The Tempering. Charles Buck
shoulder and his clear-chiselled face bore the pleasant recommendation of straight-gazing candour. His clothing was rough, yet escaped the seeming of roughness, because it sat upon his splendid body and limbs as if a part of them – like a hawk's plumage. But it was the eyes under a broad forehead that were most notable. They were unusually fine and frank; dark and full of an almost gentle meditativeness. Here was a native, thought the man on the mule, whose gaze, unlike that of many of his fellows, was neither sinister nor furtive. Here was one who seemed to have escaped the baleful heritage of grudge-bearing.
Then McCalloway's thought was interrupted by the voice of the boy declaring eagerly: "This hyar furriner 'lows ter ride over ter Cyrus Spradlin's dwellin' house. We've jest been talkin' erbout ye – an' he's already done heered of ye, Asa!"
The tall man on foot stiffened, at the announcement, into something like hostile rigidity, and the velvet softness of eye which, a moment ago, a woman might have envied, flashed into the hard agate of suspicion.
He stood measuring the stranger for an uncompromising matter of moments before he spoke, and when words came they were couched in a steely evenness of tone. "So ye've heerd of me – hev ye?"
He paused a moment after that, his face remaining mask-like, then he went on:
"I reckon whatever ye heered tell of me war either right favourable or right scandalous – dependin' on whether ye hed speech with my friends – or my enemies. I've got a lavish of both sorts."
McCalloway also stiffened at the note of challenge.
"I never talked to any one about you," he rejoined crisply. "I read your name in newspapers – as did many others, I dare say."
"Yes. I reckon ye read in them papers thet I kilt Old Man Carr. Wa'al, thet war es true es text. I kilt him whilst he was aimin' ter lay-way me. He'd done a'ready kilt my daddy an' I was ridin' inter Marlin Town ter buy buryin' clothes – when we met up in ther highway. Thet's ther whole hist'ry of hit."
"Mr. Gregory," the older man said slowly with an even courtesy that carried a note of aloofness, "I've neither the right nor the disposition to question you on personal matters. I reserve the privilege of discussing my own affairs only so far as I choose, and I recognize the same right in others. My final opinions, however, are not formed on hearsay."
The brown eyes softened again and the features relaxed. "I reckon," commented Asa with a touch of shame-faced apology in his tone, "thar warn't no proper call fer me ter start in straightway talkin' erbout myself nohow – but when a man's enemies air a'seekin' ter git him hung, hit's liable ter make him touchy an' mincy-like. Hit don't take no hard bite ter hurt a sore tooth, no-ways."
Victor McCalloway inclined his head. "I stopped here," he explained, "to ask directions of this lad. These infernal roads confuse me."
"I reckon they do be sort o' mystifyin' ter a furriner," assented the mountaineer, who stood charged with murder, then he added with grave courtesy: "I'll go back ter ther fork of ther highroad with ye an' sot ye on yore way ef so be hit would convenience ye any."
As mounted traveller and unmounted guide went on toward the rounded cone of Cinder Knob it seemed to loom as far away as ever, masking behind its timbered distances the unseen trickle of Hominy Mill Creek, where Cyrus Spradling dwelt.
But to right and left, ever the same, yet ever changing; sombre in shadowed gorge and bright of sunlit crest, lay the broken, forested hills. Their horizons gathered in tangled depths of timber – shadowed hiding places of chasms – silences and a brooding spirit of mystery.
At length a sudden elbow in the twisting way brought them face to face with two rifle-bearing men. They were gaunt fellows, tall but slouching and loose of joint. Their thin faces, too, were saturnine and ugly with the cast of vindictiveness.
"Howdy, Asa," accosted one and, with a casual nod, the guide responded, "Howdy, Jett," but in the brief silence that followed, broken by the wheezy panting of the mule, McCalloway fancied he could discern an undernote of tension.
"This here man," went on Asa Gregory, jerking his head backward, as if in answer to an unuttered query, "gives ther name of McCalloway. I hain't never seed him afore this day, but he's farin' over ter Spradling's an' I proffered ter kinderly sot him on his way. I couldn't skeercely do no less fer him."
The two nodded and when some further exchange of civilities had followed, passed on and out of sight. But for a while after their departure Asa stood unmoving with his head intently bent in an attitude of listening – and though his rifle still nestled unshifted in its cradling elbow, the fingers of the trigger hand twitched a little and the brown eyes were again agate-hard. Finally the guide's mouth line relaxed from the straight tautness of whatever emotion had caused that stiffening of posture, and the lips moved in low speech – almost drawlingly soft of cadence.
"I reckon they've done gone on," he said, as if speaking to himself; then lifting his eyes to his companion, he explained briefly. "Not meanin' no offence, I 'lowed hit war kinderly charitable ter ye ter let them fellers know ye jest fell in with me accidental like. They wouldn't favour ye no great degree ef they figgered me an' you was close friends."
"And yet," hazarded McCalloway, groping in the bewilderment of this strange environment, "you greeted each other amicably enough."
Gregory's lips twisted at the corners into a satirical smile.
"When they comes face ter face with me in ther highroad," he answered calmly, "we meets an' makes our manners ther same es anybody else – a man's got ter be civil. But we keeps a'watchin' one another outen ther tails of our eyes, jest ther same. Them two fellers air Blairs an' them an' ther Carrs is married in an' out an' back an' fo'th twell they're all as thick tergether as pigs outen ther same litter."
The traveller's question came a little incredulously.
"You mean – that those men are your actual enemies?"
"I'd call 'em enemies. I knows thet they aims ter git me some day – ef so be they're able."
"And you – ?"
The tall man in the road looked steadily into the face of his companion for a moment, then said deliberately, "Me? Oh, of course, I aims ter carcumvent 'em – ef so be I'm able."
When the newcomer had reached a point from which he no longer needed guidance Asa Gregory wheeled and began to back-track on his steps, but before he had covered a half mile he turned abruptly from the road and was swallowed in the thicket where the waxen confusion of rhododendron and laurel, the tangle of holly and thorn seemed solid and impenetrable. He went with head bent and noiseless footfall – though the sifting leaves were crisp – but with eye, ear and nostril delicately alert and receptive.
As Asa Gregory slipped, shadow like, among the shifting lights of the late afternoon, his face wore a grim smile, and when he had come to a point determined by some system of his own, he dropped to a low-crouching posture and continued his journey a step or two at a time, with a perfection of caution, and with eyes and ears strained in expectancy.
Across a gray-green hummock of sandstone, so villainously matted with blackberry briars that a pointer-dog would have balked at its edge, he hitched himself forward on his belly. From there he could look down on the road he had abandoned – and the thick bushes that fringed it, and there he lay, silent and flat as a lizard, scanning the lower ground.
A less acute and instinctive eye would have made little of it all, save the variegated colours of the foliage, but after a while he picked out a scrap of grey-brown buried deep and motionless under the leafage, much like the hue of the earth itself. His smile became more sardonically set and his muscles tensed as his rifle barrel was thrust forward. But he still sprawled there hugging the earth, and finally hushed voices stole up to him.
"… He's got ter pass by hyar ef he holds ter ther highway… I reckon he don't hardly suspicion nothin'." Then a second voice spoke Asa's name and linked it with foul expletives, yet save for the gray patches in the brush almost as hard to see as a rabbit crouched in dry grass there was no visible sign … no warning.
Asa's face blackened. His thumb lay on the hammer of his rifle and his thoughts ran to bitter turmoil.
"I