Sunlight Patch. Credo Fitch Harris
rather, in an attitude of sitting on her crossed feet—eagerly watching for another sign of life, the tenderness which spoke in mute eloquence from every movement of her ministrations for the stranger who had stood between her and insult, was a boon that might have repaid any man for worse hurts than his. She drew his head upon her lap and began carefully to staunch a trickle of blood flowing from a small cut in his temple.
The sun went down, regretfully backing out of sight, and by its slow retreat seeming loath to leave them to the somber night. She did not notice its decline, but in the afterglow leaned nearer, pushing back his matted hair and searching each of his well-molded features. There was nothing of a personal interest in the look; there was nothing in the contact of their touch that aroused in her the least personal appeal. He was merely a thing hurt, a thing wounded in her defense.
Again from outside the window came a call, the swinging, twilight-eerie notes of a whip-poor-will; while, from afar off, somewhere in the black woods, hooted an owl. Softly, but with a restless spirit, the night-wind began to stir; and a murmur, like the winnowing of many wings, passed tremulously through the branches which swept the schoolhouse roof. But now she was unafraid.
CHAPTER III
THE WOUNDED MOUNTAINEER
She was no longer fearful for his life. Saner deductions had recalled how he was fighting up to the moment Tusk threw him off, and this precluded the probability of a broken neck. The small abrasion over his temple, where it must have struck a desk, could alone be responsible for the unconsciousness which, she now felt assured, would soon be passing.
Had Jane been dressed as a nun, the picture she made with the young mountaineer's head upon her lap would have startled the world. None of those discerning critics who stalk the galleries on varnishing day could have passed a canvas such as this without bending their rusty knees at least one creak in humble reverence. For God had carefully blessed her with a Madonna-like loveliness, a matchless purity, which held enthralled all who came suddenly upon that look. Perhaps it was not known in Heaven where she got her smile. It was this, when rippling from eyes to mouth, and lingering about the ovals of her cheeks, that could have swayed Faith upon its base or chained it thrice firmly to the Rock.
She had first acquired a pleasant suspicion of this years before in the convent up the valley, where the good sisters had given her shelter. Early one morning on mischief bent, at the very peep of dawn, she had filched the garb of old sister Methtune and, supporting its bulky skirt, demurely walked into the Mother Superior's sanctified chamber. What that good woman thought as she raised herself up from her couch is not recorded even in her conscience, but Jane was sent in haste to replace the nun's attire. While passing a glass door in a dimly lit hall she saw, for the first time in her life, her own face. For five, ten minutes she continued to look back into this heretofore undiscovered and sinful reflector, sometimes laughing, sometimes making grimaces. Then for another ten minutes she simply stared. Sister Methune was late getting to her devotions that morning.
But this incident had occurred eight years ago, when she was scarcely thirteen. Until then she had literally grown up like a weed—or a wild rose—a half-savage little creature of the Cumberlands, loving passionately, hating blindly, doing all things with the full intensity of a vivid, whole-souled temperament. She lived in a cabin many miles from the more civilized country where the convent lay, under the questionable protection of a noted feudist father, who was usually making moonshine when not stalking his enemies. Her cherished glimpses of civilization came during one month each year—July—when she picked especially fat and luscious blackberries in remote spots known only to her, and sold them in the valley to Colonel John May, whose white columned house might be seen on clear days from the convent tower.
One of her visits happened upon a day when the place was enlivened by his daughter's approaching wedding. A distinguished house-party had assembled, among whom a city-bred young fellow had been attracted by her wild beauty. Safe from the eyes of his friends he followed her through the woodland pasture, and talked to her; and it had seemed a very natural thing. Mountain girls mature early, and she was a woman for all her tender years; a twelve and a half year old woman, partly savage, masquerading in the guise of a girl. He was dazzling to her and pleasing. But suddenly he kissed her and, infuriated, she flung the empty bucket in his face and fled. The gods may know where she learned the difference between right and wrong.
In a passion of shame and bitter hatred, she hurled back at him every oath her father, in his most prolific moments, had ever used. It was a wondrous collection. Her only idea was to reach home and return with the rifle, and so insistent was this that she ran most of the twelve intervening miles. Reaching at last the cabin clearing, she panted up its steep side, through burnt stumps and sparsely growing corn, to the door; but there across the sill her father lay face down and motionless. He might have been drunk, and so at first she thought, until her approach revealed a little hole in the back of his head. She stared at him like an image of wood, then sank upon the floor, putting her lips close to his ear.
"Pappy," she said, in a quick whisper, "Pappy, tell me who done hit! I know ye air daid—but can't ye tell me jest that?"
Her first impulse was of revenge, but slowly the love—unmerited as it may have been—and the sense of loss, of loneliness, came over her like a great wave, and with her face on his still shoulder she wailed her wretched grief to the silent wilderness. When she looked up it was sundown. She realized that whoever had killed him might come back for her—might now, indeed, be "layin' out" for her; and yet she could not leave him unburied! Her hands grasped his shirt and she frantically tugged, bracing her heels against the roughly hewn log door-step, in a vague way hoping that she might drag him to a spot where the ground would be soft enough to dig. A few minutes of this fruitless effort compelled her to give it up.
"Pappy, can't ye help me, jest a leetle?" she had whispered in despair. And then the tears would flow again.
She went stealthily to the edge of the corn patch and listened. A lingering afterglow touched the broken rows of skyward-pointing tassels, but the valley below her lay shrouded in gloom. Night was creeping up the mountain side; she could see it, feel it in the horrible silence. All alone in that stark vastness of crags, disregarding those who might be "layin' out" for her, she put her hands to her mouth and called; then leaned forward, holding her breath and listening. There was not even an echo. So she turned wearily back to the cabin and tenderly covered that which she was leaving with a quilt from her own bed, whispering:
"Gawd, nor nobody, don't seem ter heah me tonight—ye poh, ole Pappy!"
The only cabin where she might hope for help was three miles away; the home of a partial friend—at least no enemy. Reaching it after a perilous walk through a roadless, bridgeless wilderness, she stood outside the crooked gate and called "Hallo." Again and again she called till, in desperation scoffing at the risk—for it is never wise to approach the Kentucky mountaineer's home nearer than his front gate without an invitation—she walked boldly to the door. It was open, and she peered into the darkness. No fire had been lighted for supper. She kneeled on the sill and felt around with her hand. First she touched an overturned chair, then a piece of broken lamp chimney, then a man's foot; but the man was not standing, the toes were up. Her heart turned to ice, yet the need of help was too imperative to turn away from any hope, so again she reached for the clumsy boot and fearfully moved it to see if he might be merely asleep, or drunk. The leg was stiff, and, with another shudder, she turned and fled.
By early morning she had dragged herself down from the mountains and staggered through the convent gate. Here, at least, in one of those modest retreats, which generations ago slipped into the remoter valleys of young Kentucky for their voluntary exile, she would find help! Many an afternoon when the world was blithe she had been wont to stop and listen to the mellow peal of its bell floating across her mountains on an easterly