The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage. MacGowan Alice
against her will, Callista found herself taken up to the front of the gathering, placed between Ellen and Flenton Hands beside the coffin. Preacher Drumright was speaking with closed eyes; he had embarked on one of those servigorous prayers which Hands admired. The two girls, Ellen and Jane, were sobbing in long, dry gasps. After the prayer came a hymn, the lulls in the service being filled in by the sobs of the Hands girls, little responsive moans from some woman in the assembly, and the purr of the wind in the young pines, where scared rabbits were hiding; and by the far, melodious jangle of Old Piedy's bell – Old Piedy, dispossessed and driven away.
With the appearance of Callista and her escort on the scene, a young fellow who had been lying full length on the top of the ruining stone wall tilted his hat quite over his eyes and relaxed a certain watchfulness of demeanor which had till then been apparent in him. When the girl was finally ensconced in the middle of the lamenting Hands family, this person leaned down and whispered to Ola Derf, whose square little back was resting against the wall close beside him,
"Come on, let's go. Haven't you had about enough of this?"
"Uh-huh," agreed Ola in a whisper, "but we mustn't git our horses till the preacher quits prayin'. Hit'll make too much noise."
Again Lance relaxed into his quiescent attitude, and had to be roused when the hymn began, with,
"He's done finished, Lance. Do you want to go now?"
The wind soothed its world-old, sighing monody in the young pines overhead; beneath the waxing warmth of the morning sun faint whiffs, resinous, pungent, came down from their boughs, to mingle with the perfume from the vagrant honeysuckle that flung a long green arm toward the trunk of one of them. Suddenly a woman's tenor, wild and sweet, rose like a winged thing and led all the other voices.
"Huh-uh," grunted Lance, from his sun-warmed couch. "Let's wait awhile now."
After the hymn, Drumright read from the Scripture. Even his rasping voice could not disguise the immemorial beauty of the sombre Hebrew imagery, "Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken."
Lance drew a long quivering breath. Something in the sounds, the hour and the occasion, had appealed to that real Lance Cleaverage, of which the man Ola Derf knew was only custodian, to whose imperious needs the obvious Lance must always bend.
Yet, long before poor Callista could be released and allowed to ride home, by her own earnest petition, in the buckboard with Jane and Ellen, the two by the stone wall had found their way across to the black horses in the grove, and were scurrying down the dusty summer road, racing as soon as they were out of sight of the graveyard.
CHAPTER IV.
A DANCE AND A SERENADE
THE Derfs occupied a peculiar position among their Turkey Track neighbors. They had a considerable tincture of Cherokee Indian blood, no discredit in the Tennessee mountains, or elsewhere for that matter. One branch of the family had received money compensation for their holdings from the Government. Leola's father had at that time taken possession of an allotment of land in the Indian Territory. The eldest daughter, Iley, married out there, and brought back her Indian husband when Granny Derf, pining for her native mountains, had to be carried home to Big Turkey Track.
It was not the blood of another race that set the Derfs apart; but it may have been traits which came with the wild strain. There was a good deal of money going among the clan. Old man Derf was a general trader; also he engaged in tanbark hauling in the season, and some other contracting enterprises such as required the use of ready cash. In the back room of the main house there was quite a miscellaneous stock of provisions, goods, and oddments for sale. Derf was more than suspected of being a moonshiner or of dealing with moonshiners. He gave dances or frolics of some sort at his house very frequently, and there was always plenty of whisky. At one time or another the family had lived in the Settlement a good deal, and come off rather smudged from their residence in that place. Indeed, your true mountaineer believes that sin is of the valley, and looks for no good thing to come out of the low ground. In a simple society, like that of the mountains, the line is drawn with such savage sharpness that the censors hesitate to draw it at all. Yet a palpable cloud hung over the Derfs. While not completely outcast, they were of so little standing that their house was scarcely a respectable place for a young, unmarried woman to be seen frequently. Ola, Garrett Derf's second daughter, a girl of twenty, and a homely, high-couraged, hard muscled little creature, was permitted in the neighborhood circle of young girls rather on sufferance; but she did not trouble them greatly with her presence, preferring as a rule her own enterprises.
Lance Cleaverage, a free, unfettered spirit, trammeled by no social prejudices, came often to the frolics at Derf's. He seldom danced himself, whisky he never touched; but he loved to play for the others, and he got all the stimulation which his temperament and his mood asked out of the crowd, the lights, the music, and some indefinable element into which these fused for him.
It was nearly two months after the incident at the church and the funeral of Granny Yearwood, that Ola was redding up and putting to rights for a dance. She had hurried through an early supper; the house was cleared, like the deck of a ship for action, of all furniture that could not be sat upon. What remained – a few chairs and boxes, and the long benches on which, between table and wall, the small fry of the family crowded at meal time – were arranged along the sides of the room out of the way. The girl herself was wearing a deep pink calico dress and a string of imitation coral beads. Generally, she gave little thought to her appearance; but everybody believed now that the time was set for the marriage of Lance Cleaverage and Callista Gentry; neither of the young people denied it, Callista only laughing scornfully, and Lance lightly admitting that there was a mighty poor chance for a fellow to get away when a girl like Callista made up her mind to wed him. In the face of these things, the little brown girl clad her carefully, laboring with the conscienceless assiduity of Nature's self to do her utmost to get her chosen man away from the other woman – to get him for herself. She went out past the wood-pile to view the evening sky anxiously, and seeing only a few cloud-roses blooming in the late light over the hills, came back with satisfaction to attempt once more putting her small brothers and sisters out of the way.
A little after dark her guests began to arrive, coming in by ones and twos and threes, some of the boys in mud-splashed working clothes, some in more holiday attire. About moonrise Lance strolled down the road, and by way of defending himself from the importunities of Ola's conversation, if one might guess, kept his banjo twanging persistently. There was a certain solemnity over the early comers, although Derf roared a hearty greeting from his door of the cabin, and occasionally some of the men adjourned to his special room and came out wiping their mouths.
"Ain't nobody never goin' to dance?" inquired Ola impatiently. "Here's Lance a-playin' and a-playin', and nobody makin' any manner of use of the music."
There was nearly ten minutes of hitching and halting, proposals and counter propositions, before a quadrille was started. It was gone through rather perfunctorily, then they all sat down on the boxes and benches and stared into the empty middle of the room.
"Good land!" cried Ola, coming from the other side of the house, "play 'Greenbacks', Lance – let's dance 'Stealing partners'."
The new amusement – half dance, half play – proved, as she had guessed, a leaven to the heaviness of the occasion. People began to laugh a little, and speak above their breath. Two awkward boys, trying to "shoot dominickers" at the same moment, collided under the arch and went sprawling to the floor. The mishap was greeted with a roar of mirth in which all chill and diffidence were drowned.
And now the arrivals from the far cabins were on hand. Small children who had been allowed to sit up and look on nodded in corners, or stretched themselves across their fathers' knees and were tumbled just as they were upon a pallet in the loft. The usual contingent of bad little boys collected outside the door and began to shout at the dancers by name, calling out comments on personal peculiarities, or throwing small chips and stones under foot to trip up the unwary. These were finally put down by the strong hand.
Clapping and stamping increased as the dancers moved more rapidly; calls were shouted; the laughter was continuous. Lance Cleaverage leaned forward in his place, striking the