Judith of the Cumberlands. MacGowan Alice
confession of himself.
“You wouldn’t understand what I was trying to tell about,” he began gently. “Since I’ve been living in the valley, where folks get rich and see a heap of what they call pleasure, I’ve had many a hard thought about the lives of our people up yonder in the mountains. I want to go back to my people with—I want to tell them—”
The girl leaned forward in her saddle, burning eyes fixed on his intent face, red lips apart.
“Yes—what?” she breathed. “What is it you want to say to the folks back home? You ort to come and say it. We need it bad.”
“Do you think so?” asked Bonbright doubtfully. “Do you reckon they would listen to me? I don’t know. Sometimes I allow maybe I’d better stay here where the Judge wants me to till I’m an older man and more experienced.”
He studied the beautiful, down-bent face greedily now, but it was not the eye of a man looking at a maid. His thoughts were with the work he hoped to do. Judith’s heart contracted with fear, and then set off beating heavily. Wait till he was an old man? Would love wait? Somebody else would claim him—some town girl would find the way to charm him. In sheer terror she put down her hand and laid it upon his.
“Don’t you never think it,” she protested. “You’re needed right now. After a while will be too late. Why, I come a-past your old home in the rain last Wednesday, and I could ’a’ cried to see the winders dark, and the grass all grown up to the front door. You come back whar you belong—” she had almost said “honey”—“and you’ll find there is need a-plenty for folks like you.”
“Well, they all allow that I’ll be elected next Thursday,” Creed assented, busying himself over the lengthening of Beck’s bridle, that she might lead the mule the more handily. “And if I am I’ll be in the Turkey Tracks along in April and find me a place to set up an office. If I’m elected——”
“Elected! An’ ef yo’r not?” she cried, filled with scorn of such a paltry condition. What difference could it make whether or not he were elected? Wouldn’t his hair be just as yellow, his eyes as blue? Would his voice be any less the call to love?
He smiled at her tolerantly, handing up the lengthened strap.
“Well, I don’t just rightly know what I will do, then,” he debated.
“But you’re a-comin’ up to the Turkey Tracks anyhow, to—to see yo’ folks,” persisted Judith with a rising triumph in her tone.
“Yes,” acquiesced Bonbright, “I’ll come up in April anyhow.”
And with this assurance the girl rode slowly away, leading Beck, the now resigned Pete following behind. All the sounds from the valley were gathered as in a vast bowl and flung upward, refined by distance. A moment she halted listening, then breasted the first rise and entered that deep silence which waits the mountain dweller. The great forest closed about her.
Creed Bonbright stood for a moment in the open road looking after her. Something she had conveyed to him, some call sent forth, which had not quite reached the ear of his spirit, and yet which troubled his calm. He lifted his gaze toward the bulk of the big mountain looming above him. He passed his hand absently through his fair hair, then tossed his head back with a characteristic motion. It was good to know he was needed up there. It was good to know he would be welcomed. So far the girl had made her point. After this the mountains and Judith Barrier would mean one thing in the young man’s mind. As the shortest way to them both, he turned and walked swiftly down toward the settlement and to the undertaking which there awaited him.
Chapter II
At “The Edge”
The girl on the sorrel nag and the two riderless animals toiled patiently up the broad, timbered flank of Big Turkey Track, following the raw red gash in the greenery that was the road.
She gazed with wondering eyes at the familiar landmarks of the trail. All was just as it had been when she rode down it at dawn that morning, Andy and Jeff ahead on their mules whistling, singing, skylarking like two playful bear cubs. It was herself that was changed. She pushed the cheap hat off her hot forehead and tried to win to some coherence of thought and—so far had she already come on a new, strange path—looked back with wondering uncomprehension, as upon the beliefs and preferences of a crude primitive ancestress, to the girl who had cared that this hat cost a dollar and a half instead of a dollar and a quarter—only a few hours since when she bought it at the store. She went over the bits of talk that had been between her and Creed Bonbright. What had he said his favourite colour was? Memory brought back his rapt young face when she put the question to him. She trembled with delight at the recollection. His eyes were fixed upon the sky, and he had answered her absently, “blue.”
Blue! What a fool—what a common thickheaded fool she had been all her days! She let the sorrel take his own gait, hooked his bridle-rein and Beck’s upon the saddle-horn, and lifting her arms withdrew the hatpins and took off the unworthy headgear. For a moment she regarded savagely the cheap red ribbon which had appeared so beautiful to her; then with strong brown fingers tore it loose and flung it in the dust of the road, where Pete shied at it, and the stolid Beck coming on with flapping ears set hoof upon it.
What vast world forces move with our movements, pluck us uncomprehending from the station we had struggled for, and make our sorrowful meat of our attained desires! The stars in their courses pivot and swing on these subtle attractions, ancient as themselves. Judith Barrier, tearing the gaudy ribbon from her hat and casting it upon the road under her horse’s feet, stood to learn what the priests of Isis knew thousands of years ago, that red is the symbol of pleasure and of mere animal comfort, while blue is the colour of pure reason.
Halfway up the trail they rode into a cloud that rested trembling on the mountain-side, passed through it and emerged upon fitful sunlight. Near the top there came a sudden shower which descended with the souse of an overturned bucket. It won small attention from Judith, but Pete and Beck resented it in mule fashion, with a laying back of ears and lashing out of heels. These amenities were exchanged for the most part across the intervening sorrel nag and his rider, and Selim replied promptly and in kind, almost unseating Judith.
“You Selim!” she cried jerking the rein. “You feisty Pete! You no-account Beck! What ails you-all? Cain’t you behave?” and once more she lapsed into dreaming. It was Selim who, wise and old, stopped at Aunt Nancy Card’s gate and gave Judith an opportunity to descend if such were her preference.
On the porch of the cabin sat a tall, lean, black-eyed old man smoking his pipe, Jephthah Turrentine himself. Nancy Card, a dry, brown little sparrow of a woman, occupied a chair opposite him, and negotiated a pipe quite as elderly and evil-smelling as his own.
The kerchief folded about her neck was notably white; her clean check-apron rustled with starch; but the half-grey hair crinkling rebelliously from its loose coil was never confined by anything more rigorous than a tucking comb. In moments of stress this always slipped down, and had to be vigorously replaced, so that stray strands were apt to be tossing about her eyes—fearless, direct blue eyes, that looked out of her square, wrinkled, weather-beaten little face with the sincere gaze of an urchin. Back of her chair lay a bundle of white-oak splits for use in her by-trade of basket-weaver; above them hung bundles of drying herbs, for Nancy was a sick-nurse and a bit of an herb-doctor. She had made a hard and a more or less losing fight against poverty—the men folk of these hardy, valiant little women seem predestined to be shiftless.
It came back to Judith dimly as she looked at them—she was in a mood to remember such things—that her uncle had courted Nancy Card when these two were young people, that they had