The Young Mountaineers Part 21

The officer stepped in instantly. "Good-mornin', Mrs. Coggin," he said politely. "'T would pleasure me some ter git a glimpse o' that handkercher."

"Air it your'n?" asked the woman wonderingly. "I jes' now fund it, an' I war tried ter know who had drapped it hyar."

The officer, without a word, untied the knot which Amos Brierwood had made in one corner, while the Coggins looked on in open-mouthed amazement. It contained a five-dollar bill, and a bit of paper on which some careless memoranda had been jotted down in handwriting which the traveler claimed as his own.

It seemed a very plain case. Still, he got out of the sound of the woman's sobs and cries as soon as he conveniently could, and sauntered down the road, where the officer presently overtook him with Alf and his father in custody.

"Whar be ye a-takin' of us now?" cried the elder, gaunt and haggard, and with his long hair blowing in the breeze.

"Ter the church-house, whar yer boy says ye hev hid the traveler's money-purse," said the officer.

"_My boy_!" exclaimed John Coggin, casting an astounded glance upon his son.

Poor Alf was almost stunned. When they reached the church, and the men, after searching for a time without result, appealed to him to save trouble by pointing out the spot where the pocket-book was concealed, he could only stammer and falter unintelligibly, and finally he burst into tears.

"Ax the t'other one--the leetle boy," suggested an old man in the crowd.

Alf's heart sank--sank like lead--when Jim, suddenly remembering the promised "good word" to the witches, piped out, "I war tole not ter tell who teched it,--'kase my dad didn't want n.o.body ter know 'twar hid thar."

John Coggin's face was rigid and gray.

"The Lord hev forsook me!" he cried. "An' all my chillen hev turned liars tergether."

Then he made a great effort to control himself.

"Look-a-hyar, Jim, ef ye hev got the truth in ye,--speak it! Ef ye know whar I hev hid anything,--find it!"

Jim, infinitely important, and really understanding little of what was going on, except that all these big men were looking at him, crossed the room with as much stateliness as is compatible with a pair of baggy brown jeans trousers, a plaid comforter tied between the shoulder-blades in a big knot, a tow-head, and a tattered black hat; he slipped his grimy paw in the c.h.i.n.king where Amos Brierwood had hid the pocket-book, and drew it thence, with the prideful exclamation,--

"B'longs ter my dad!"

The officer held it up empty before the traveler,--he held up, too, the bit of comforter in which it was folded, and pointed to the small boy's shoulders. The gentleman turned away, thoroughly convinced. Alf and his father looked from one to the other, in mute despair. They foresaw many years of imprisonment for a crime which they had not committed.

The constable was hurrying his prisoners toward the door, when there was a sudden stir on the outskirts of the crowd. Old Parson Payne was pus.h.i.+ng his way in, followed by a tall young man, who, in comparison with the mountaineers, seemed wonderfully prosperous and well-clad, and very fresh and breezy.

"You're all on the wrong track!" he cried.

And his story proved this, though it was simple enough.

He was sojourning in the mountains with some friends on a "camp-hunt,"

and the previous evening he had chanced to lose his way in the woods.

When night and the storm came on, he was perhaps five miles from camp.

He mistook the little "church-house" for a dwelling, and dismounting, he hitched his horse in the laurel, intending to ask for shelter for the night. As he stepped upon the porch, however, he caught a glimpse, through the c.h.i.n.king, of the interior, and he perceived that the building was a church. There were benches and a rude pulpit. The next instant, his attention was riveted by the sight of two men, one of whom had drawn a knife upon the other, quarreling over a roll of money. He stood rooted to the spot in surprise. Gradually, he began to understand the villainy afoot, for he overheard all that they said to each other, and afterward to Jim. He saw one of the men cut the bit from the comforter, wrap the pocket-book in it, and hide it away, and he witnessed a dispute between them, which went on in dumb show behind the boy's back, as to which of two bills should be knotted in the handkerchief which they twisted into the comforter.

The constable was pressing him to describe the appearance of the ruffians.

"Why," said the stranger, "one of them was long, and lank, and loose-jointed, and had sandy hair, and"--He paused abruptly, cudgeling his memory for something more distinctive, for this description would apply to half the men in the room, and thus it would be impossible to identify and capture the robbers.

"He hedn't no thumb sca'cely on his lef' hand," piped out Jim, holding up his own grimy paw, and looking at it with squinting intensity as he crooked it at the first joint, to imitate the maimed hand.

"No thumb!" exclaimed the constable excitedly. "Amos Brierwood fur a thousand!"

Jim nodded his head intelligently, with sudden recollection. "That air the name ez the chunky man gin him when they fust kem in."

And thus it was that when the Coggins were presently brought before the justice, they were exonerated of all complicity in the crime for which Brierwood and his accomplice were afterward arrested, tried, and sentenced to the State Prison.

Jim doubts whether the promised "good word" was ever spoken on his behalf to the witches, who were represented as making personal inquiries about him, because he suspects that the two robbers were themselves the only evil spirits roaming the woods that night.

ON A HIGHER LEVEL

As Jack Dunn stood in the door of his home on a great crag of Persimmon Ridge and loaded his old rifle, his eyes rested upon a vast and imposing array of mountains filling the landscape. All are heavily wooded, all are alike, save that in one the long horizontal line of the summit is broken by a sudden vertical ascent, and thence the mountain seems to take up life on a higher level, for it sinks no more and pa.s.ses out of sight.

This abrupt rise is called "Elijah's Step,"--named, perhaps, in honor of some neighboring farmer who first explored it; but the ignorant boy believed that here the prophet had stepped into his waiting fiery chariot.

He knew of no foreign lands,--no Syria, no Palestine. He had no dream of the world that lay beyond those misty, azure hills. Indistinctly he had caught the old story from the nasal drawl of the circuit-rider, and he thought that here, among these wild Tennessee mountains, Elijah had lived and had not died.

There came suddenly from the valley the baying of a pack of hounds in full cry, and when the crags caught the sound and tossed it from mountain to mountain, when more delicate echoes on a higher key rang out from the deep ravines, there was a wonderful exhilaration in this sylvan minstrelsy. The young fellow looked wistful as he heard it, then he frowned heavily.

"Them thar Saunders men hev gone off an' left me," he said reproachfully to some one within the log cabin. "Hyar I be kept a-choppin' wood an' a pullin' fodder till they hev hed time ter git up a deer. It 'pears ter me ez I mought hev been let ter put off that thar work till I war through huntin'."

He was a tall young fellow, with a frank, freckled face and auburn hair; stalwart, too. Judging from his appearance, he could chop wood and pull fodder to some purpose.

A heavy, middle-aged man emerged from the house, and stood regarding his son with grim disfavor. "An' who oughter chop wood an' pull fodder but ye, while my hand air sprained this way?" he demanded.

That hand had been sprained for many a long day, but the boy made no reply; perhaps he knew its weight. He walked to the verge of the cliff, and gazed down at the tops of the trees in the valley far, far below.

The expanse of foliage was surging in the wind like the waves of the sea. From the unseen depths beneath there rose again the cry of the pack, inexpressibly stirring, and replete with woodland suggestions. All the echoes came out to meet it.

"I war promised ter go!" cried Jack bitterly.

"Waal," said his mother, from within the house, "'tain't no good nohow."

Her voice was calculated to throw oil upon the troubled waters,--low, languid, and full of pacifying intonations. She was a tall, thin woman, clad in a blue-checked homespun dress, and seated before a great hand-loom, as a lady sits before a piano or an organ. The creak of the treadle, and the thump, thump of the batten, punctuated, as it were, her consolatory disquisition.

Her son looked at her in great depression of spirit as she threw the shuttle back and forth with deft, practiced hands.

"Wild meat air a mighty savin'," she continued, with a housewifely afterthought. "I ain't denyin' that."

Thump, thump, went the batten.

"But ye needn't pester the life out'n yerself 'kase ye ain't a-runnin'

the deer along o' them Saunders men. It 'pears like a powerful waste o'

time, when ye kin take yer gun down ter the river enny evenin' late, jes' ez the deer air goin' ter drink, an' shoot ez big a buck ez ye hev got the grit ter git enny other way. Ye can't do nothin' with a buck but eat him, an' a-runnin' him all around the mounting don't make him no tenderer, ter my mind. I don't see no sense in huntin' 'cept ter git somethin' fitten ter eat."

This logic, enough to break a sportsman's heart, was not a panacea for the tedium of the day, spent in the tame occupation of pulling fodder, as the process of stripping the blades from the standing cornstalks is called.