The Law Of Hemlock Mountain Part 7

CHAPTER V

Private Grant had been bred of the blood of hatred and suckled in vindictiveness. He had come into being out of the heritage of feud fighting "foreparents," and he thought in the terms of his ancestry.

When he had fled into the jungle beyond the island village, though he had been demented and enfeebled, the instinct of a race that had often "hidden out" guided him. That instinct and chance had led him to a native house where his disloyalty gave him a welcome, and there he had found sanctuary until his fever subsided and he emerged cadaverous, but free. Word had filtered through to him there of Spurrier's court-martial and its result.

In the course of time, fever-wasted yet restored out of his semi-lunacy, he had made his way furtively but successfully toward Manila and there he had supplemented the sketchy fragments of information with which his disloyal native friends had been able to provide him.

He knew now that the accused officer had pitched his defense upon an accusation of the deserter and the refugee's eyes smoldered as he learned that he himself had been charged with prefacing his flight with murder. He knew what that meant. The disgraced officer would move heaven and earth to clear his smirched name, and the condition precedent would be the capture of Private Grant and the placing of him in the prisoner's dock. To be wanted for desertion was grave enough.

To be wanted both for desertion and the a.s.sa.s.sination of his company commander was infinitely worse, and to stand in that position and face, as he believed he would have to, a conspiracy of cla.s.s feeling, was intolerable.

Haunting the shadowy places about Manila, Grant had been almost crazed by his fears but with the lifting of the steamer's anchor, a great spirit of hope had brightened in him, feeding on the solace of the thought that, once more in the States, he could lose himself from pursuit and vigilance.

Then he had seen, on the same s.h.i.+p, the face of the man whom, above all others, he had occasion to fear!

For their joint lives the world was not large enough. One of them must die, and in the pa.s.sion that swept over him with the dread of discovery. Grant had skirted a relapse into his recent mania.

At that moment when Spurrier had looked down and he had looked up, the deserter had seen only one way out, and that was to kill. But when the other had moved away, seemingly without recognition, his thoughts had moved more lucidly again.

Until he had tried soldiering he had known only the isolated life of forested mountains and here on a s.h.i.+p at sea he felt surrounded and helpless--almost timid. When he landed at San Francisco, if his luck held him undiscovered that long, he would have dry land under him and s.p.a.ce into which to flee.

The refugee had hated Comyn. Now Comyn was dead and Grant transferred his hatred from the dead captain to the living lieutenant, resolving that he also must die.

The moment to which he looked forward with the most harrowing apprehension was that when the vessel docked and put her pa.s.sengers ash.o.r.e. Here at sea a comforting isolation lay between first and third cabin pa.s.sengers and one could remain unseen from those deck levels that lay forward and above. But with the arrangements for disembarkation, he was unfamiliar, and for all he knew, the steerage people might be herded along under the eyes of those who traveled more luxuriously. He might have to march in such a procession, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, over a gang-plank swept by a watchful eye.

So Private Grant brooded deeply and his thoughts were not pretty. Also he kept his pistol near him and when the hour for debarkation arrived he was ripe for trouble.

It happened that a group of steerage pa.s.sengers, including himself, were gathered together much as he had feared they might be, and Grant's face paled and hardened as he saw, leaning with his elbows on a rail above him and a pipe in his mouth, the officer whom he dreaded.

Grant's hand slipped un.o.btrusively under his coat and his eyes narrowed as his heart tightened and became resolved.

Spurrier had not yet seen him but at any moment he might do so. There was nothing to prevent the wandering and casual glance from alighting on the spot where the deserter stood, and when it did so the mountaineer would draw and fire.

But as the ex-officer's eyes went absently here and there a girl pa.s.sed at his back and perhaps she spoke as she pa.s.sed. At all events the officer straightened and stiffened. Across his face flashed swiftly such an expression as might have come from a sudden and stinging blow, and then, losing all interest in the bustle of the lower decks, the man turned on his heel and walked rapidly away.

The deserter's hand stole away from the pistol grip and his breath ran out in a long, sibilant gasp of relief and reaction. When later he had landed safely and unmolested, he turned in flight toward the mountains that he knew over there across the continent--mountains where only bloodhounds could run him to earth.

Beyond the rims of those forest-tangled peaks he had never looked out until he had joined the army, and once back in them, though he dare not go, for a while, to his own home county, he could shake off his palsy of fear.

He traveled as a hobo, moneyless, ignorant, and unprepossessing of appearance, yet before the leaves began to fall he was at last tramping slopes where the air tasted sweeter to his nostrils, and the speech of mankind fell on his ear with the music of the accustomed.

The name of Bud Grant no longer went with him. That, since it carried certain unfulfilled duties to an oath of allegiance, he generously ceded to the United States Army, and contented himself with the random subst.i.tute of Sim Colby.

Now he tramped swingingly along a bowlder-broken creek bed which by local euphemism was called a road. When his way led him over the backbone of a ridge he could see, almost merged with the blue of the horizon, the smoky purple of a sugar loaf peak, which marked his objective.

When he pa.s.sed that he would be in territory where his journeying might end. To reach it he must transverse the present vicinity in which a collateral branch of his large family still dwelt, and where he himself preferred to walk softly, wary of possible recognition.

To the man whose terror had seen in every casual eye that rested on him while he crossed a continent, a gleam of accusation, it was as though he had reached sanctuary. The shoulders that he had forced into a hang-dog slough to disguise the soldierly bearing which had become habitual in uniform, came back into a more buoyant and upright swing.

The face that had been sullen with fear now looked out with something of the bravado of earlier days, and the whole experience of the immediate past; of months and even years, took on the unreality of a nightmare from which he was waking.

The utmost of caution was still required, but the long flight was reaching a goal where substantial safety lay like a land of promise.

It was a land of promise broken with ragged ranges and it was fiercely austere; the c.u.mberland mountains reared themselves like a colossal and inhospitable wall of isolation between the abundant richness of lowland Kentucky to the west, and Virginia's slope seaward to the east.

But isolation spelled refuge and the taciturn silences of the men who dwelt there, asking few questions and answering fewer, gave promise of unmolested days.

These hills were a world in themselves; a world that had stood, marking time for a hundred and fifty years, while to east and west life had changed and developed and marched with the march of the years. Sequestered by broken steeps of granite and sand stone, the human life that had come to the coves and valleys in days when the pioneers pushed westward, had stagnated and remained unaltered.

Illiteracy and ignorance had sprung chokingly into weed-like prevalence. The blood-feud still survived among men who fiercely insisted upon being laws unto themselves. Speech fell in quaint uncouthness that belonged to another century, and the tides of progress that had risen on either hand, left untouched and uninfluenced the men and women of mountain blood, who called their lowland brethren "furriners" and who distrusted all that was "new-fangled" or "fotched-on."

Habitations were widely separated cabins. Roads were creekbeds. Life was meager and stern, and in the labyrinths of honeycombed and forest-tangled wilds, men who were "hidin' out" from sheriffs, from revenuers, from personal enemies, had a sentimental claim on the sympathy of the native-born.

This was the life from which the deserter had sprung. It was the life to which with eager impatience he was returning; a life of countless hiding places and of no undue disposition to goad a man with questioning.

Through the billowing richness of the Bluegra.s.s lowlands, he had hurried with a homing throb in his pulses. As the foothills began to break out of the fallow meadows and the brush to tangle at the fringe of the smoothness, his breath had come deeper and more satisfying.

When the foothills rose in steepness until low, wet streamers of cloud trailed their slopes like shrapnel smoke, and the timber thickened and he saw an eagle on the wing, something like song broke into being in his heart.

He was home. Home in the wild mountains where air and the water had zest and life instead of the staleness that had made him sick in the flat world from which he came. He was home in the mountains where others were like him and he was not a barbarian any longer among contemptuous strangers.

He plodded along the shale-bottomed water course for a little way and halted. As his woodsman's eye took bearings he muttered to himself: "Hit's a right slavish way through them la'rel hills, but hit's a cut-off," and, suiting his course to his decision, he turned upward into the thickets and began to climb.

An hour later he had covered the "hitherside" and "yon side" of a small mountain, and when he came to the highway again he found himself confronted by a half dozen armed hors.e.m.e.n whose appearance gave him apprehensive pause, because at once he recognized in them the officialdom of the law. The mounted travelers drew rein, and he halted at the roadside, nodding his greeting in affected unconcern.

The man who had been riding at the fore held in his left hand the halter line of a led horse, and now he looked down at the pedestrian and spoke in the familiar phrase of wayside amenity.

"Howdy, stranger, what mout yore name be?"

"Sim Colby from acrost Hemlock Mountain ways, but I've done been west fer a year gone by, though, an' I'm jest broguein' along to'rds home."

The questioner, a long, gaunt man with a face that had been scarred, but never altered out of its obstinate set, eyed him for a moment, then shot out the question:

"Did ye ever hear tell of Sam Mosebury over thet-away?"

It was lucky that the fugitive had given as his home a territory with which he had some familiarity. Now his reply came promptly.

"Yes, I knows him when I sees him. Some folks used ter give him a right hard name over thar, but I reckon he's all right ef a man don't aim ter crowd him too fur."

"I don't know how fur he mout of been crowded," brusquely replied the man with the extra horse, "but he kilt a man in Rattletown yestiddy noon an' tuck ter ther woods. I'm after him."

The foot traveler expressed an appropriate interest, then added:

"Howsomever, hit ain't none of my affair, an' seein' thet I've got a right far journey ahead of me, I'll hike along."

But the leader of the mounted group shook his head.

"One of my men got horse flung back thar an' broke a bone inside him.

I'm ther high sheriff of this hyar county, an' I hereby summons ye ter go along with me an' ack as a member of my possy."

Under his tan Private Grant paled a little. This mischance carried a triple menace to his safety. It involved riding back to the county seat where some man might remember his face, and recall that two years ago he had gone away on a three years' enlistment. But even if he escaped that contingency, it meant tarrying in this neighborhood through which he had meant to pa.s.s inconspicuously and rapidly. To be attached to a _posse comitatus_ riding the hills on a man hunt meant to challenge every pa.s.sing eye with an interest beyond the casual.