CHAPTER XIII

Before Henderson had come that night, Blossom had been trying to study, but the pages of her book had developed the trick of becoming blurred.

Two faces persisted in rising before her imagination; one, the reproachful countenance of Bear Cat, whom she ought to love whole-heartedly; the other, that of Henderson, whom she told herself she admired only as she might admire the President of the United States or the man who had written the dictionary--with distant and respectful appreciation.

"He says I'm all right," she mused, "but I reckon he _knows_ in his heart that I ain't good enough fer him--ner fer his folks."

Tears sprang into her eyes at the confession, and her reasoning went upon the rocks of illogic. "In the first place," she irrelevantly argued, "I'm in love with Bear Cat--an' in the second to think about Mr. Henderson would be right smart like crying for the moon."

Then Henderson had come; had come asking refuge from danger. He had declared his love with tumultuous force--and it seemed to Blossom that, after all, the moon was hers without crying for it.

When she had fed him in silence, because of the possibility of lurking spies outside, they sat, unmindful of passing hours, before the roar of the stone hearth and as the man's arms held her close to him she let her long lashes droop over her eyes and surrendered her hair and lips to his kisses.

They had no great need of words, but sometimes she raised her lids and gazed steadfastly into his face, and as the carmine flecks of the blaze lighted her cheeks, the eyes were wide and unmasked, with a full, yet proud, surrender.

He thought that for this gift of flower-like beauty and love the abandonment of his stern opportunism was a cheap exchange. His eyes, too, were glowing with an ardent light and both were spared the irony of realization that afterward impulse must again yield to the censorship of colder considerations. There is nothing more real than an impossible dream--while it endures.

Once the girl's glance fell on a home-made doll, with a coarse wig of horse-hair, propped on the mantel-shelf. It was one of those crude makeshifts which mountain children call poppets, as our great-grandfathers' great-grandmothers called them puppets.

A shadow of self-accusing pain crossed Blossom's face. "Turney whittled that poppet fer me outen hickory wood when I was a jest a leetle gal," she whispered remorsefully, then added: "Turney 'lowed ter wed me some day."

Henderson reassured her with irrefutable logic.

"Turner wouldn't have you disobey your heart, Blossom. Only you must be sure what your heart commands."

"I _am_ sure. I'm plumb dead-sartain sure!" she vehemently responded, though still in a suppressed voice.

They sat before the fire, alertly wakeful, in the shadow of impending danger until the first pale hint of dawn. Then Blossom went out with water pails, ostensibly busied about her early tasks but really on a journey of investigation.

Returning, satisfied of temporary safety, she said briefly and authoritatively: "Come on, hit won't do fer ye ter tarry hyar. They'll come back, sartain sure. Thar's a leetle cave back thar in ther rocks that's beknownst only to Turner an' me. Hit's dry an' clean an' thar's sweet water runnin' through hit. I'll fotch ye yore victuals every day--an' when the s'arch fer ye lets up a leetle, I'll guide ye acrost inter Virginny whar ye kin strike the railroad without goin' back to Marlin Town."

"If I were you, Blossom," suggested the man as they slipped out of the house before full daylight, "I wouldn't tell Brother Fulkerson anything about my hiding place. These men who seek my life are probably influential. If your father can truthfully deny any knowledge of my being near, it will save him embarrassment. I don't want to make enemies for him--and you."

The girl pondered this phase of the situation judicially for a moment, then nodded gravely: "I reckon thet's ther wisest way," she agreed.

For three days Blossom carried food across the steeps to the hidden man, then late one cold night, when again her father was away on some mission of kindness which would keep him from home for twenty-four hours or more, she appeared at the mouth of the cave and signaled to the refugee.

She had decided that the moment had arrived for making the dash with him across the Virginia border, and since she knew every foot of the way, it would be better to travel in the cover of darkness.

It was a long and tedious journey, and the girl led the way tirelessly through frost-rimed thickets with a resilient endurance that seemed incompatible with her slenderness.

When the rising sun was a pale disk like platinum, they had arrived on the backbone of a high ridge and the time had come for parting.

Below them banks of white vapor obliterated the valleys. Above them, in the misty skies, began to appear opalescent patches of exquisite color and delicacy. About them swept and eddied clean and invigorating currents of frosted air.

For a little while reluctant of leave-taking, they stood silent, and the argent shield of the sun burst into fiery splendor. Then the heights stood out brilliant and unveiled.

"I reckon," said Blossom falteringly, "hit's come time to bid ye farewell."

The man took her hands in his and held them lingeringly; but with a sudden and passionate gesture Blossom withdrew them and threw her arms about his neck.

"But ye hain't a-goin' fer always? Ye aims ter come back ter me ergin in good time, don't ye?"

For a little while he held her tightly clasped with his lips pressed to her soft hair, then he spoke impetuously:

"I aims ter come back ter ye right soon."

"Ye mustn't come twell hit's safe, though," she commanded, and after that she asked softly: "Now thet we're plighted I reckon ye don't forbid me ter tell my pappy, does ye?"

Henderson's muscles grew suddenly rigid and beads of sweat moistened his forehead in spite of the frosty tang of the morning air.

The words brought back a sudden and terrifying realization; the renewed conflict of a dilemma. He was going out into the other world, leaving the dead reckoning of the primal for the calculated standards of modernity. He was plighted to a semi-illiterate! Yet as her breath came fragrantly from upturned lips against his temples, all that went down under a wave of passionate love.

"No, Blossom," he advised steadily, "don't tell him yet. There are things that must be arranged--things that are hard to explain to you just now. Wait until I come back. I've got to study out this attack from ambush so that I can know whom I'm fighting and how to fight. It may take time--and if I write to you, naming a place,--will you come to me?"

Gravely and with full trust she nodded her head. "I'll come anywhars--an' any time--to you," she told him, and the man kissed her good-bye.

* * * * *

Turner Stacy's longing to see Blossom had driven him to the imprudence of breaking the restrictions of exile. After traveling by night and hiding by day it happened that he was breasting a ridge just at sunrise one morning on his way to her house, when his alert gaze caught an indistinct movement through the hazy half-light of the dawn. He could make out only that two figures seemed coming west along the mist-veiled path and that they appeared to be the figures of a man and a woman.

Surprised to encounter travelers at so remote a spot at that hour, he edged cautiously into the underbrush and lay flat on a huge rock which overlooked the path from a low eminence at its right.

They had halted just beyond the range of hearing, but when with mountain suddenness, like a torn curtain, the half-light became full-light he froze into a petrified astonishment which seemed to have clutched and squeezed all the vitality out of his heart, and to have left his blood currentless.

The abrupt revelation of light had fallen on the bright hair of Blossom Fulkerson and the dark uncovered head of Jerry Henderson; and before the monstrous incredibility of the situation could be fully grasped, the girl, to whom he had bade farewell as his acknowledged sweetheart, had thrown her arms around the neck of the man to whose loyal care he had confided her, and that man was kissing her with a lover's ardor!

What their words might be he could not tell--but their clinging embrace said enough--and Blossom was giving her lips with eager willingness.

[Illustration: What their words might be he could not tell--but their clinging embrace said enough]

Bear Cat lay for a moment, sick, dizzy and motionless while a groan, which never reached his lips, spasmodically shook his chest and shoulders. Succeeding that paralyzed instant, a fever of unspeakable fury surged over him and while all the rest of his body stretched unstirring, his arms slipped forward and the muzzle of his rifle crept over the ledge of rock. But that, too, was only a response to instinct and the thumb halted in the act of cocking the hammer. His vengeance called not only for satisfaction but for glutting.

Henderson must die face to face with him, not by the stealth of ambuscade, but by open violence to be administered with bare hands--realizing the cause of his punishment--dying by inches!

But as he was on the point of rising to confront them, something arrested him: the stupor of a man whose mind and heart had trusted so implicitly that they could not yet fully credit even the full demonstration of his eyes. This must, despite all its certainty, be some hallucination--some wide-eyed nightmare!

While the spell of his stunned heart held him in the thrall of inaction, Henderson and Blossom parted with slow reluctance and took up their opposite direction of journey.

Left alone, like a man sitting, shaken and demoralized, upon the broken debris of a wrecked universe, Turner stared ahead with a dull incredulity. But inaction was foreign to his nature and after a while he rose unsteadily to his feet. He turned and started at a swift stride which broke presently into a dog-trot along the way Henderson had taken; then he hesitated, halted and wheeled in his tracks.

"No!" he exclaimed. "No, by God, ef I meets up with _him_ the way I feels now, I'll kill him afore he has ther chanst ter speak with me. I kain't govern myself. I aims ter let _her_ tell hit to me her own self!"

So he altered his direction and went plunging westward.

A short route through broken rock and tangled brush enabled him to cut ahead of Blossom's course so that, turning an abrupt angle in the trail, the girl found him standing before her with clenched hands and a face so set and pale that she started back. It seemed to her that, instead of himself, it was his ghost which confronted her.

With a slow and stifled outcry, at the apparition, she carried her hands to her face, then broke into convulsive sobs.

"I didn't aim ter eavesdrop, Blossom," said Turner, his sternness wavering before her tears. "But I seed ye givin' yore lips ter Jerry Henderson back thar. Hit seems ter me like I kin almost discern the stain of thet kiss soilin' em now. I reckon I ought rightfully ter hev speech with him fust--but I knowed I'd kill him ef I did--an' so I held my hand twell I'd done seed _you_."

They were both trembling, and the girl's hands came slowly away from a face pitifully agitated. Her voice was a whisper.

"Ye mustn't censure me, Turney," she huskily protested. "I'm plighted--ter _him_."

"Plighted!" The word broke from the man as explosively as an oath, then after a moment's silence she heard him saying, in a slow and stunned fashion: "I 'lowed thet ye war all but plighted to _me_."

"I knows--I knows, Turney," she pleaded desperately. "I wants thet ye should understand. I thought thet I loved ye--I _do_ love ye better then ef ye war my own blood brother--but I didn't know afore now ther kind of love thet--thet----"

"Thet Jerry Henderson's done stole from me," he finished for her, in a voice she had never before heard on his lips. "Atter all I did make a mistake. Hit _war_ him I should hev spoke with fust--an' I reckon hit hain't too late ter overtake him yit."

Her hands were clinging to his arms. "No, Turney," she sought to explain. "He didn't know hit an' I didn't know hit either, when ye left. Neither one of us wouldn't hev sought ter lie ter ye."

Bear Cat Stacy was only partly conscious of what she was saying. Before his eyes swam red spots of fury which blinded him. If there was any vestige of truth in his ugly suspicion that Blossom was being deceived or played with, the responsible man, trusted friend and admired preceptor though he had been, was Bear Cat's to kill--and must die!

So he stood, tensely strained of attitude and ashen of cheek while a murder light kindled afresh in his eyes, and Blossom seemed the wavering shape of a dream: the dream of every hope his life had known--now utterly unattainable. Her fingers were clutching his taut arms yet she seemed suddenly withdrawn from his world, leaving it void.

But she was talking earnestly, beseeching, and with the strained effort of one striving to separate lucid voices from the chaotic din of a delirium, he gave painstaking heed. She told the story of Jerry's narrow escape from death and of her conducting him to a place of safe departure. Part of it only he understood through the crashing dissonance of tempest which still confused his brain.

The volcanic fires within him that were destined to bring earthquake and transition were licking consumingly at the gates of his self-control.

His whole life had been builded on a single dream: the dream of her love--and she had promised it. For that he had fought the one enemy that had ever mastered him, and had conquered. For that he had shaped his life. Now he had been robbed of everything!

"Don't ye see how hit is, Turney?" she pleaded. "Hit wasn't his fault ner hit wasn't my fault.... Hit jest had ter be! Ye sees how hit is, don't ye?"

"Yes, I sees--how hit is!" The response came dully, then with a nearer recovery of a natural tone he went on. "Anyways I reckon ye've got ther right ter decide atween us. I reckon yore heart's yore own ter give or withhold. Hit war ter me that ye pledged yoreself first. Yore first kiss was mine--an' ye suffered me ter hope an' believe." There was a strained pause, then he added: "But even ef I could hold yer erginst yore free will, I wouldn't seek ter do hit."

Blossom's contrite wretchedness was so sincere and her sympathy so inarticulate that his face presently changed. The bitter and accusing sternness died gradually out of it and after a grief-stricken moment gave way to a great gentleness--such a gentleness as brought a transformation and stamped his lips and brow with a spirit of renunciation.

"Thar was murder in my heart, jest at first, little gal," he assured her softly, "but I reckon atter all hit's a right-pore love thet seeks ter kill a man fer gainin' somethin' hit's lost hitself. He kin take ye down thar whar life means sich things as ye desarves ter enjoy. With me ye'd have ter endure ther same hardships thet broke my mother down. I wants above all else thet ye should be happy--an' ef I kain't make ye happy----" He paused abruptly with a choked throat and demanded: "When does ye aim ter wed?"

The girl flushed. She did not think Turner would accord a sympathetic understanding to her lover's somewhat vague attitude on that point, so she only answered. "He 'lows ter write ter me--ef so be he kain't come back soon."

"Write ter ye!" The militant scorn snapped again in his eyes, burning away their softness as a prairie fire consumes dry grass, in its first hot breath. "Write ter ye! No, by Almighty God in Heaven, ye says ye're plighted ter wed him! Ye've done suffered him ter hold ye in his arms. Mountain men comes ter fotch thar brides ter church--they don't send fer 'em ter journey forth an' meet 'em. In these hills of old Kaintuck men come to thar women! He's got ter come hyar an' claim ye ef he has ter fight his way acrost every league of ther journey--an' ef he _don't_----!" But Bear Cat broke off suddenly with a catch in his voice.

"I've got full trust, Turney," she declared, and her eyes showed it, so that the man forced himself to calmness again, and went on in a level voice.

"I aims ter see thet ye hes what ye wants, Blossom, ef I hes ter plumb tear ther hills down level by level ter git hit fer ye. I must be a-farin' back inter Virginny," he announced a moment later with a curtness meant to bulwark him against a fresh outburst of feeling.

Blossom raised her hands as if to detain him, then let them drop again with a pathetic gesture. Bear Cat picked up his hat which had fallen to the ground and stood crushing its limp brim in his clenched fingers. Finally he said, without anger, but very seriously: "I wants thet ye should give me back my pledge--erbout drinkin'. Ye knows why I give hit ter ye--an' now----"

"Oh, Turner," she interrupted protestingly, "don't ask thet!"

"I'm obleeged ter ask hit, Blossom," he obdurately answered. "I reckon mebby I kin still win my fight with licker--but I mustn't be beholden by a bond thet's lost hits cause."

Tearfully she nodded her head. "I'll free ye if ye demands hit," she conceded, "but I aims ter go on a-prayin'."

* * * * *

Jerry Henderson was not a scoundrel in a general sense nor had he hitherto been a weakling, but for once he was the self-governed man who has lost control of his life and fallen victim to vacillation. Surging waves of heart-hunger made him want to go recklessly back; to fight his way, if need be, through all the Towers' minions to Blossom's side and claim her as his promised bride.

Other and perhaps saner waves of tremendous misgiving beat with steady reiteration against those of impulse. He must live out most of his days among people to whom such an alliance would be stripped of all illusion; would resolve itself into nothing more than a mesalliance. For both of them it would eventuate in wreck--and so Blossom heard nothing from him and she tasted first fear, then despair.

At last Kinnard Towers either learned or guessed the truth; that Blossom had hidden Henderson out in the absence of her father and had aided his escape. He saw to it that the report gained wide currency in a land avid for gossip.

Whatever the condition of his love affairs, Jerry came up short against the realization that he could not indefinitely abandon his business. He must, in some way, demonstrate that he was not being effectively put to flight by feudal threats and so he carried his perplexities to Lone Stacy, who was awaiting trial in the Louisville jail, and unbosomed himself in a full and candid recital.

The bearded moonshiner, gaunter than ever and with the haunted eyes of a caged eagle, listened with grave courtesy but with a brow that gradually knitted into an expression half puzzled and half sinister.

"I reckon Bear Cat'll feel right-sensibly broke up," he said slowly. "Ye've done cut him out with his sweetheart, endurin' his absence from home, and ther two of 'em's growed up without no other notion then thet of bein' wed some day."

Henderson was on the point of self-justification, but before he could speak the prisoner went thoughtfully on: "Howsoever, a gal's got a rather as to her sweet-heartin'--an' ef ye won her fa'r an' above-board, I reckon Turner kin be fa'r-minded, too. I was thinkin' of somethin' else, though. From what ye tells me hit looks like es ef all these things, my jailin' an' yore lay-wayin', is jest pieces of one pattern. Hit looks like _I_ was brought down hyar so thet Kinnard Towers could git _you_. Ef I'd a-knowed erbout his warnin' ye off thet night ye came, I mout hev guessed hit afore now."

He rose and paced the floor of the room where prisoners were permitted to receive guests bearing special permits--under the chaperonage of a turnkey. Suddenly he halted and his eyes flared, though his voice remained low and tense.

"I'm a Christian an' a man of peace," he said ominously, "but ef what I suspicions air true I don't aim ter submit ter hit. Does ye want ter go back thar ter Little Slippery?"

"I do, indeed," replied Henderson eagerly. "And soon!"

"All right then. Ther Stacys hev still got some power acrost Cedar Mounting an' they aims ter exercise hit. I'll straightway send a letter ter my brother, Joe Stacy. Ef ye gits offen ther train in Marlin Town one week from terday, he'll be thar ter meet ye--an' he'll hev enough men thar with rifle-guns ter see ye through safe--an' hold ye safe, too."

"Joe Stacy," repeated Henderson, "I've never met him, have I?"

"I don't hardly believe ye hes. He dwells on Skinflint, but he'll know _you_ when he sees ye."

Later that same day the turnkey, who had from time to time received certain courtesies from Mark Tapper, repeated the conversation to that officer, and within forty-eight hours a messenger relayed it verbally to Kinnard Towers.

"Ef thar's any way ter head off thet letter ter Joe, now," reflected the backwoods master of intrigue, "an' thet bodyguard don't show up--I reckon we kin still compass what we failed in, ther first time."

* * * * *

To the house in Virginia where Bear Cat was temporarily established came Lew Turner, a distant kinsman on an enterprise of cattle trading. The meeting was a coincidence though a natural one, since their host was a man who had migrated from Little Slippery and had long been known to both. Shortly the two sat alone in conversation, and Bear Cat demanded news from home.

"Wa'al thar hain't no welcome tidings ter give ye. They keeps puttin' off yore paw's trial jest ter frazzle him out, fer one thing," began the newcomer lugubriously. "Then Henderson come back from down below an' some fellers aimed ter lay-way him, so he sought refuge in Brother Fulkerson's dwellin'-house when ther preacher warn't thar. Blossom tuck him in outen charity an' the two of 'em spent ther night thar all alone by tharselves. Hit didn't become gin'rally known till after he'd got away safe, but then ther gossips started in tongue-waggin'."

"Hold on, Lew! By God Almighty, ye've done said too much," Bear Cat broke out with a dangerous note of warning, his eyes narrowing into slits of menacing glitter.

The man from home hastily hedged his statement. "Hit warn't no fashion Blossom's fault. He'd done faithfully promised ter wed with her."

Bear Cat Stacy had risen eruptively out of his chair. He bent over the intervening table, resting on hands in which the knuckles stood out white. "Go on!" he commanded fiercely. "What next?"

"Thet's erbout all, save thet since thet time she's done been pinin' round like somebody sickenin' ter her death. Es fer ther preacher, he just clamps his mouth shet an' won't say nothin' at all. Howsoever, he looks like he'd done been stricken."

Bear Cat straightened up and passed a hand across his forehead. He was rocking unsteadily on his feet as he reached for his hat.

"Whar air ye a-goin', Bear Cat?" asked the kinsman, with a sudden fear for the consequences of his narrative.

"Whar am I 'goin'? God, He knows! Wharever Jerry Henderson's at, _thar's_ whar I'm 'goin'--an' no man hed better seek ter hinder me!"

##