XI.

The day fixed for processioning Kenniston's land dawned with an element of perplexity all its own to add to the troublous questions which it was expected to decide. The weather was the aptest illustration of uncertainty. The first gray light came with a rolling cloud and a dank wind sweeping along quick gusts of rain; then the sun rose, diffusive, promissory, with a great lavishness of red and yellow suffusions, a range and degree of rank, heavy color that seemed nearer to the hues of sunset than to the luminous purity and delicacy of wonted matutinal freshness. The slate-tinted clouds were massed once more, the beams failed, the wind brought the rain anew, and when it ceased at last, light mists were stealing along the heavy purple mountains, and rising from every chasm and depression; even far away amongst those vague contours, gray and dun-tinted and brown, that were like the first lifeless sketch of the dazzling azure ranges that the sunny days were wont to paint with such brilliant softness upon the fair field of the horizon, these vapors, white, soft, opaque, flocculent, could be seen. So from the furthermost reaches to the nearest limits invisibility was visibly garnered.

As Kenniston, perturbed because of the weather signs, turned ever and anon in his saddle, as he rode up and up the mountain to the tryst at the Big Hollow Boulder, he saw now the great outward bend of the mountain, with heavily wooded green slopes under the gray sky, all the coloring heightened by the impending tufty white of the masses of silent approaching vapor; the surly crags of the terrace dark with the moisture and the shadow; and the great black mass of the charred wood still sending up a slow, melancholy thread of smoke where the hotel lay in ruins. And again, looking over his shoulder to verify some half-forgotten detail of the scene, the trees twenty feet away were barely visible in the encompassing medium, so fleetly did the impalpable cloud press upon them. To him, unversed in mountain weather, the enterprise of the day seemed impracticable; and he was half surprised to see the surveyor, with his Jacob's staff and his chain-bearers, already waiting at the boundary corner. The figures of the group of men, with their horses picketed hard by, stood out against the inexpressive whiteness about them with the distinctness of sketches on otherwise blank paper. They were easily recognizable even from a distance, and Cap'n Lucy's slim proportions and grace of movement further served to differentiate him from the burlier forms of the others.

"Ah, colonel," called out Kenniston as he dismounted, "you here?"

It might hardly be believed by one who had experienced its causticity, but Cap'n Lucy's tongue was blunted of much of its capacities under his own roof-tree by the exactions of hospitality. Now he felt the franchise of the free outer air.

"I'm a mighty confidin' young critter, I know," he replied, advancing a few paces with his hands thrust in his pockets, "but this hyar man"--he nodded at the surveyor and affected to lower his voice confidentially--"hev got the name o' bein' sorter tricky, an' I 'lowed I hed better kem along like a good neighbor ter holp ye some, else he mought cheat ye out'n a passel o' lan'."

The surveyor, a tall, saturnine, businesslike body, took not the slightest notice of this fling, but his two young chain-bearers grinned their appreciation, and the other men laughed outright with evident enjoyment, notably a tall, dark-eyed fellow, whom Kenniston presently recognized as the deputy sheriff, with whom he had already had some slight colloquy touching the possibly incendiary origin of the fire that had destroyed the new building. The recollection furnished him with a retort. He had flushed darkly, and his eyes were angry.

"I shouldn't be surprised to be ill treated in any way now in the Cove--after what _has_ happened."

The laughter was checked by his tone. The men glanced at one another constrainedly. Before his coming, the event had promised to the volunteer assistants an episode of sociability affording the interchange of ideas and jocular converse, the interest of the developments sufficiently great to repay them for the hardship of the steep scramble down the mountain side. The significance of the proceeding was reasserted, and the silence was unbroken until the surveyor, busily adjusting his compass, remarked to Kenniston that he had noted one or two blazes indicating an old line, as he came up the mountain.

"Ye won't go a-nigh them blazes!" cried Cap'n Lucy sarcastically, waving his hand along an imaginary line. "Ye take my word fur it, ye won't see them blazes 'twixt hyar an' the mounting's foot."

Kenniston detected a covert meaning in the tone, and glanced keenly around at the speaker. But Cap'n Lucy's face was as enigmatically satiric as his laughter; and as Kenniston's questioning stare sought out the son, Luther turned away to avoid meeting his eyes, lowering, anxious, and it seemed somehow conscious. Conscious, too, was the hang-dog manner with which the usually bluff young mountaineer spoke to the deputy sheriff Ross, observing that he did not see how the surveyor could get his bearings such a shut-in day as this.

The deputy sheriff had found it easily compatible with his interpretation of his duty to spare the time to assist as idle spectator at anything promising so much interest and excitement as the processioning of the Kenniston tract. For the antagonism between the disputants had already been noised abroad, and Rodolphus Ross, albeit a "peace officer" within the meaning of the statute, was not so attached to the service of the white-winged goddess that he did not cherish a lively expectation of whatever sport could be extracted from Cap'n Lucy's and Kenniston's belligerent idiosyncrasies. He protested now so clamorously that it might seem he feared that this unique opportunity would be wrested from him, and, assuming the rôle of a trustworthy weather prophet, maintained that whenever it rained before twelve o'clock, noon, an early clearance was the certain sequel. The discussion and the aspect of the weather diverted the general attention from Cap'n Lucy's singular words, and from Luther's unwillingness to proceed and surly disaffection.

But Kenniston, whose already keen observation was whetted by the appreciation of the enmity he sustained and the magnitude of the disaster that had befallen him, followed Luther's motion with an alert, apprehending eye, and hardly lost sight of him even when the mists swept between them and gave him but a distorted looming presentment of the young mountaineer; though thus caricatured, Luther never lost for a moment his uncharacteristic and already significant demeanor. Small as the group was, the figures of two or three were now and again abstracted from it, as if literally caught up in the clouds, slowly materializing again as the mists shifted. The horses hard by were sometimes invisible in the dense white medium, and anon only their heads would appear here and there in various attitudes, like studies for a cavalry subject. Even the Big Hollow Boulder, the corner of the lines, seemed to recede, and again was near at hand, in a manner altogether inconsistent with its accepted attributes of immovability as a monument of boundary. The great felled trees, lying close by athwart the outcropping ledges of rock,--traces of the mountain tempest,--were obliterated and invisible in the encompassing whiteness. The chilly sound of the rain beating heavily below in the valley rose on the dank air, and more than once the white gauzy suffusions of the encompassing vapor were pervaded with a transient yellow glow, broad and innocuous reflections of the lightning of the storm-cloud of the lower levels.

The surveyor was a tall, well-knit man of forty-five or fifty, with a square, short, grizzled beard decorating his chin, high cheek-bones, a blunt nose, a far-seeing gray eye, and a quid of tobacco that seemed to render him indifferent to the joys of conversation. His high boots were drawn to the knees over his trousers,--a style affected by the rest of the party; Kenniston's correct equestrian garb being sufficiently dissimilar to give him that air of peculiarity and modishness that somehow seems so unworthy and flippant among plain and humble folk, as if they cared for better things than fashion. It made him a trifle ill at ease, and he had a sense of being out of his sphere, added to the conviction of the vicinage of enemies. He stood with his riding-whip in his hand beside the surveyor as he adjusted his instrument, conscious of sustaining the curious attention of the chain-bearers, two stalwart young fellows arrayed in brown jeans and heavy boots, amply competent for the task of carrying the chain through that rugged wilderness; conscious, too, of Cap'n Lucy's brilliant, laughing, handsome eyes, the doubtful, furtive glances of the others, and Luther's anxious, troubled gaze.

Suddenly, with an infinitely light, elastic effect that permeated all its vast area, the cloud began to uplift; the great grassy bald of the mountain towering above them showed its vast green dome as it were between precipitous white cliffs of still higher cloud mountains. An eagle's wing caught the sunlight as he soared above, beyond rifle range, and as he felt the rising wind his keen, exultant cry floated down to them. A tempered white glister suffused all the clouds about them; the sun was out, and as the illumined masses parted, the blue mountains afar off now glimmered with a dusky section of the quiet valley below, and again were veiled with the gleaming gauze. Between its shining folds a glittering green avenue opened out down the woods, as the surveyor, bending first to take sight, then holding his Jacob's staff stiffly before him, set out from the Big Hollow Boulder with a fair start and a long, elastic step; the two chain-bearers in file alertly followed, alternately bowing down and rising again, while the chain writhed through the grass between them like some living sinuous thing, ever and again drawn out tense and straight, and the echoes rang with the strophe and antistrophe of their sudden short cry, "Stick!" "Stuck!" "Stick!" "Stuck!"

It might seem that all the oreads of the Great Smoky were set to flight by this invasion of their sylvan haunts, so many a flitting white robe fluttered elusive among the dense shadows of the trees, gone ere you could look again; so often a glistening white arm was upflung in the deepest green jungle of the laurel. They sprang up by every shadowy cliff and lurking chasm, by every hidden spring and trickling stream, and fled with tattered white scarfs streaming in the wind behind them. All the way the rout continued as Science came down the slope, led by a compass rather than the sun or the shadow, and with her votaries to mete out the freedom of the wilds, and the grace of the contour of the slopes, and the beauty of herbage and flowering growth, and the largess of the gracious earth, and to reduce all to an arbitrary scale, and judge it by the rod or perch or pole.

The grizzly old surveyor saw naught of this,--not even when, in advance of all the company, he threaded the sun-glinted green glade, and strode almost in the midst of a bevy of white gauze-draped fleeing figures. Nor his chain-bearers, young though they were, and presumably impressionable,--not even when they rose from their alternate genuflections, and their sudden call "Out!" resounded on the air, though they stood idle and looked about them while the surveyor paused to mark the "out." Nor Cap'n Lucy, as light and swift on his feet as the youngest, fierce, jaunty, with his clear, defiant eye. Nor Rodolphus Ross, finding great opportunity for mirth behind Cap'n Lucy's back as he scuffled along amongst the knot of spectators, keeping up as best they might, skirting the barriers that the surveyor and his chain-bearers, constrained by duty, went over, and tumbling, pulling, and struggling with each other now and then for the best and foremost place. "Look at old Cap'n Tems!" cried Ross. "Ain't he the very model of a game rooster? He ain't big, an' he ain't strong, an' he ain't heavy, but Lord! how he thinks he is!" Nor Kenneth Kenniston, beginning to pause now and again,--albeit he did not flag, despite the hard pull over the impracticable ground, for he was a man of stalwart physique and a practiced pedestrian,--to look instead at the memorandum of the calls of the title-deed, which original paper the surveyor held in his hand, in doubt at first, in growing dismay, then in hot and mounting anger. At the next "out," when the surveyor set down his Jacob's staff, Kenniston strode over and tapped him somewhat imperatively on the shoulder.

"My good friend," he said, with an evident effort at self-repression, "are you not making some mistake? You surely are not following the calls as they are set forth in these papers?"

To the professor of an exact science the suggestion of mistake is an imputation of incapacity. The claims of the quid of tobacco were disregarded for the nonce. The surveyor spoke, albeit with his mouth full, and spoke to the point:--

"I reckon I know what I'm about, Mr. Kenn'ston. If you don't like the way I'm runnin' this line, run it yerse'f."

"The blazes on those trees on the side of the mountain, that you called my attention to, indicating the old line, are away over yonder on that sharp ridge." Kenniston waved his hand with the paper in it toward a high rocky crest to the left; then he fixed insistent eyes on the surveyor, and stroked his full brown whiskers mechanically with the other hand.

The surveyor followed with perplexed eyes the direction pointed out. He gave a little puzzled sniff, as if he sought to smell the line. Then he reverted to that prop of common sense, his Jacob's staff.

"D'ye want me to run the line according to the compass and the calls of the title papers, or by the old blazes scattered about in the woods on the trees?" he demanded. "You don't know whether they ever were intended to mark the line, nor who put 'em thar, nor for what. I know they ain't no kin ter the line I'm runnin' now, 'cordin' ter the calls an' the compass."

Once more he took his bearings, and, holding his Jacob's staff before him, walked steadily forward into the deeps of the wilderness; the two sworn chain-bearers, who had listened with indignant, sullen brows to the wrangle, and reflection on the work, again began diligently to bow down and rise up, as they ejaculated their "Stick!" "Stuck!" "Stick!" "Stuck!"--the clanking of the chain sounding loud and metallic in the sylvan quiet. The other men, with their shadows, all pressed forward in a close squad, for the pause had given the stragglers time to gather.

Kenniston was aware that Cap'n Lucy carried the sympathies and good wishes of all the company, save perhaps the impartial surveyor, who would suffer himself to be influenced by nothing less just than his compass. He realized that he was looked upon as the "town man," and a rich one, desirous of wresting, by a slight technicality of the law, a very little land from a poor man who had in good faith built his house upon it. He had grown extremely bitter in his sentiment toward the people of the section because of the fire in which so much of value had perished, for he believed its origin incendiary. He was conscious of sustaining much antagonism, and he had fiercely resolved to deserve it. He had, in his first uncontrolled rush of anger, declared that he would punish somebody,--the true culprit, if possible; but _somebody_ should kick his heels in jail for a while, and go to the penitentiary if might be. He did not in reality go so far in feeling as in expression, but his was not a prudent tongue. He earnestly desired success in the matter of the processioning; the scheme of the new hotel had grown very close to him; it seemed to him that one log cabin might serve the mountaineer as well as another, and that, moreover, in justice to himself, he should claim his own. He had felt sure, perfectly sure, that his deed called for the land that Cap'n Lucy held. For the first time, as he clambered with the rest down the rugged slopes, a doubt of this entered his mind. It made him wince from the probable result. He was not prepared to occupy the position of having sought to despoil a man, and a poor man, of his own, his very own, and fail. He knew that if he succeeded the countryside would wish that he had failed, and Cap'n Lucy would be a popular and picturesque object of commiseration. But he could not endure the idea of the rejoicings in his failure. To work a hardship to another was bad, indeed, and he had never contemplated it without the salve of an ample money compensation. To futilely seek to work a hardship was far worse. Again and again he knit his brows, as he gazed at the treacherous annotations in his hand, while the interchange of glances behind him commented on his attitude and his evident state of mind. Cap'n Lucy, who could not have read a word of the notes, strode on, apparently indifferent to fate, the "very model of a game rooster," esteeming Kenniston's show of anxiety the merest subterfuge; for would that monument of boundary known as the Big Hollow Boulder have become so nimbly peripatetic, despite its tons of weight, if the line run out therefrom were not to be materially altered for the betterment of the claimant at whose instance the processioning was held?

And still the chain clanked and writhed its length along the ground, and the cries "Stick!" "Stuck!" of the chain-bearers alternated as before, until the sudden call "Out!" resounded, and the surveyor paused to mark the "out" once more.