DWELLERS IN THE HILLS + THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER + THE GILDED CHAIR. Melville Davisson Post
blessed hours with our eyes sealed up tight as the lid of a jar.
"How high was the Gauley?" I almost shouted, pointing my finger at Red Mike.
"'Mid sides," answered Jourdan, turning around in his saddle.
"'Mid sides!" I echoed; "and the logs? Was it running logs?"
"Nothin' but brush an' a few old rails. You can see the water mark on Red Mike right here at the bottom of the saddle skirt." And the old man reached down and put his finger on the smoking horse. "The Gauley ain't up to stop nothin'."
I clapped my teeth together. So much for the solicitous care of Hawk Rufe. If we had gone by the Hacker's Creek road we should have missed Jourdan and lost the good half of a day. Woodford knew that Ward would send by the shortest road. It was the first gleam of the wolf tooth shining for a moment behind the woolly face of the sheepskin.
I looked down at Ump. The hunchback put his elbow on the horn of his saddle and rested his jaw in the hollow of his hand.
"Old Granny Lanum," he said, "her that's buried back on the Dolan Knob, used to say that God saw for the little pup when it was blind, but after that it was the little pup's business. An' I reckon she knowed what she said."
Wiser heads than mine have pondered that problem since the world began its swinging,—but with greater elegance, but scarcely more clearly than Ump had put it. Old Liza used to tell me when I was very little that if I fought with those who were smaller than myself, I was fighting the wards of the Father in heaven, and it was a lot better to get a broken head from some sturdy urchin who was big enough to look out for himself. And I have always thought that old Liza was about as close to the Ruler of Events as any one of us is likely to get. Anyway I doubted not that if the good God rode in the Hills, He was far from stirrup by stirrup with Woodford.
Red Mike was beginning to shiver in his wet coat, and Jourdan gathered up his reins.
"Mr. Ward," he said, "told me to tell you to stay with old Simon Betts to-night, an' git an early start in the mornin'." Then he rode away, and we watched him disappear in the hollow out of which he had come carrying so much terror.
We were a sobered three as we turned back into the woods. Ghosts and all the rumours of ghosts had fled to the chimney corners. No witch rode and there walked no spirit from among the dead. Above us the oaks knitted their fantastic tops, but it made no fairy arch for the dancing minions of Queen Mab. The thicket sang, but with the living voices of the good crickets, and the owl yelled again, diving across the road, but his piping notes had lost their eerie treble.
There is something in the creak of saddle-leather that has a way of putting heart in a man. To hear the hogskin rubbing its yellow elbows is a good sound. It means action. It means being on the way. It means that all the idle talking, planning, doubting is over and done with. Sir Hubert has cut it short with an oath and a blow of his clenched hand that made the glasses rattle, and every swaggering cutthroat has his foot in the stirrup.
It is good, too, when one feels the horse holding his bit as a man might hold a child by the fingers. No slave this, but a giant ally, leading the way up into the enemy's country. Out of the road, weakling!
We travelled slowly back toward the Stone Coal. Far away a candle in some driver's window twinkled for a moment and was shut out by the trees. In the low land a fog was rising, a climbing veil of grey, that seemed to feel its path along the sloping hillside.
I heard the boom of the Stone Coal tumbling over the welts in its bedding as we turned down toward the old Alestock mill. The clouds had packed together in the sky, and the moon dipped in and out like a bobbin. As we swept into the turnpike by the long ford, Ump stopped, and, tossing his rein to Jud, slipped down into the road. El Mahdi stopped by the Cardinal. When I looked, the hunchback was on his knees.
"What are you doing?" I said.
Ump laughed. "I'm lookin' for hawks' feathers. Where they fly thick, there ought to be feathers."
He nosed around on the road for some minutes like a dog, and then disappeared over the bank into the willow bushes. The Stone Coal lay like a sheet of silver, broken into long hissing ridges, where it went driving over the ragged strata. On the other side, the Hacker's Creek road lifted out of the ford and went trailing away through the hills. In the moonlight it was a giant's ribbon.
I had no idea of what Ump was up to, but I should learn no earlier by a volley of questions. So I thrust my hands into my pockets and waited.
Presently he came clambering up the bank and got into his saddle.
"Well," I said; "did you find any feathers?"
"I did," he answered; "fresh ones from the meanest bird of the flock, an' he's flyin' low. I think that first turn into the Stone Coal fooled him. But he will know better by midnight."
Then I understood it was horse tracks he had been looking for.
"How do you know he's trailing us?" I asked.
"Quiller," he answered, "when Come-an'-go-fetch-it rides up an' down, he's lookin' for somethin'. An' I reckon we're are about ready to be looked for."
We were clattering up the turnpike while Ump was speaking. All at once, rising out of the far away hills, I heard a voice begin to bellow:
"They put John on the island. Fare ye well, fare ye well.
An' they put him there to starve him. Fare ye well, fare ye well."
It was Parson Peppers, and of his reverence be it said that no Brother of the Coast, rollicking drunk on a dead man's chest, ever owned a finer bellow.
I turned around in my saddle. "Peppers!" I cried. "Man alive! How did you know that it was the old bell-wether's horse?"
Ump chuckled. "I saw her shod once. A number six shoe an' a toe-piece."
Chapter V
The Waggon-Maker
A spring of eternal youthfulness gushing somewhere under the bed of the mountains, was a dream of the Spanish Main, sought long and found not, as the legends run. But it is no dream that some of us carry our inheritance of youthfulness shoulder to shoulder with Eld into No Man's Country. Such an one was Simon Betts the waggon-maker.
I sat by his smouldering fire of shavings and hickory splinters, and wondered at the old man in the chimney corner. He was eighty, and yet his back was straight, his hair was scarcely grey, and his hands, resting on the arms of his huge wooden chair, were as unshrunken and powerful, it seemed to me, as the hands of any man of middle life.
Eighty! It was a tremendous hark back to that summer, long and long ago, when Simon came through the gap of the mountains into the Hills. The land was full of wonders then. The people of the copper faces prowled with the wolf and whooped along the Gauley. The Dwarfs lurked in the out-of-the-way corners of the mountains, trooping down in crooked droves to burn and kill for the very joy of doing evil. And who could say what unearthly thing went by when the wind shouted along the ridges? The folk then were but few in the Hills, and each busy with keeping the life in him. The land was good, broad waters and rich hill-tops, where the blue-grass grew though no man sowed it. A land made ready for a great people when it should come. With Simon came others from the south country, who felled the forest and let in the sunlight, and made wide pastures for the bullock, and so elbowed out the wandering and the evil.
High against the chimney, on two dogwood forks, rested the long rifle with its fishtail sight and the brass plate on the stock for the bullets and the "patching." Below it hung the old powder-horn, its wooden plug dangling from a string,—tools of the long ago. Closing one's eyes one could see the tall grandsires fighting in the beech forest, a brown patch of hide sighted over the brass knife-blade bead, and death, and to load again with the flat neck of the bullet set in the palm of the hand and covered with powder.
That yesterday was gone, but old Simon