The Code of the Mountains. Charles Buck

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СКАЧАТЬ long, low moan escaped her, and her father's face reddened in anger. He turned away and left her, going into the house, and she fled precipitately to the heights above and sobbed out her misery at the roots of the pine to which she was bidding farewell.

      Then they had moved, and life had meant fitting herself into a new family, no member of which liked her, and submitting to the shrewish heckling of a step-mother, who seemed to her a hideous libel upon the memory of the woman who had been lucky enough to die young.

      Now, as she sat with her book in her lap, because in a few days she must go back to that cabin, the past was parading in review before her eyes, and though she was very hungry for "larnin'" she was neglecting her books.

      CHAPTER III

      The late convict had wasted his strength. His violent paroxysm of anger had exhausted him more than his laborious tramp. It had sent his temperature up and brought a sickening weakness to his muscles. He wavered as he plodded and once or twice even stumbled to his knees, until at last, with only three-quarters of a mile left, he turned aside to the bank of the roadside and sat down with the sweat of weakness dripping from his face.

      It was such a day as must have set poets to making jeweled phrases out of words. The air and skies held that radiance which can make of a Kentucky June morning a miracle of beauty. The horizons were dreamily soft and warm. In the field at Newt Spooner's back a meadow-lark was madly trying to burst his pulsating throat with the flood of golden joy. In Newt Spooner's mind was a somber picture; a picture of the mountains which a few days more would throw across the eastern sky-line, and of a man who lived there and who was to die. He was to die without opportunity to defend himself and without benefit of clergy. It was not to be a fight, but an execution. In the entire mental range of the young man panting by the roadside was no reflex of any other thing than brute bitterness and "pizen meanness."

      A buggy and horse rose into view over the crest of the hill. It had only one occupant and the occupant was a girl. She was unlike any woman Newt Spooner had ever known; unlike any of the "gals" back in the mountains. Her lithe figure had all the fresh charm of the sparkling morning and all the spirited quality of the thorough-bred. And just as to Newt Spooner the world held only gall, so to her it held only fragrance and music and starshine – and an abiding faith in men and women.

      She was happy because she had not yet discovered any unhappiness and because she was young … and because to-day she would see in Winchester a certain member of the opposite sex in whom her interest was direct and personal. Meantime, June was softly glowing around the whole circle of the sky's embrace and the trees were rustling their fresh greenery and the birds were singing.

      She was singing, too, but suddenly she stopped as her eyes fell on the young man by the roadside. Her quick gaze discerned that he was desperately thin and that the color in his face burned only in hectic spots against a chalky pallor. She saw, too, that as he wiped his forehead on his sleeve his forearm and hand trembled. His clothes proclaimed him lately released from the penitentiary, but her ideas on the subject of prisons were vaguely confined to a compassionate regret that they existed. Quite probably had she found him there looking weak and sick even had he worn stripes, she would still have offered him help. She drew the horse to a standstill, and called out cheerfully in a voice as tuneful as the lark over yonder in the field:

      "Good-morning. Can't I give you a lift?"

      Newt Spooner gazed back at her sullenly and defiantly. The dog that has only been kicked distrusts the hand thrust out in kindness. It is unknown to his experience.

      "Naw," he declined, with as surly an utterance as possible.

      The girl flushed and her lips tightened. She flung back her head with a gesture that set truant curls tantalizingly astir and flapped the reins on the horse's back, but in quick afterthought she drew him down again. This boy's rudeness did not alter the fact that he was sick. He looked like a mountaineer and could hardly be expected to measure up to the bluegrass requirements of courtesy.

      "You're about as polite as – as a mud-turtle," she calmly informed the traveler, holding his eyes with an unflinching gaze, before which they shamefacedly drooped; "but that doesn't make any difference. I'm going into Winchester, and you don't look very well. Hadn't you better get in and ride to town?"

      The boy from Troublesome stared his incredulity. She seemed to him a marvelous sort of being. Her simple dress was to his eyes extravagantly elegant and her patrician delicacy of feature belonged to an order which neither the drudgery of the hills nor that of the state prison had given him opportunity to study.

      "I reckon," he said slowly and diffidently, but no longer with a note of bitterness, "hit hain't wuth while to pester ye."

      "That's all right," she commanded. "Climb in." Slowly he rose and obeyed, the whiskey-flask protruding from his coat-pocket, and when they had gone a quarter of a mile, Newt made his sole voluntary contribution to the conversation.

      "I'm obleeged ter ye," he said.

      She did not question him unduly, nor ply him with conversation, but she smiled, and in some subtle fashion there broke through the storm-wrack of the boy's bitterness a thin ray of light and glow of graciousness. She let him out at the court-house square, where buggies stood in rows and traders jostled and the auctioneer's shout resounded, and there he lost himself in the crowd; but first he stood looking after her until her buggy turned a corner, and then he remembered that she had nodded with a friendly smile of farewell. It was rather wonderful to be treated like a human being.

      Newt Spooner wanted food and he wanted it to be cheap, so he foraged up and down Main Street until he came upon that lower section where several shabby eating-houses were sandwiched between equally shabby saloons.

      And while he stood on the pavement undecided which way to turn, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and he wheeled, startled, to find himself gazing into the face of his kinsman, Red Newton.

      "Come hyar," commanded the older man. "I done heered thet ye was pardoned out, an' I sorter 'lowed ye'd be making tracks fer ther mountings. I wants ter have talk with ye afore ye goes back."

      "I aims ter git a snack ter eat," demurred Newt. "I hain't a-goin' ter talk ter no man afore I eats."

      The other nodded.

      "I knows a place whar we kin eat an' talk, too. Fult Cawsler hes done moved hyar from over on Squabble Creek, an' opened a resteraw. All our folks eats thar."

      The youth, who had three days before been Number 813, permitted himself to be led through an uninviting doorway around which stood several gaunt men in mud-spattered clothes. But Red Newton did not suffer him to halt at any of those tables, covered with red oil-cloth, where several taciturn pilgrims from the hills were feeding themselves from the blades of their knives. Instead he whispered something to Fult Cawsler himself, and was permitted to climb a narrow stairway at the back. At its head they traversed a narrow hall and came into a separate room where around a private table were seated a group of men whom the boy knew. Old Jason Dode was, as usual, tipsy and, even as the new-comers entered, was tilting the bottle of "red licker" which he unwillingly substituted for the white and sweetish moonshine of his native stills. But the important thing was that Black Pete Spooner stood gazing out of the open window, though he stood back far enough to escape the eyes of passers-by below. His hands were thrust deep in his pockets and on his face was the same expression that always sat there. Few people passed Black Pete by without turning to look again. He stood somewhat upward of six feet and his broad shoulders tapered to a gauntness of waist and leg which gave him the suggestion of a timber wedge. He was as tough as that lumberman's implement and wedgelike, too, in his power of disrupting the dividing elements which, but for him, might have hung together in harmony.

      His СКАЧАТЬ