and for a moment his figure was silhouetted in the open light. Then again the curtain of blue-black shadow was shot through with fiery threads and a rifle barked sharply, trailing a broken wake of echoes.
Bear Cat Stacy's two hands went high above his head, his right still clutching his rifle. He swayed for the duration of a breath, rocking on his feet, then plunged forward and outward.
The next morning, no worms were found hanging in the highway, but, back at the Quarterhouse, Kinnard Towers turned in his hand a battered hat that had been retrieved from floating drift.
"Yes, I reckon thet's his hat," he commented after a close scrutiny. "I reecollect seein' thet raw-hide thong laced round hit, endurin' his speech over thar. Wa'al, he elected ter go chargin' amuck – an' he's done reaped his harvest."