The Trail of the Lonesome Pine Part 36

"No, no, NO! I wouldn't TOUCH anything that was yours"--she put her hands to her head as though she were crazed, and then she turned and broke into a swift run up the road.

Panting, June reached the gate. The front door was closed and there she gave a tremulous cry for Bub. The door opened a few inches and through it Bub shouted for her to come on. The back door, too, was closed, and not a ray of daylight entered the room except at the port-hole where Bub, with a Winchester, had been standing on guard. By the light of the fire she saw her father's giant frame stretched out on the bed and she heard his laboured breathing. Swiftly she went to the bed and dropped on her knees beside it.

"Dad!" she said. The old man's eyes opened and turned heavily toward her.

"All right, Juny. They shot me from the laurel and they might nigh got Bub. I reckon they've got me this time."

"No--no!" He saw her eyes fixed on the matted blood on his chest.

"Hit's stopped. I'm afeared hit's bleedin' inside." His voice had dropped to a whisper and his eyes closed again. There was another cautious "h.e.l.lo" outside, and when Bub again opened the door Dave ran swiftly within. He paid no attention to June.

"I follered June back an' left my hoss in the bushes. There was three of 'em." He showed Bub a bullet hole through one sleeve and then he turned half contemptuously to June:

"I hain't done it"--adding grimly--"not yit. He's as safe as you air. I hope you're satisfied that hit hain't him 'stid o' yo' daddy thar."

"Are you going to the Gap for a doctor?"

"I reckon I can't leave Bub here alone agin all the Falins--not even to git a doctor or to carry a love-message fer you."

"Then I'll go myself."

A thick protest came from the bed, and then an appeal that might have come from a child.

"Don't leave me, Juny." Without a word June went into the kitchen and got the old bark horn.

"Uncle Billy will go," she said, and she stepped out on the porch. But Uncle Billy was already on his way and she heard him coming just as she was raising the horn to her lips. She met him at the gate, and without even taking the time to come into the house the old miller hurried upward toward the Lonesome Pine. The rain came then--the rain that the tiny cobwebs had heralded at dawn that morning. The old step-mother had not come home, and June told Bub she had gone over the mountain to see her sister, and when, as darkness fell, she did not appear they knew that she must have been caught by the rain and would spend the night with a neighbour. June asked no question, but from the low talk of Bub and Dave she made out what had happened in town that day and a wild elation settled in her heart that John Hale was alive and unhurt--though Rufe was dead, her father wounded, and Bub and Dave both had but narrowly escaped the Falin a.s.sa.s.sins that afternoon. Bub took the first turn at watching while Dave slept, and when it was Dave's turn she saw him drop quickly asleep in his chair, and she was left alone with the breathing of the wounded man and the beating of rain on the roof. And through the long night June thought her brain weary over herself, her life, her people, and Hale. They were not to blame--her people, they but did as their fathers had done before them. They had their own code and they lived up to it as best they could, and they had had no chance to learn another. She felt the vindictive hatred that had prolonged the feud. Had she been a man, she could not have rested until she had slain the man who had ambushed her father. She expected Bub to do that now, and if the spirit was so strong in her with the training she had had, how helpless they must be against it. Even Dave was not to blame--not to blame for loving her--he had always done that. For that reason he could not help hating Hale, and how great a reason he had now, for he could not understand as she could the absence of any personal motive that had governed him in the prosecution of the law, no matter if he hurt friend or foe. But for Hale, she would have loved Dave and now be married to him and happier than she was. Dave saw that--no wonder he hated Hale.

And as she slowly realized all these things, she grew calm and gentle and determined to stick to her people and do the best she could with her life.

And now and then through the night old Judd would open his eyes and stare at the ceiling, and at these times it was not the pain in his face that distressed her as much as the drawn beaten look that she had noticed growing in it for a long time. It was terrible--that helpless look in the face of a man, so big in body, so strong of mind, so iron-like in will; and whenever he did speak she knew what he was going to say:

"It's all over, Juny. They've beat us on every turn. They've got us one by one. Thar ain't but a few of us left now and when I git up, if I ever do, I'm goin' to gether 'em all together, pull up stakes and take 'em all West. You won't ever leave me, Juny?"

"No, Dad," she would say gently. He had asked the question at first quite sanely, but as the night wore on and the fever grew and his mind wandered, he would repeat the question over and over like a child, and over and over, while Bub and Dave slept and the rain poured, June would repeat her answer:

"I'll never leave you, Dad."

x.x.xI

Before dawn Hale and the doctor and the old miller had reached the Pine, and there Hale stopped. Any farther, the old man told him, he would go only at the risk of his life from Dave or Bub, or even from any Falin who happened to be hanging around in the bushes, for Hale was hated equally by both factions now.

"I'll wait up here until noon, Uncle Billy," said Hale. "Ask her, for G.o.d's sake, to come up here and see me."

"All right. I'll axe her, but--" the old miller shook his head.

Breakfastless, except for the munching of a piece of chocolate, Hale waited all the morning with his black horse in the bushes some thirty yards from the Lonesome Pine. Every now and then he would go to the tree and look down the path, and once he slipped far down the trail and aside to a spur whence he could see the cabin in the cove. Once his hungry eyes caught sight of a woman's figure walking through the little garden, and for an hour after it disappeared into the house he watched for it to come out again. But nothing more was visible, and he turned back to the trail to see Uncle Billy laboriously climbing up the slope. Hale waited and ran down to meet him, his face and eyes eager and his lips trembling, but again Uncle Billy was shaking his head.

"No use, John," he said sadly. "I got her out on the porch and axed her, but she won't come."

"She won't come at all?"

"John, when one o' them Tollivers gits white about the mouth, an' thar eyes gits to blazin' and they KEEPS QUIET--they're plumb out o' reach o' the Almighty hisself. June skeered me. But you mustn't blame her jes'

now. You see, you got up that guard. You ketched Rufe and hung him, and she can't help thinkin' if you hadn't done that, her old daddy wouldn't be in thar on his back nigh to death. You mustn't blame her, John--she's most out o' her head now."

"All right, Uncle Billy. Good-by." Hale turned, climbed sadly back to his horse and sadly dropped down the other side of the mountain and on through the rocky gap-home.

A week later he learned from the doctor that the chances were even that old Judd would get well, but the days went by with no word of June.

Through those days June wrestled with her love for Hale and her loyalty to her father, who, sick as he was, seemed to have a vague sense of the trouble within her and shrewdly fought it by making her daily promise that she would never leave him. For as old Judd got better, June's fierceness against Hale melted and her love came out the stronger, because of the pa.s.sing injustice that she had done him. Many times she was on the point of sending him word that she would meet him at the Pine, but she was afraid of her own strength if she should see him face to face, and she feared she would be risking his life if she allowed him to come. There were times when she would have gone to him herself, had her father been well and strong, but he was old, beaten and helpless, and she had given her sacred word that she would never leave him. So once more she grew calmer, gentler still, and more determined to follow her own way with her own kin, though that way led through a breaking heart. She never mentioned Hale's name, she never spoke of going West, and in time Dave began to wonder not only if she had not gotten over her feeling for Hale, but if that feeling had not turned into permanent hate. To him, June was kinder than ever, because she understood him better and because she was sorry for the hunted, hounded life he led, not knowing, when on his trips to see her or to do some service for her father, he might be picked off by some Falin from the bushes. So Dave stopped his sneering remarks against Hale and began to dream his old dreams, though he never opened his lips to June, and she was unconscious of what was going on within him. By and by, as old Judd began to mend, overtures of peace came, singularly enough, from the Falins, and while the old man snorted with contemptuous disbelief at them as a pretence to throw him off his guard, Dave began actually to believe that they were sincere, and straightway forged a plan of his own, even if the Tollivers did persist in going West. So one morning as he mounted his horse at old Judd's gate, he called to June in the garden:

"I'm a-goin' over to the Gap." June paled, but Dave was not looking at her.

"What for?" she asked, steadying her voice.

"Business," he answered, and he laughed curiously and, still without looking at her, rode away.

Hale sat in the porch of his little office that morning, and the Hon.

Sam Budd, who had risen to leave, stood with his hands deep in his pockets, his hat tilted far over his big goggles, looking down at the dead leaves that floated like lost hopes on the placid mill-pond. Hale had agreed to go to England once more on the sole chance left him before he went back to chain and compa.s.s--the old land deal that had come to life--and between them they had about enough money for the trip.

"You'll keep an eye on things over there?" said Hale with a backward motion of his head toward Lonesome Cove, and the Hon. Sam nodded his head:

"All I can."

"Those big trunks of hers are still here." The Hon. Sam smiled. "She won't need 'em. I'll keep an eye on 'em and she can come over and get what she wants--every year or two," he added grimly, and Hale groaned.

"Stop it, Sam."

"All right. You ain't goin' to try to see her before you leave?" And then at the look on Hale's face he said hurriedly: "All right--all right," and with a toss of his hands turned away, while Hale sat thinking where he was.

Rufe Tolliver had been quite right as to the Red Fox. n.o.body would risk his life for him--there was no one to attempt a rescue, and but a few of the guards were on hand this time to carry out the law. On the last day he had appeared in his white suit of tablecloth. The little old woman in black had made even the cap that was to be drawn over his face, and that, too, she had made of white. Moreover, she would have his body kept unburied for three days, because the Red Fox said that on the third day he would arise and go about preaching. So that even in death the Red Fox was consistently inconsistent, and how he reconciled such a dual life at one and the same time over and under the stars was, except to his twisted brain, never known. He walked firmly up the scaffold steps and stood there blinking in the sunlight. With one hand he tested the rope.

For a moment he looked at the sky and the trees with a face that was white and absolutely expressionless. Then he sang one hymn of two verses and quietly dropped into that world in which he believed so firmly and toward which he had trod so strange a way on earth. As he wished, the little old woman in black had the body kept unburied for the three days--but the Red Fox never rose. With his pa.s.sing, law and order had become supreme. Neither Tolliver nor Falin came on the Virginia side for mischief, and the desperadoes of two sister States, whose skirts are st.i.tched together with pine and pin-oak along the crest of the c.u.mberland, confined their deviltries with great care to places long distant from the Gap. John Hale had done a great work, but the limit of his activities was that State line and the Falins, ever threatening that they would not leave a Tolliver alive, could carry out those threats and Hale not be able to lift a hand. It was his helplessness that was making him writhe now.

Old Judd had often said he meant to leave the mountains--why didn't he go now and take June for whose safety his heart was always in his mouth?

As an officer, he was now helpless where he was; and if he went away he could give no personal aid--he would not even know what was happening--and he had promised Budd to go. An open letter was clutched in his hand, and again he read it. His coal company had accepted his last proposition. They would take his stock--worthless as they thought it--and surrender the cabin and two hundred acres of field and woodland in Lonesome Cove. That much at least would be intact, but if he failed in his last project now, it would be subject to judgments against him that were sure to come. So there was one thing more to do for June before he left for the final effort in England--to give back her home to her--and as he rose to do it now, somebody shouted at his gate:

"h.e.l.lo!" Hale stopped short at the head of the steps, his right hand shot like a shaft of light to the b.u.t.t of his pistol, stayed there--and he stood astounded. It was Dave Tolliver on horseback, and Dave's right hand had kept hold of his bridle-reins.

"Hold on!" he said, lifting the other with a wide gesture of peace. "I want to talk with you a bit." Still Hale watched him closely as he swung from his horse.

"Come in--won't you?" The mountaineer hitched his horse and slouched within the gate.

"Have a seat." Dave dropped to the steps.

"I'll set here," he said, and there was an embarra.s.sed silence for a while between the two. Hale studied young Dave's face from narrowed eyes. He knew all the threats the Tolliver had made against him, the bitter enmity that he felt, and that it would last until one or the other was dead. This was a queer move. The mountaineer took off his slouched hat and ran one hand through his thick black hair.

"I reckon you've heard as how all our folks air sellin' out over the mountains."