When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry Part 38

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."

CHAPTER XXII

The story of Turner's death at unknown hands spread in the next few days like wild fire.

Whatever may have been the lack of sympathy for the young man's undertakings of reform, it was now only remembered that he was a Stacy who had been "dogged to his death" by Towers' minions, and ugly rumblings of threat awoke along the water courses where his kinsmen dwelt.

It was voiced abroad that Jerry Henderson could not outlive that week: that when he died, the body of Bear Cat Stacy would be buried with him, and that, from those two graves, the Stacys would turn away to wreak a sanguinary vengeance.

Yet all this was the sheerest sort of rumor. No man had proof that a Towers rifle had killed Turner--the man to whom his clan had looked for leaders.h.i.+p. No man had seen the body which his family was said to be holding for that dramatic consignment to the earth.

But in part the report found fulfilment. On Sunday afternoon Blossom leaned over the quilt-covered figure of her dying husband to realize that he was no longer dying but dead.

"Speak ter me, Jerry," she cried as she dug her nails into her palms.

"Speak ter me--jest one time more."

She sought to call out to her father, but her lips refused the service, and as she came to her feet she stretched out her hands and crumpled, insensible, to the floor.

Brother Fulkerson went that afternoon to the saw-mill at the back of Uncle Israel's store and stood by as the storekeeper himself sawed planks and knocked together the crude box which must serve Jerry Henderson as a casket. Later across the counter he bought some yards of coa.r.s.e cloth cut from a bolt of black calico, which was to be his daughter's pathetic attempt at mourning dress.

The afternoon of the funeral was unspeakably sullen and dismal. Clouds of leaden dreariness hung to the bristling mountains, themselves as gray as slate. Cold skies promised snow and through the bleak nakedness of the forest whined the dirge-like complaint of a gusty wind.

To the unkempt place of briar-choked and sunken graves, crawled a dingy procession.

Blossom would have preferred going with her dead unattended save by her father, but that mountain usage forebade. A wedding or a funeral could not be so monopolized in a land where there is frugally little to break daily monotony. This funeral above all others, belonged in part to the public, made pregnant with interest by the story that two bodies instead of one would be laid to rest. The question of how Bear Cat Stacy had come to his death would be answered over his open grave, and men would know at the falling of the last clod whether they should return quietly to their homes or prepare for the sterner task of reprisal.

Kinnard Towers must know, too, what happened there, and must know it speedily, though to go himself or to send one of his recognized lieutenants was beyond the question. Yet his plans were carefully laid.

Those few nondescripts who bore the repute of being Stacy sympathizers, while in fact they were Towers informers, were to be present; and along the miles of "slavish roughs" between Quarterhouse and burial-ground, like runners in a relay race, were other heralds. When the news began to come from the place it would travel fast. Sitting grimly behind the closed stockade of the Quarterhouse and surrounded now not only by a body-guard but by some scores of fighting men, the old intriguer anxiously awaited the outcome.

Long before the hour for the services had arrived men, as drab and neutral in color as the sodden skies, and women wrapped in shawls of red and blue, began to gather from hither and yon over roads mired to the prohibition even of "jolt-wagons." They came on foot or on muddied mules and horses with briar-tangled manes and tails--and having arrived, they waited, shuffling their weary feet against frost-bite and eddying in restless currents.

Two men were still at work with shovels and they had spread out their excavation so wide, in removing slabs of unbreakable rock, that the place might have been a single, double or even a triple grave.

The wind moaned as murky clouds began to spit snow, and then on the gulch-washed road which climbed steeply, a little procession was glimpsed in the distance.

The men fondled their guns, but the cortege was lost again to view behind a screen of cedars and until it turned finally on the level of the graveyard itself, its details remained invested with the suspense of expectancy.

At the fore, when it arrived, was Brother Fulkerson astride his old mare, and on a pillion behind him rode the "Widder Henderson," the whiteness of her thin face startlingly accentuated by the unrelieved lines of her black calico gown. Under her erstwhile vivid eyes lay dark rings of suffering, but she held her head rigid and gazed straight before her.

The cortege came without the proper hush of due solemnity, for the rough coffin that held Jerry Henderson's body was borne on a fodder sledge and the stolid team of oxen that drew it required constant and vociferous shouts and goading as they strained unwillingly against their yokes. After the sledge trailed a dozen neighbors, afoot and mounted; all plastered with mud--but the crowd caught its breath and broke into a low murmur. There was only one casket!

As the evangelist dismounted and lifted his daughter down, the men who were there as observers for Kinnard Towers sought places near enough to hear every syllable.

Yet when the elderly preacher began to speak, while his daughter stood with the dull apathy of one only half realizing, the faces of the crowd mirrored a sort of sullen disappointment. For them the burial of the man who was, after all, well-nigh a stranger, was secondary in interest. It was in every material respect touching their lives and deeper interests, Bear Cat's funeral they had come to attend. But on that topic the bearded shepherd meant to give them no satisfaction. So far he had made no mention of Bear Cat, and now he was concluding with the injunction: "Let us pray."

But as he bent his head, a woman standing near the foot of the grave raised a hand that trembled with all the violence of superst.i.tious fear. From her thin lips broke a half-smothered shriek, not loud but eerie and disconcerting, and she shrilled in terrorized notes, "Air thet a specter I sees thar?"

Many eyes followed the pointed finger and again a dismayed chorus of inarticulate sound broke from the crowd. Just behind Blossom--herself ghostlike in her white rigidness--had materialized a figure that had not been there before. It was a gaunt figure whose face these people had seen before only bronzed and aggressive. Now the cheek-bones stood out in exaggerated prominence and the flesh was bloodlessly gray.

Though Bear Cat Stacy was present in the flesh his sudden materialization there might well have startled a superst.i.tious mind into the thought that he had come not only from a bed of illness but from one of death. Ignoring the sensation he had created, he spoke in a whisper to the minister, and Brother Fulkerson made a quiet announcement.

"Hit hain't no ghost, sister. Turner Stacy hes been sore sick an' nigh ter death, but hit's pleased ther Almighty ter spare him. Let us pray."

A man near the grave began quietly working his way to the outer fringes of the gathering, and when he had escaped immediate observation, he went with hot haste. Kinnard must know of this.

He had detected an undernote in that general murmur of astonishment, which was clearly one of satisfaction. The Stacys had derived pleasure in this ocular proof that Bear Cat was not dead.

As the preacher said "Amen" Bear Cat bent tensely forward and caught both of Blossom's hands in his own. "I kain't tarry," he said, "even fer a leetle spell, but I wanted ye ter know thet I done my best ter get hyar afore."

She looked at him with dazed eyes which under the intensity of his gaze slowly began to awaken into understanding.

Turner went on eagerly, "I started over hyar as soon as I got yore letter, but I was set upon an' wounded. I've been insensible well nigh ever sence then."

"Oh, Turney!" she whispered, as the grief which had held her in its thrall of unrelieved apathy suddenly broke into an overflow of tears.

"Oh, Turney, I'm glad ye _tried_. He kept callin' fer ye. 'Peared like he wanted to tell ye somethin'." The clods were falling dully on the grave.

The crowd held back, fretting against the edict of decorum, as the voices rose in the miserable treble of song, to which two hounds added their anguished howls. At the last words of the verse, an instant clamor of question and discussion broke in eager storm--but Bear Cat had melted into the thicket at his back. With the same mystifying suddenness that had characterized his appearance, he had now disappeared.

Excited men rushed hither and thither, calling his name. They beat the woods and tramped the roads, but with as little result as though he had, in fact, appeared out of his grave and returned again to its hiding.

The story of that funeral was going with the pervasive swiftness of wind throughout the country-side. It was being mouthed over in dark cabins where toothless grannies and white-shocked grandsires wagged their heads and recalled the manner of Bear Cat's birth.

When Joe Sanders had left Bear Cat that afternoon at the abandoned cabin, it had been with the impression that Stacy meant to take the path which he had advised; the only path that was not certainly closed to his escape, and seek refuge at Dog Tate's house. He had found an immediate opportunity to report that program to Dog himself, and Dog sought to make use of it in Bear Cat's service.

Tate, in recognition of his grievance as an outraged distiller, had been given the leaders.h.i.+p of one of the largest of the search parties, which it was his secret purpose to lead far afield on a blind trail.

Inasmuch as Bear Cat had been specifically cautioned against going in the direction of his own dwelling place, and yet since that would seem a logical goal, Dog had maneuvered his hunters into territory between the abandoned cabin and Little Slippery.

He himself had been in the woods across the waters of the suddenly swollen creek, when an outburst of rifle fire told him that something had gone wrong and brought him running back to the guidance of that musketry.

He arrived at the edge of the swirling, drift-enc.u.mbered water in time to see the silhouetted figure on the opposite bluff totter and plunge head first into the moonlit whirlpool. Dog knew that he was the only man on that side of the stream, but any effort to plunge in and try for a rescue would mean death to himself without hope of saving the man who had fallen. As he watched he made out what seemed to be the lifeless body come to the surface, to be swept in a rus.h.i.+ng circle and, as chance would have it, to catch and hang lodged in a ma.s.s of floating dead-wood. The creek at ordinary times ran shallow and though it was gus.h.i.+ng now beyond its normal borders it was still not wide. The deadwood swirled, raced forward, and fouled the out-jutting root of a giant sycamore.

Dog Tate crawled out along the precarious support of the slimy rootage and slowly drew the ma.s.s of drift into shallow water. It was tedious work since any violent tugging might loosen the lightly held tangle and send the body floating away unbuoyed.