The Code of the Mountains Part 18

The ex-convict was not accustomed to thought. In its stead, he had subst.i.tuted brooding. Thought is hard and tinged with torture for the brain that has not been reflective. Yet now he must think.

Minerva had been to the college. She yearned for even a greater degree of education. He had built this room because he understood how she shrank from the squalid and unclean life of the mountain cabin--and in all the mountains was no more squalid creature than himself. She despised the idea of blood-reprisal, and to forego that would, by his standards, mean a baser surrender than for a priest to repudiate his cloth.

He was ignorant, penniless, vindictive. She was, to his thinking, learned, fastidious and pledged to the new "fotched-on" order.

Should he tell her that he loved her, provided he could imagine his stoic lips shaping such phrases, she could only be offended and distressed. He must not tell her. That one thing seemed certain, and, as he stood there, masking the storm in his thin breast under a scowling visage of tightly compressed lips and drawn brow, he was being racked by a yearning greater than he had ever known or imagined.

How long he remained rigid and silent he did not know, but at last he heard her voice, speaking very softly:

"Newty, you have been very good to me. You did all this for me--and yet even you don't know how much it means to me."

"Hit warn't nothin'," he answered in a dead voice. Then, having resolved not to betray himself, he found himself crying out to his own surprise, in a tumult of fierce and pa.s.sionate feeling: "I'd go plumb down inter h.e.l.l, fer ye, M'nervy."

The girl looked up, then she rose unsteadily, and laid a hand on his arm. Her eyes were gazing very fixedly into his, and she spoke eagerly:

"You say you'd do that--for me. Do something else, Newty. Come--out of a life that's not much better than h.e.l.l--for me."

He spoke quietly again, though under her finger-touch his arm shook as if it were suddenly palsied:

"I don't jest plumb understand ye."

"Give it all up, Newty." She was talking excitedly, and her words came fast. "Give up this idea of vengeance. It's all wrong and mistaken--and wicked. It hurts you most of all. You said out there to-night that this was the only life you ever knew--"

"This an' ther penitenshery," he corrected her; and a harsh note stole into the words as he uttered them.

"There are other lives you can know. Can't you forego this idea of vengeance? Can't you forget it?"

The man gave a short and hollow laugh.

"I reckon so," he answered. Then, as his eyes flashed wildly, his utterance rose and snapped out the remainder of his response. "When Henry Falkins is dead an' buried--d.a.m.n him!"

Minerva stood looking into the face that was close to her own. It was a face branded and stamped with so fierce a vindictiveness that she realized the hopelessness of argument. It would have been as easy to persuade a maniac to become sane by asking him to lay aside his lunacy.

She turned and dropped into her chair, then, looking straight ahead at the blazing logs, she went on, holding her voice steady and even:

"When you were in jail, Newty--at Jackson--I tried to see you. But they--they wouldn't let me."

The bitterness left his eyes, and he bent suddenly forward.

"Ye tried ter see me--in ther jail-house? What fer did ye do thet?"

"I wanted to tell you, I was sorry--and to beg you to give up--your idea. I didn't know until that day that you were nursing a grudge--against Mr. Falkins."

For a while, Newt stood silent. Finally, he said curtly:

"I'm obleeged ter ye."

"But that isn't all, Newt." Minerva's hands were clasped in her lap, and the fingers twined themselves nervously and tightened as she went on.

"I've got to tell you all of it. I heard that morning--what you aimed to do--and I went to Jackson--to warn him."

The mountaineer drew back, and over his pale face pa.s.sed a paroxysm of bitterness, which at first left him wordless. His posture grew rigid, and, if Minerva Rawlins had been capable of physical fear, she would have felt it then, because she was looking into eyes burning with the fire of mono-mania. But, at last, he spoke in the same dead voice, and only to ask a question:

"How did ye know? Who betrayed me?"

"I can't tell you that. I knew that, if you succeeded, you would ruin your life--as well as end his. You are bound to see sometime that all this idea of a man's being his own judge and jury and executioner is wicked, and then--if you had succeeded--" She raised her hands in a despairing gesture, and broke off.

Once more the boy had become stiff in his att.i.tude, and his face seemed a gargoyle of hatred.

"Ef I'm goin' ter be so plumb miserable erbout hit," he said slowly, "I mout as well suffer fer a couple as fer one. Who war hit thet betrayed me?"

Minerva shook her head.

"You think of Henry Falkins as your bitter enemy. He isn't, Newt. He's not any man's enemy. Only he has lived in the civilized world as well as here, and he knows that a system that's built on murder is wrong. You know only the Henry Falkins that you've imagined. I know how terrible it must have been down there--at Frankfort.... I know that you had little else to think about.... But just for that very reason you can't trust the ideas that came to you down there. The real Henry Falkins isn't the man you think."

Newt Spooner took two slow steps, and stood before her. As he half-turned, the fire fell on one side of his face, gleaming yellow and vermilion on the gaunt angle of his jaw and chin, and kindling the other and more baleful fire in his pupils. He talked in a monotone, and, as he talked, the girl seemed to see a spirit dying in darkness and confinement, as a potted plant might die in a cellar.

"Ye says I didn't hev nothin' ter do down thar in ther peniten'shery but ter study over false notions. Mebby ye're right, but I've done studied hit all out--an' I've got 'em settled. I reckon ye hain't got no proper idee of what a feller gits down thar in them d.a.m.ned stone walls, with stripes on his clothes an' no decent air ter breathe an' no water ter drink outen a runnin' spring-branch. Hev ye ever tried ter raise a young hawk in a bird-cage, an' watched hit sicken an' die? They aims ter reform fellers down thar. Well, jest watch an' see how good they've reformed me." It was the longest speech she had ever heard him make, but he was not through yet, and she did not interrupt. "Who sent me thar? This Henry Falkins thet ye're braggin' about. Why did he do hit?

Out of the sneekin' meanness of his heart. War I ther fust feller hyar-abouts thet ever kilt anybody? Why didn't ther rest of 'em go down thar? Hit war because I war a kid thet didn't know no better then ter do what I war bid, an' because them what bid me didn't stand behind me." He paused and wiped his forehead on his coat-sleeve. "I didn't 'low thet thar war anybody in ther world a feller could trust. Then I came back hyar. I found my pappy dead, an' my ma married ergin, an' my rifle-gun sold.... Then--" His words ended in a sort of wretched gasp.

"Then you came hyar. I reckon I'd ought to hev knowed better by this time then ter be beguiled, but I 'lowed I could trust you. Ye war ther one body in ther world I'd 'a' swore by ... an' ye rid over thar an'

warned him, an' hed me throwed inter ther jail-house."

He drew his shoulders back and turned slowly, starting toward the door; but, with his hand on the latch, he paused, and added with cold bitterness:

"Ye've done succeeded in a-balkin' me oncet, M'nervy; but ye've done 'complished another thing besides thet. I only aimed ter kill Henry Falkins oncet, but atter what ye've told me, ef thar war a way under G.o.d's sun ter do hit--I'd kill him twicet."

The girl rose and came over, and her hands fell on the boy's arm.

"Newty," she pleaded with tears of desperation in her eyes. "Newty, you must try to understand me. It was for you as much as for him. It would have ruined your life. Besides, you misunderstand him--"

The young man shook her hands roughly away.

"I reckon my life's done been ruint a'ready," he declared. Then, with an up-leaping voice, he demanded as he fiercely caught her fore-arms in an iron grasp: "Ye says I don't understand Henry Falkins. What does ye know about him beyond what I knows?" The jealousy that rang through the question was the only declaration of love he had ever made to her, and his fingers unconsciously bit into her arms until they ached.

"He came down to the school," she said faintly, "and he gave me this medal because I had--I had tried to study hard."

She had succeeded in withdrawing her hands, and groped at her throat for the small metal disc, which she held out to him. But he drew back, his eyes gleaming venomously.

"I'd ruther tech a rattle-snake," he declared in a voice which she hardly recognized, "then ter lay hands on anything thet d.a.m.ned dog hed teched." She stood dazed, and he went on in the high-timbered shrillness of excitement: "Some day I'm a-goin' to have a reckonin' with thet feller, an', when I gits through, he won't go roun' givin' medals to no other gals." He wheeled and stamped out of the room, and the girl did not know that for hours he tramped the snowy woods of the mountainsides, cursing under his breath, and redoubling his oath of reprisal.

News from the outside world percolates slowly into the quarantine of the beleaguered hills. A fever that rushes hotly through the arteries of the nation from sea to sea, is hardly a flush to the country that leads its own isolated life. From Was.h.i.+ngton to 'Frisco, men were gathering at bulletin boards and clinging with hot excitement to the latest word of tidings. In city armories, militiamen were inspecting kits and drilling overtime. The _Maine_ had been blown up in Havana harbor. The war fever was burning thousands into fitful patriotism, but back there in the c.u.mberland mountains, where men scarcely knew who was President of the United States, life was going more placidly than usual. The war which this country knew most about had waned into a two-years' truce. Less than for two decades was there thought of fighting and blood-letting.

One day, Newt met a trader riding a spent mule through the mired roads with a newspaper protruding from his splattered saddle-bags.

"I reckon you soldiers'll get a chance ter sashay out an' show what's in ye now," said the trader with a grin, as though he found the idea highly humorous.

"What does ye mean?" demanded the boy, resting on his grounded rifle and fixing the other with steady, incurious eyes. "Hes the Falkinses busted the truce?"