A Pagan of the Hills Part 17

skull fas.h.i.+on."

He walked across and locked the baggage-room door, though it was shuttered from the outside, and dropped the key within his pocket.

"Come on boys, let's start right in," he invited. "Fer yore own sakes. .h.i.t's kinderly a pity ye couldn't git these irons offen me . . .

they're right apt ter scar somebody up."

They knew that to get out they must fight their way out--and after all there were three of them. Flinging a heavy chair above his head, the quickest-witted of the trio hurled himself forward to the attack.

From Halloway's eyes shot bolts of Berserker battle-l.u.s.t, and from under the down-sweep of the clubbed missile he glided as a trout slips away from a startling shadow. Before that a.s.sailant had recovered his equilibrium, Halloway had seized him up as a grown man might seize a small child and hurled him headlong at the operator, so that the two went down in a tangle of writhing bodies.

The third had not been idle and as Halloway straightened and wheeled, he met the cyclonic lunge of a snarling adversary with a lifted and wickedly gleaming dirk.

As the knife flashed down, the dodging Goliath felt its sting in his left shoulder--but only with a glancing blow which had been aimed at his throat. Blood was let but no great hurt done save that it roused him to a demoniac fury. The embrace in which the wielder of the blade was folded was like the snapping of a bear-trap and, not slowly but almost instantly, its victim dropped his weapon and hung gasping with broken ribs and stifled lungs.

Halloway cast him aside and wheeled again with lowered head, for two men were at him afresh with whatever things of weight came to their hands. Neither dared pause and desperation had endowed them with a strength as unwonted and exaggerated as that which his frenzy brings to a maniac.

The fallen figure lay quiet enough, but the remaining three swept in tempestuous chaos about the place. The table was wrecked--the furniture shattered--all were bleeding and panting in sob-like brokenness of breath.

Two bore the brand-like marks of handcuffs; the other a great welt across the forehead, left there by the large file, but at the end one figure straightened up--his task ended--and behind him lay three that would not soon be ready to fight again. Then, unlocking the door, Halloway let himself out into the night.

He paused on the platform and drew a long breath and after that, plunging his hands deep into his pockets, he strolled along whistling.

But when he had come to the edge of the town and the road toward Wolf-Pen Gap, he broke into a run.

Alexander had stood waiting for a while at the edge of the rock, wondering who these men might be who were approaching with such an extremity of caution. Once more she was called on to endure the heart-chill of suspense, but when finally two figures slipped through the shaft-mouth with c.o.c.ked rifles thrust out before them that tautness of nerve eased into relaxation. One of them--palpably nervous--was Will Brent. The other, with eyes agleam and an eagerness keyed for battle, was Jerry O'Keefe.

Yet as both took in the narrow and seemingly deserted area between the coal-seamed walls, their faces became heavy with disappointment. Other men followed them until eight or ten had crowded into the cavern, and very dejectedly Brent said, "We're too late. They've been here and gone."

Alexander, peering silently over the top of her rock, missed the face of Bud Sellers, the one man she had wholly trusted. She told herself that to suspect Brent or O'Keefe was ungenerous, yet out of her recent viscissitudes an exaggerated instinct of caution had been born, and she waited to judge the complexion of affairs before she revealed herself.

Jerry's engaging face grew vengefully dark as he turned toward Brent and spoke apprehensively.

"Ther place stinks with burnt gun-powder! Does ye reckon she showed fight--and they hurt her? Afore G.o.d, men, ef thet's true, I aims ter do some killin' my own self--I hain't nuver seed her but oncet--but I aims ter wed with thet gal!"

Then with a laugh that pealed through the place and brought them all around startled, Alexander emerged from her concealment.

"I almost feels sorry thet they didn't finish me--ef thet's ther fate thet's in store fer me," she announced.

Her eyes squarely met those of Jerry O'Keefe, and he reddened furiously, but at once Brent began asking and answering questions and in that diversion of attention the young mountaineer found escape from his discomfiture. The rescue party had encountered none of the men who had so recently vacated the mine. Outside the woods were "masterly wild and la'relly" and poroused with cavernous crags. The conspirators had evidently scattered and melted from sight as bees melt into a honeycomb.

But Alexander's face grew again serious and pained as she gave her most important information. "You men come a leetle too late. I driv 'em off--but them thet went last tuck my saddle-bags away with 'em."

Brent's only response to that was a brief gesture of despair. So after all the plotting, the counterplotting, the dangers and hards.h.i.+ps; after all her own gallant efforts, the girl had lost the game.

He looked at her as she stood there repressing under a stoical blankness of expression, emotions which he thought must sum up to a worm-wood bitterness of spirit.

"We're wasting time here," he announced after a brief and painful pause. "They can't have gone far--we must comb these woods."

But Alexander shrugged her shoulders.

"Thar hain't no possible way of runnin' 'em down ternight," she said.

"They've scattered like a hover of pa'tridges thet's been shot at, an'

whichever one's got them saddle-bags is in safe hidin' afore now. I've got one more plan yit, but hit's fer termorrer. Let's go back thar an'

sot thet Halloway feller free."

But halfway back they met a gigantic figure whose wrists jangled with the clink of steel chains as he swung his long arms. He was calm--even cheerful--of mood, now that he had appeased his wrath, nor did he seem concerned as to what might be the fate of the trio he had left behind him.

The skies had cleared and a moon had risen. No longer refusing the attendance of her bodyguard, Alexander insisted upon pus.h.i.+ng on through Viper to her kinsman's house at Perry Center. It was as well that her foes should imagine her forces in full flight.

Though they had all spent arduous days and nights they made the last stage of the trip at an excellent rate of speed. After Wolf-Pen Gap and its vicinity had been left behind, the unspeakable wildness of the country gave way abruptly, as it so often does in Appalachia, to higher grounds where for a little way the roads run through almost parklike stretches, now silver and cobalt under a high moon.

Jerry O'Keefe had friends at Perry Center whose doors would open to him and his companions even at this inhospitable hour between midnight and dawn, and when they left Alexander at her threshold, she paused for a moment and turned with the moonlight on her face.

"Boys," she said softly, "I'm beholden ter every one of ye! Even ef we fails 'atter all, hit hain't because we didn't try hard and we hain't done yit."

Two of the men to whom she spoke were gazing at her with rapt eyes.

O'Keefe was riding on that moonlit night at the gallop of bold dreams, and in his mind were visions of wedding and infare. Halloway's thoughts would perhaps have suffered by comparison, but in desire and the wild dream they were no less strong, and later when he and Brent lay on the same palet, in the c.o.c.k-loft of a log house, he heaved a deep sigh and gave rein to his fancy.

"I'm going away from here," he announced, "and G.o.d knows I shall miss her as a man misses the brilliance of tropic seas and the l.u.s.ter of tropic skies."

"I thought you boasted that you meant to stay," commented Brent drowsily, but Halloway went on and soon he was talking to an unhearing and unconscious bed-fellow.

"I did--but I'm not a sheer fool. I told you that I had gauged my entrance with a nicety of judgment for dramatic values. I shall regulate my exit with the same sense. She likes to think herself a man, which means that she hasn't waked up yet, but some day she will."

He paused and his own voice became heavy with coming sleep. "She's had adventures that she won't forget--if I go away--her imagination will be at work. Later when Spring comes and the sap rises--and the birds--the birds----" There the voice trailed off into the incoherence of slumber.

Jase Mallows was sleeping, too, at that hour, and it was only by a lucky chance that it wasn't his final sleep. The terrain over which the group of highwaymen had been operating had centered about the mine shaft just back of the Wolf-Pen Gap. The distances between all the points involved had been short of radius save as prolonged by the broken formation of mountain and chasm, of precipice and gorge. There were caves and thickets and the Gap itself was what local parlance termed a "master shut-in."

When the chief body of alleged Ku-Klux operators had trailed out of the mine shaft, they had removed their masks and scattered into the raggedness. They could, if need exacted, have remained there for days, safe from discovery, each in his separate hiding place. One unfamiliar with this country of eyrie and lair, wonders at the stories of men hiding out successfully, but one who knows it marvels only that any man who has taken to the wilds is ever captured.

One of the last contingent to leave had stumbled on an inert and prostrate body in the dark as he crossed a ridge not far away.

Cautiously he had investigated and had recognized Jase, who was unconscious and had lost much blood. His confederate paused for a time in a quandary as to what disposition to make of him. When to-morrow's news leaked out, wounded men would be suspected men, and those who accompanied them might share in that suspicion.

Yet to desert a comrade in that fas.h.i.+on was abhorrent even to the slack conscience of this desperado. So he grudgingly hefted the burden of the senseless figure and plodded under its weight to the nearest cabin.

There he told a story of how he had stumbled on his grewsome find in the open high-road--which was a lie--and his mystification of manner was so great as to const.i.tute for himself a practical alibi.

Early the next morning, Brent, Halloway and O'Keefe went to consult with Alexander as to the next step. None of them meant to give up after going this far and the men fretted for immediate action, but Alexander to their mystification shook her head. "Not yit," she ruled.

"I'm waitin' hyar now fer tidin's thet may holp us."

While they stood in the yard of the log house, a figure appeared plodding slowly along the roadway, and the girl's eyes were bent on it with a fixed anxiety. It came with such a weary lagging, with such a painful shuffling of feet and such an exhausted hanging of head that Brent at first failed to recognize Bud Sellers. The left arm hung with that limpness which denotes a broken bone.

"Good G.o.d," exclaimed the timber buyer under his breath, "I should hardly think he'd have the nerve to show himself here!"

But Bud looked only at the girl. He was on foot now but over his shoulders hung his saddle-bags. He halted and threw them at Alexander's feet.

"My mule got shot out from under me," he informed her quite simply, "an' I busted an arm--hit war a right slavish trip. Open them bags."