The Common Lot and Other Stories

by Emma Bell Miles

  Atlas Cleaverage come back, and sitting in the church with her husband! Roma’s inconsequent girl’s mind had never conceived this conjunction. She strove only to bear herself as one unconscious of anything strange in the situation. When, after the service, she with Guthrie passed the newcomer in the yard, her cheeks were burning, her eyes down-bent, and her limbs trembled. He gravely took off his hat to the preacher’s wife, which innovation caused the lads around the threshold to catch their breath.

  “Reckon you come back to the mountings to get ye a wife?”

  The leading question was put to him curiously as the young fellow lingered among his former cronies after service.

  “I—well, there’s no denyin’ I did start with that notion,” Cleaverage hesitated. “But some things back here has turned out different from what I expected, and I reckon I’ll take my money and buy me a loggin’ team, and stay around here for a spell.”

  Yet the next week, and the next and the next, Atlas did not come to church. Finally the preacher, unmindful of that portion of Solomon’s wisdom, which in effect bids a man let well enough alone, rode Buckeye down the creek to the sawmill, where Cleaverage was at work, and flung him a bidding that was a challenge to attend next Sunday’s service. Atlas had laughed at the news that he had been made the subject of a special intercession at a recent prayer-meeting; but at this summons to show why he should not be utterly condemned for contempt of church, he straightened himself, looked the elder man in the eye, and answered:

  “Very well, sir, if you say so, I’ll be there.”

  Guthrie’s main reason for calling the interloper out to church was that during these weeks he had thought of many more effective things which might be hurled at him, and the sermon was pretty well devoted to the shortcomings of a certain fool who had flouted the faith of his fathers and gone west into heathen lands. Atlas received the charge almost smiling, with that look under his eyelashes of an inner light or knowledge which fascinated and daunted the duller witted. Roma, shivering in her seat, dreaded the collision which she thought must follow. But young Cleaverage had learned better ways of fighting for his own. At the close of the sermon, he asked and received permission to make a few remarks. Instead of rising in his place to address the congregation, he walked the length of the room and took his stand on the low platform that served for pulpit. Guthrie sullenly stepped down and seated himself in the amen corner, unwilling to endure the withering comparison of standing beside the younger man, yet quite unconscious of that fact.

  “Friends, kinsmen, and neighbors,” Atlas opened in unknowing plagiarism of a greater speech. At the first word the houseful felt the thrill of the unexpected. That he should begin, unhurried, unabashed, without singsong or gesticulation, to address them as he might if they had met him on the open road, riveted their attention; the stature, strength, and beauty of the man, and first and last the deep, bell-like timbre of his voice, held and swayed them.

  “I aint here to defend myself against old charges or new,” he said, half smilingly. “Time has cleared my name of mighty near all I was blamed with. You all know who poked Brother Guthrie with a stick through a crack durin’ the big meetin’ in this church two years ago. I reckon you can guess, yet nobody says much about it, seein’ the man’s dead, who it was that shot through the church-house door at Shiloh. As for the story of my playin’ cards all night in the loggin’ camp, that’s neither here nor there; I was run out from this neighborhood by tales that seemed to be hurtin’ somebody else worse than they could ever hurt me—an’ I was a fool to go. Nor I’m not goin’ to apologize to you for never havin’ been baptized, neither. I’ve lived out yon where there’s room for men of my religion, and a free life for all, and if I hadn’t got to honin’ for something I’d left behind me, I reckon I’d been livin’ there yet.”

  Roma bent low her head over the hands close-gripped in her lap. The color ebbed swiftly from cheek and lip and abruptly returned when Guthrie rose, put forth a shaking hand, and interrupted the discourse.

  “Oh, no,” objected Atlas, coolly. “You’ve had your say, Brother Guthrie. Leave it to the folks now. If they want me to hush and set down, I will.”

  The easy confidence of this proposition won the instant suffrages of a people who prize courage above everything. Of the entire assembly, Roma only could follow the speaker’s thought, and she less by reasoning than by the answering leap and thrill of kindred instinct. At no point did the round of their contracted lives touch the greater circle, which he now tried to make real to them; yet they were eager to hear. It was not his statements which charmed and carried them with him, for they were incapable of logical thought and set no value upon it. It was not the interest of a novel point of view, for novelty is anathema throughout the region. It was the sense of sweeping, elemental occurrence—of winged life—of wind and rain, and snow and hail in the hothouse, which startled and enthralled them.

  “Go on, Brother!” cried three or four men at once; and Guthrie sank back in his place silenced: whipped out in his own kennel, ashamed for his congregation, and jealous of the figure he cut before his young wife.

  Atlas spoke at length of his life in the West, his longing for the mountains (one heart beating with guilty rapture guessed what that longing meant); and finally asked his old friends to come forward and shake hands with him. They were moving up by twos and threes, all singing, Cleaverage’s clear baritone leading the tune, while the little windows shook to the clang, when the preacher came to an understanding that his meeting had been fairly taken away from him.

  It was Roma herself who had to remind him with a soft touch on his shoulder that it was time for the formal dismissal of church.

  His bearing at home during the ensuing weeks was hard for a wild young creature like Roma to endure. All day he sat brooding in his big chair on the porch and allowed the farm work to lie. The mantle of dignity seemed to fall from him, leaving him a sulky, irritable, old man. Once when the girl could endure it no longer, she flung out at him in reply to some bitter taunt of his own.

  “Is that yo’ religion?” she asked. “Atlas Cleaverage has mo’ good will in his little finger than you have in yo’ whole body. Is that yo’ religion?”

  He turned upon her with a sort of snarl. “You mad at me because I don’t fellowship with that there—that—” The fit epithet was wanting in his vocabulary, and he went on: “I shake hands with no man that’s got neither beliefs nor principles—that’s not even a member of any church!” But after a heart-sick pause he added, staring down at the floor, “I may be a mighty ill somebody to live with, but I think a heap o’ you, girl.”

  “I know hit,” she answered scarcely above her breath.

  She did know it, and to her cost, for every day it was coming more bitterly home to her that she had sold her birthright of young love and a mate of her own feather; bartered it for ignoble peace, for a cook-stove, a lampshade, an organ with a square of mirror let into the top. And from this time on Atlas inevitably strode into her dreams and her waking thoughts, strong and vivid, a creature of sun and earth and air, the embodiment of the life from which she was shut out.

  II.

  So passed the summer; and the season drew nigh when the great migratory instinct should again send the wild birds South across half a world. It chanced that Boaz Guthrie was much from home about this time; the young wife was idle, thrown upon her own resources, and this perhaps was not well. Returning from an appointment at the head of Sequatchie Valley one day, the preacher found his cabin shut and locked, and Roma gone. There was no message nor writing left for him, but inquiry among the neighbors soon showed that she had fled with Atlas Cleaverage in his wagon, the pair striking out across country.

  Guthrie lost no time in determining his course of action. Was he, after all, so greatly surprised at the outcome of things? Had he not, from the first, looked for just this? He had married a wife less than half his age, on impulse, as most men marry; yet with him the impulse ripened to a passionate at
tachment—that almost embittered devotion of the old for what is young, and full of life, and beautiful. Now his faith taught him no scruples against vengeance, nor did his church “think strange” of his armed pursuit. Atlas and Roma had a week’s start; but at first he did not grudge them a day of it, deeming the cumbrous wagon easily traced.

  Where love and tenderness must carry a little home of comfort with them, naked and single vengeance could follow swiftly unincumbered. Taking only his gun, a shirt or two, and what ready money he could get together, from camp to camp, by creek and gap and break and ford, across Sequatchie County and up through the Cumberlands into Kentucky, Guthrie followed. But he was delayed by one mischance and another—a rumor of change in the wagon’s course, a strain of Buckeye’s withers, a flood where Atlas had forded safely the day before, an invitation hardly to be refused, to preach in return for hospitality; and the sixth week found him still on the trail.

  Whither were the fugitives heading? To the coast? Was it their plan to sell the team and wagon there and take passage on a ship? The thought staggered Guthrie, for to the mountaineer’s consciousness the world beyond the water looms almost as dim and unreal a shadow as it was to the aboriginal inhabitants of his land. No; more likely Atlas was tending toward the place of his childhood near the Carolina border. There might be some fastness of the ranges known to him alone, some little valley enclosed by walls of rock, some “jug” cave defensible by one against an army. That the pair he pursued might be in mere, aimless, mallard flight, wing and wing, snatching each day’s delight from under the sword, did not occur to Guthrie.

  The strain told on his years; but he lessened the distance between himself and the team by a little almost every day. At the same hour when he camped miserably in Kell’s Cove on what he began to fear was a blind trail, Atlas, only five miles away across the range, was purchasing a coop of a dozen chickens from a huckster, because Roma said she must have better food.

  That huckster met Guthrie next morning, and replied to the haggard stranger’s question:

  “Why, yo’ man mout a-been in with a gang o’ traders that come thro’ here with a string o’ mules three-fo’ days back. You mout ast some o’ these-yere folks livin’ along the road ’at seed ’em go by. I did meet a feller’n ’is wife yen side the ridge, but they was settlers here. They wasn’t gwine to’ds the coast. He ’lowed he aimed to put ’em up a shack some’ers hereabout. Couldn’t abeen yo’ man, I don’t reckon?”

  “No,” said the preacher, never guessing how Atlas could have altered his plan overnight. He thought it not unlikely that the pair should have joined the traders’ camp for better protection, the more as they must be nearly penniless by this time, and Atlas’ skill of horseflesh might in such case stand him in good stead. He made inquiries as the huckster had suggested, and was told that there had indeed been a couple among the “gypsies” answering the description he gave.

  He overtook the traders at Nashville. There, in the jockey-lot, sick with disappointment at having wasted weeks on this false scent, he collapsed with “the winter fever.” His mind, fiery with the lust of vengeance, was wearing out his body; and through the long weeks when he lay “tended on” with rough kindness in the gypsy camp, it haled him back upon the track and showed him pitilessly where he had played the fool in passing by the squatters of whom the huckster had told him. It was mid-winter when, disregarding all remonstrance, he again took the road.

  Back into the Cumberlands he headed, clamoring upon the only God he knew for that wild and blundering justice which was his sole notion of Right; but every mile and every moment put behind him set his revenge further away. Although his heart was still hot, it began to be that he was pursuing a phantom. The constant endeavor to reach an understanding, in order to forecast the fugitive’s probable course, unwittingly bred something like sympathy with his enemy’s mind. For weeks he had continually asked himself, “Now, if I was Atlas, what would I do, and where would I go?” That this persistent question must result in some harmony and consequent final agreement between pursuer and pursued he had not the insight to foresee. He could not realize that under his anger, day by day, his purpose was ebbing from him.

  After all, were they not kin by birthplace and tradition? Had Atlas been quite incapable of religious passion, he could not have so overpowered and humiliated the preacher that day in church. And had Guthrie felt no stirrings of an untamed nature, he would never have been so determined to marry a madcap girl.

  III.

  Title-deeds in the mountain-country read “from the bluff” and “to the bluff;” but the bluff itself is, like roads and rivers, Public Domain. Atlas had, in common with many mountaineers, an indistinct and limited knowledge of law, but an unbounded faith in the Government’s good will towards men; it was perhaps with some idea of placing himself and Roma under Government protection that, when she could go no farther, he chose their habitation, like an eyrie, half way up the mountain-wall. The great cave at Wolf-Pen Gap had hidden many a refugee aforetime: the red man, or those who fled from him, scouts and spies of older wars; now it became shelter of this wild pair during the first frosts and storms of the year. But ere winter locked the Gap, Atlas sold the team and wagon, and managed to erect a tiny cabin on the wide-arched ledge at the cave’s mouth. He worked now and then, when the weather permitted, for a farmer in the valley, walking to his toil before day, and carrying provisions home on his back at night. At other times he fished and hunted and trapped. Their walls were half covered with drying pelts. Roma broiled venison and trout and pheasant over four stones in the middle of the hut, since there was neither floor nor chimney to their dwelling. The smoke-escape was an opening in the roof.

  It was the life of their dreams—of their dreams. And yet, dreams have a cynical trick of coming true, clipped, shorn, presenting the semblance and denying the substance. Roma had said to her companion in the first day’s ride:

  “I do love you, Atlas; but if ever you tech me ag’in my will, I’ll leave ye; I b’lieve I could kill ye for hit; I’d never look on your face again.”

  And now, at the end of their wanderings, she was farther from him than ever.

  A flaming autumn had swept the mighty slopes, and the long rains followed, extinguishing the last sparks of the splendid conflagration. November handed them over, along with the woodland creatures, to the hungry winter; but unlike their lesser brothers in fur and feathers, this pair was cut off from even a diminished natural food-supply. Then one blow after another was dealt them by the weather: it turned warm to rain, turned cold to snow, and cleared with a sunshine that only mocked their eyes through the glittering air. They ate food that neither had ever before tasted, things they had dreamed unfit for human consumption. The mountains towered about them pitiless as if built of white metal; the valleys might be open, but at that altitude the snow lay thick. All day, in the frozen forest, stripes of blinding silver changed places with shadows of steel.

  And yet from this strange companionship, the love that was in them, the wild free zest for happiness that was common to both, wrung a taste of joy. The home in the cave’s throat was a nest of kindly human warmth. In the long evenings, by the torches and the red hickory blaze, they achieved a dear comradeship in spite of the sword Roma had laid between them. They sang together, all the songs they knew—old ballads handed down by word of mouth for centuries, and new ones, quite as wild, of their own composition and rhyming. And they talked, like Indians, in voices low and even as the rain upon their roof, with long intervals of meditation. Roma, at least was happy. The dull emptiness of her other life was a thing of the past. Atlas could always interest her with tales of hunting, herding, or trading. His keen humor, and the swift, strong, level action of his mind, even more than his grand build and strength, made him seem bigger and freer than other men. She felt she could have gone with him to any fate.

  The man, taught a little in life’s school, kept wondering how it would all end, hearkening ever for the footstep of that change
which would put a stop to the strange, impossible situation. But even so it was unexpectedly that the avenger came upon them.

  Guthrie, circling where he lost the trail months ago, heard of the couple keeping house in the cave, and in the face of a sleet-storm walked, from the valley farm, up a path which Buckeye could not travel. He knew better than to attempt such a journey at such a time; everything was against him: failing strength, bad footing, wind and weather; the paths obliterated, and at best a way he did not know; but there was that in him that drove him forward.

  The rain, freezing as it fell, thickened on every twig until the trees hung heavy with their burden, groaning aloud as the strain neared the breaking-point. Now and then a sapling bowed slowly to earth, or a big branch snapped like a shot in the tense stillness. He wandered, stumbling and sliding, along the talus of the bluff, where hand-hold and foothold were varnished with ice. It was too late to turn back even had he wished, and he would not relinquish the gun that hampered him dangerously. The low sun broke through the clouds as he scrambled, and for a moment the forest flamed with more jewels than Aladdin’s garden. In the fading light he saw the clouds run scattering, driven by the whistling scourge of the wind that now began to search his vitals. The preacher was wet, sick, and disheartened. But at last he descried, on the heights above him, a moving light as of a pine torch carried in some one’s hand.