The Law of Hemlock Mountain

by Hugh Lundsford

  CHAPTER V

  Private Grant had been bred of the blood of hatred and suckled invindictiveness. He had come into being out of the heritage of feudfighting "foreparents," and he thought in the terms of his ancestry.

  When he had fled into the jungle beyond the island village, though hehad been demented and enfeebled, the instinct of a race that had often"hidden out" guided him. That instinct and chance had led him to anative house where his disloyalty gave him a welcome, and there he hadfound sanctuary until his fever subsided and he emerged cadaverous,but free. Word had filtered through to him there of Spurrier'scourt-martial and its result.

  In the course of time, fever-wasted yet restored out of hissemi-lunacy, he had made his way furtively but successfully towardManila and there he had supplemented the sketchy fragments ofinformation with which his disloyal native friends had been able toprovide him.

  He knew now that the accused officer had pitched his defense upon anaccusation of the deserter and the refugee's eyes smoldered as helearned that he himself had been charged with prefacing his flightwith murder. He knew what that meant. The disgraced officer would moveheaven and earth to clear his smirched name, and the conditionprecedent would be the capture of Private Grant and the placing of himin the prisoner's dock. To be wanted for desertion was grave enough.To be wanted both for desertion and the assassination of his companycommander was infinitely worse, and to stand in that position andface, as he believed he would have to, a conspiracy of class feeling,was intolerable.

  Haunting the shadowy places about Manila, Grant had been almost crazedby his fears but with the lifting of the steamer's anchor, a greatspirit of hope had brightened in him, feeding on the solace of thethought that, once more in the States, he could lose himself frompursuit and vigilance.

  Then he had seen, on the same ship, the face of the man whom, aboveall others, he had occasion to fear!

  For their joint lives the world was not large enough. One of them mustdie, and in the passion that swept over him with the dread ofdiscovery. Grant had skirted a relapse into his recent mania.

  At that moment when Spurrier had looked down and he had looked up, thedeserter had seen only one way out, and that was to kill. But when theother had moved away, seemingly without recognition, his thoughts hadmoved more lucidly again.

  Until he had tried soldiering he had known only the isolated life offorested mountains and here on a ship at sea he felt surrounded andhelpless--almost timid. When he landed at San Francisco, if his luckheld him undiscovered that long, he would have dry land under him andspace into which to flee.

  The refugee had hated Comyn. Now Comyn was dead and Grant transferredhis hatred from the dead captain to the living lieutenant, resolvingthat he also must die.

  The moment to which he looked forward with the most harrowingapprehension was that when the vessel docked and put her passengersashore. Here at sea a comforting isolation lay between first andthird cabin passengers and one could remain unseen from those decklevels that lay forward and above. But with the arrangements fordisembarkation, he was unfamiliar, and for all he knew, the steeragepeople might be herded along under the eyes of those who traveledmore luxuriously. He might have to march in such a procession,willy-nilly, over a gang-plank swept by a watchful eye.

  So Private Grant brooded deeply and his thoughts were not pretty. Alsohe kept his pistol near him and when the hour for debarkation arrivedhe was ripe for trouble.

  It happened that a group of steerage passengers, including himself,were gathered together much as he had feared they might be, andGrant's face paled and hardened as he saw, leaning with his elbows ona rail above him and a pipe in his mouth, the officer whom hedreaded.

  Grant's hand slipped unobtrusively under his coat and his eyesnarrowed as his heart tightened and became resolved.

  Spurrier had not yet seen him but at any moment he might do so. Therewas nothing to prevent the wandering and casual glance from alightingon the spot where the deserter stood, and when it did so themountaineer would draw and fire.

  But as the ex-officer's eyes went absently here and there a girlpassed at his back and perhaps she spoke as she passed. At all eventsthe officer straightened and stiffened. Across his face flashedswiftly such an expression as might have come from a sudden andstinging blow, and then, losing all interest in the bustle of thelower decks, the man turned on his heel and walked rapidly away.

  The deserter's hand stole away from the pistol grip and his breath ranout in a long, sibilant gasp of relief and reaction. When later he hadlanded safely and unmolested, he turned in flight toward the mountainsthat he knew over there across the continent--mountains where onlybloodhounds could run him to earth.

  Beyond the rims of those forest-tangled peaks he had never looked outuntil he had joined the army, and once back in them, though he darenot go, for a while, to his own home county, he could shake off hispalsy of fear.

  He traveled as a hobo, moneyless, ignorant, and unprepossessing ofappearance, yet before the leaves began to fall he was at lasttramping slopes where the air tasted sweeter to his nostrils, and thespeech of mankind fell on his ear with the music of the accustomed.

  The name of Bud Grant no longer went with him. That, since it carriedcertain unfulfilled duties to an oath of allegiance, he generouslyceded to the United States Army, and contented himself with the randomsubstitute of Sim Colby.

  Now he tramped swingingly along a bowlder-broken creek bed which bylocal euphemism was called a road. When his way led him over thebackbone of a ridge he could see, almost merged with the blue of thehorizon, the smoky purple of a sugar loaf peak, which marked hisobjective.

  When he passed that he would be in territory where his journeyingmight end. To reach it he must transverse the present vicinity inwhich a collateral branch of his large family still dwelt, and wherehe himself preferred to walk softly, wary of possible recognition.

  To the man whose terror had seen in every casual eye that rested onhim while he crossed a continent, a gleam of accusation, it was asthough he had reached sanctuary. The shoulders that he had forced intoa hang-dog slough to disguise the soldierly bearing which had becomehabitual in uniform, came back into a more buoyant and upright swing.The face that had been sullen with fear now looked out with somethingof the bravado of earlier days, and the whole experience of theimmediate past; of months and even years, took on the unreality of anightmare from which he was waking.

  The utmost of caution was still required, but the long flight wasreaching a goal where substantial safety lay like a land of promise.It was a land of promise broken with ragged ranges and it was fiercelyaustere; the Cumberland mountains reared themselves like a colossaland inhospitable wall of isolation between the abundant richness oflowland Kentucky to the west, and Virginia's slope seaward to theeast.

  But isolation spelled refuge and the taciturn silences of the men whodwelt there, asking few questions and answering fewer, gave promise ofunmolested days.

  These hills were a world in themselves; a world that had stood,marking time for a hundred and fifty years, while to east and westlife had changed and developed and marched with the march of theyears. Sequestered by broken steeps of granite and sand stone, thehuman life that had come to the coves and valleys in days when thepioneers pushed westward, had stagnated and remained unaltered.

  Illiteracy and ignorance had sprung chokingly into weed-likeprevalence. The blood-feud still survived among men who fiercelyinsisted upon being laws unto themselves. Speech fell in quaintuncouthness that belonged to another century, and the tides of progressthat had risen on either hand, left untouched and uninfluenced themen and women of mountain blood, who called their lowland brethren"furriners" and who distrusted all that was "new-fangled" or"fotched-on."

  Habitations were widely separated cabins. Roads were creekbeds. Lifewas meager and stern, and in the labyrinths of honeycombed andforest-tangled wilds, men who were "hidin' out" from sheriffs, fromrevenuers, from personal enemies, had a sentimental claim on thesympathy of
the native-born.

  This was the life from which the deserter had sprung. It was the lifeto which with eager impatience he was returning; a life of countlesshiding places and of no undue disposition to goad a man withquestioning.

  Through the billowing richness of the Bluegrass lowlands, he hadhurried with a homing throb in his pulses. As the foothills began tobreak out of the fallow meadows and the brush to tangle at the fringeof the smoothness, his breath had come deeper and more satisfying.When the foothills rose in steepness until low, wet streamers of cloudtrailed their slopes like shrapnel smoke, and the timber thickened andhe saw an eagle on the wing, something like song broke into being inhis heart.

  He was home. Home in the wild mountains where air and the water hadzest and life instead of the staleness that had made him sick in theflat world from which he came. He was home in the mountains whereothers were like him and he was not a barbarian any longer amongcontemptuous strangers.

  He plodded along the shale-bottomed water course for a little way andhalted. As his woodsman's eye took bearings he muttered to himself:"Hit's a right slavish way through them la'rel hills, but hit's acut-off," and, suiting his course to his decision, he turned upwardinto the thickets and began to climb.

  An hour later he had covered the "hitherside" and "yon side" of asmall mountain, and when he came to the highway again he found himselfconfronted by a half dozen armed horsemen whose appearance gave himapprehensive pause, because at once he recognized in them theofficialdom of the law. The mounted travelers drew rein, and he haltedat the roadside, nodding his greeting in affected unconcern.

  The man who had been riding at the fore held in his left hand thehalter line of a led horse, and now he looked down at the pedestrianand spoke in the familiar phrase of wayside amenity.

  "Howdy, stranger, what mout yore name be?"

  "Sim Colby from acrost Hemlock Mountain ways, but I've done been westfer a year gone by, though, an' I'm jest broguein' along to'rdshome."

  The questioner, a long, gaunt man with a face that had been scarred,but never altered out of its obstinate set, eyed him for a moment,then shot out the question:

  "Did ye ever hear tell of Sam Mosebury over thet-away?"

  It was lucky that the fugitive had given as his home a territory withwhich he had some familiarity. Now his reply came promptly.

  "Yes, I knows him when I sees him. Some folks used ter give him aright hard name over thar, but I reckon he's all right ef a man don'taim ter crowd him too fur."

  "I don't know how fur he mout of been crowded," brusquely replied theman with the extra horse, "but he kilt a man in Rattletown yestiddynoon an' tuck ter ther woods. I'm after him."

  The foot traveler expressed an appropriate interest, then added:

  "Howsomever, hit ain't none of my affair, an' seein' thet I've got aright far journey ahead of me, I'll hike along."

  But the leader of the mounted group shook his head.

  "One of my men got horse flung back thar an' broke a bone inside him.I'm ther high sheriff of this hyar county, an' I hereby summons ye tergo along with me an' ack as a member of my possy."

  Under his tan Private Grant paled a little. This mischance carried atriple menace to his safety. It involved riding back to the countyseat where some man might remember his face, and recall that twoyears ago he had gone away on a three years' enlistment. But even ifhe escaped that contingency, it meant tarrying in this neighborhoodthrough which he had meant to pass inconspicuously and rapidly. To beattached to a _posse comitatus_ riding the hills on a man hunt meantto challenge every passing eye with an interest beyond the casual.

  Finally, though he might well have forgotten him, the man whose trailhe was now called to take in pursuit had once known him slightly, andif they met under such hostile auspices, might recognize and denouncehim.

  But the sheriff sat enthroned in his saddle and robed in the color ofauthority. At his back sat five other men with rifles across theirpommels, and with such a situation there was no argument. The law'sofficer threw the bridle rein of the empty-saddled mount to the man inthe road.

  "Get up on this critter," he commanded tersely, "and don't let him githis head down too low. He follers buck-jumpin'."

  When Grant, alias Colby, found that the men riding with him were moredisposed to somber silence than to inquisitiveness or loquacity, hebreathed easier. He even made a shrewd guess that there were others inthat small group who answered the call of the law as reluctantly ashe.

  Sam Mosebury was accounted as dangerous as a rattlesnake, and Buddoubted whether even the high sheriff himself would make more than aperfunctory effort to come to grips with him in his presentdesperation.

  When the posse had ridden several hours, and had come to a spot in theforest where the trail forked diversely, a halt was called. They hadtraveled steep ways and floundered through many belly-deep fords. Dustlay gray upon them and spattered mud overlaid the dust.

  "We've done come ter a pass, now," declared the sheriff, "where hitain't goin' ter profit us no longer ter go trailin' in one bunch. Wehev need ter split up an' turkey tail out along different routes."

  The sun had long crossed the meridian and dyed the steep horizon withburning orange and violet when Bud Grant and Mose Biggerstaff, withwhom he had been paired off, drew rein to let their horses blow in agorge between beetling walls of cliff.

  "Me, I ain't got no master relish for this task, no-how," declaredMose morosely as he spat at the black loam of rotting leaves. "No manain't jedgmatically proved ter me, yit, thet ther feller Sam kiltdidn't need killin'."

  Bud nodded a solemn concurrence in the sentiment. Then abruptly thetwo of them started as though at the intrusion of a ghost and, ofinstinct, their hands swept holsterward, but stopped halfway.

  This sudden galvanizing of their apathy into life was effected by thesight of a figure which had materialized without warning and inuncanny silence in a fissure where the rocks dripped from reeking mosson either side.

  It stood with a cocked repeating rifle held easily at the ready, andit was a figure that required no heralding of its identity or menace.

  "Were ye lookin' fer me, boys?" drawled Sam Mosebury with a palpableenjoyment of the situation, not unlike that which brightens the eyesof a cat as it plays with a mouse already crippled.

  With swift apprehension the eyes of the two deputies met and effectedan understanding. Mose Biggerstaff licked his bearded lips until theirstiffness relaxed enough for speech.

  "Me an' Sim Colby hyar," he protested, "got summoned by ther highsheriff. We didn't hev no rather erbout hit one way ner t'other. Allwe've got ter go on air ther _dee_scription thet war give ter us--an'we don't see no resemblance atween ye an' ther feller we're atter."

  The murderer stood eying them with an amused contempt, and one couldrecognize the qualities of dominance which, despite his infamies, hadwon him both fear and admiration.

  "Ef ye thinks ye'd ought ter take me along an' show me ter yore highsheriff," he suggested, and the finger toyed with the trigger, "I'mright hyar."

  "Afore God, no!" It was Bud who spoke now contradicting his colleague."I've seed Sam Mosebury often times--an' ye don't no fashion faverhim."

  Sam laughed. "I've seed ye afore, too, I reckon," he commented dryly."But ef ye don't know me, I reckon I don't need ter know _you_,nuther."

  The two sat atremble in their saddles until the apparition haddisappeared in the laurel.

  * * * * *

  Gray-templed and seamed of face, Dyke Cappeze entered the courthouseat Carnettsville one day a few months later and paused for a moment,his battered law books under his threadbare elbow, to gaze around themurky hall of which his memory needed no refreshing.

  About the stained walls hung fly-specked notices of sheriff's sales,and between them stamped long-haired, lean-visaged men drawn in bylitigation or jury service from branchwater and remote valley.

  Out where the sun lay mellow on the town square was the brickpavement, on which Cap
peze's law partner had fallen dead tenyears ago, because he dared to prosecute too vigorously. Acrossthe way stood the general store upon which one could still see thepock-marking of bullets reminiscent of that day when the Heatonsand the Blacks made war, and terrorized the county seat.

  Dyke Cappeze looked over it all with a deep melancholy in his eyes. Heknew his mountains and loved his people whose virtues were morenumerous, if less conspicuous, than their sins. In his heart burned amilitant insurgency. These hills cried out for development, anddevelopment demanded a conception of law broader gauged and moreserious than obtained. It needed fearless courts, unterrified juries,intrepid lawyers.

  He had been such a lawyer, and when he had applied for life insurancehe had been adjudged a prohibitive risk. To-day the career of threedecades was to end, and as the bell in the teetering cupola began toclang its summons he shook his head--and pressed tight the straightlips that slashed his rugged face.

  On the bench sat the circuit-riding judge of that district; a man towhom, save when he addressed him as "your honor," Dyke Cappeze had notspoken in three years. They were implacable enemies, because toooften the lawyer had complained that justice waited here onexpediency.

  Cappeze looked at the windows bleared with their residue of dust andout through them at the hills mantling to an autumnal glory. Then heheard that suave--to himself he said hypocritical--voice from thebench.

  "Gentlemen of the bar, any motions?"

  Wearily the thin, tall-framed lawyer came to his feet and stood erectand silent for a moment in his long, black coat, corroding into thegreen of dilapidation.

  "May it please your honor," he grimly declared. "I hardly know whethermy statement may be properly called a motion or not. It's more avaledictory."

  He drew from his breast pocket a bit of coarse, lined writing paperand waved it in his talon-like hand.

  "I was retained by the widow Sales, whose husband was shot down by SamMosebury, to assist the prosecution in bringing the assassin topunishment. The grand jury has failed to indict this defendant. Thesheriff has failed to arrest him. The court has failed to producethose witnesses whom I have subpoenaed. The machinery of the law whichis created for the sole purpose of protecting the weak against theencroachments of the malevolent has failed."

  He paused, and through the crowded room the shuffling feet fell silentand heads bent excitedly forward. Then Cappeze lifted the paper in hishand and went on:

  "I hold here an unsigned letter that threatens me with death if Ipersist with this prosecution. It came to me two weeks ago, and sincereceiving it I have redoubled my energy. When this grand jury wasimpaneled and charged, such a note also reached each of its members. Iknow not what temper of soul actuates those men who have sworn toperform the duties of grand jurors. I know not whether these threatshave affected their deliberations, but I know that they have failed toreturn a true bill against Sam Mosebury!"

  The judge fingering his gavel frowned gravely. "Does counsel mean tocharge that the court has proven lax?"

  "I mean to say," declared the lawyer in a voice that suddenly mountedand rung like a trumpeted challenge, "that in these hills of Kentuckythe militant spirit of the law seems paralyzed! I mean to say thatterrorism towers higher than the people's safeguards! For a lifetime Ihave battled here to put the law above the feud--and I have failed. Inthis courthouse my partner fought for a recognition of justice and atits door he paid the penalty with his life. I wish to make no chargesother than to state the facts. I am growing old, and I have lost heartin a vain fight. I wish to withdraw from this case as associatecommonwealth counsel, because I can do nothing more than I have done,and that is enough. I wish to state publicly that to-day I shall takedown my shingle and withdraw from the practice of law, because lawamong us seems to me a misnomer and a futile semblance."

  In a dead silence the elderly attorney came to his period and gatheredup again under his threadbare elbow his two or three battered books.Turning, he walked down the center aisle toward the door, and as hewent his head sagged dejectedly forward on his chest.

  He heard the instruction of his enemy on the bench, still suave:

  "Mr. Clerk, let the order be entered striking the name of Mr. Cappezefrom the record as associate counsel for the commonwealth."

  It was early forenoon when the elderly attorney left the dingy lawoffice which he was closing, and the sunset fires were dying when heswung himself down from the saddle at his own stile in the hills andwalked between the bee-gums and bird boxes to his door. But before hereached it the stern pain in his eyes yielded to a brighteningthought, and as if responsive to that thought the door swung open andin it stood a slim girl with eyes violet deep, and a beauty soalluring and so wildly natural that her father felt as if youth hadmet him again, when he had begun to think of all life as musty anddecrepit with age.