Charles Buck - When 'Bear Cat' Went Dry

Sometimes she lifted a pale face and her lips twisted themselves pathetically in the earnestness of her prayer.

The Almighty to Whom she made her plea, and Who knew everything, must know, even as she knew, that Turner Stacy was not like those rowdy youths who habitually disgraced the hills. That occasional smile which lurked with its inherent sweetness under his affected sullenness must mean something .

Turner had always been her willing vassal, and "sometime" she had supposed, though hitherto that had always seemed a vaguely distant matter like the purple haze on the horizon, they would be avowed sweethearts.

Yesterday, though, as she walked back from the meeting on the ridge it had seemed as if she had spent a moment in that languourous land where the far mists drouse, – and yet the glamour had not faded. She hadn't sought to analyze then, she had only felt a new thrill in her heart as she instinctively broke clusters of pink-hearted bloom from the laurel.

She left the woods after a while and as she came out again to the high road, she heard a voice raised in the high-pitched, almost falsetto, minors of mountain minstrelsy.

It was not a pleasing voice, nor was the ballad a cheery one. As for the singer himself, the twisting of the way still concealed him from view, so that his song proclaimed him like a herald in advance.

"He stobbed her to ther heart an' she fell with a groan.

He threw a leetle dirt ov -er her, an' started fer home,"

wailed the dolorous voice of the traveler. There was a splashing of hoofs in shallow water, then a continuation

"His debt ter ther devil now William must pay,

Fer he fell down an' died afore break of day."

Thus announced, a mule plodded shortly into sight, and upon his back, perching sidewise, sat a tow-headed lout of a boy with staring, vacant eyes and a mouth which hung open, even when he desisted from song.

With an access of callow diffidence he halted his mount at sight of Blossom, staring with a nod and a bashful "Howdy."

"Howdy, Leander," accosted the girl. "How's all your folks?"

Leander White, of Crowfoot Branch, aged fifteen, gulped twice with prodigious and spasmodic play of his adam's apple, before he eventually commanded voice to reply:

"They're all well… I'm obleeged … ter ye." Then, however, reassured by the cordial smile on the lips of Blossom Fulkerson, his power of speech and his hunger for gossip returned to him in unison.

"But old Aunt Lucy Hutton, over acrost ther branch, she fell down yistiddy an' broke a bone inside of her, though."

"Did she?" demanded the girl, readily sympathetic, and Leander, thus given sanction as a purveyor of tidings, nodded and gathered confidence. "Huh-huh, an' Revenuers raided Joe Simmons's still-house on ther headwaters of Skinflint an' cyarried off a beau tiful piece o' copper – atter they'd punched hit full o' holes."

"Revenuers!" Into the girl's voice now came a note of anxiety.

"Huh-huh, revenuers. Folks says they're gittin' bodaciously pesky these days."

"Ye ain't – ye ain't seen none of 'em yourself, have ye, Leander?" The question came a bit breathlessly and the boy forgot his bashfulness as he expanded with the importance of his traveler's tales.

"Not to know 'em fer sich," he admitted, "but I met up with a furriner a few leagues back along ther highway. He was broguein' along mighty brash on his own two feet. La! But he was an elegant party ter be a-ridin' on shoe-leather, though!"

"What manner of furriner was he, Leander?" demanded Blossom with a clutch of fright at her heart, but the boy shook his head stupidly.

"Wa'al he was jest a feller from down below. Ter tell hit proper, I didn't hev much speech with him. We jest met an' made our manners an' went our ways. He 'lowed ter go ter Lone Stacy's house."

"Lone Stacy's house," echoed the girl faintly.

"Reckon' I'll be a-ridin' on," drawled the young horseman nonchalantly. "Reckon I've done told ye all ther tidings I knows."

Blossom stood, for a while, rooted where he had left her, listening to the splash of the mule's feet along the creek. If a prying eye should discover the Stacy still to-day it would find not only "a beautiful piece of copper" but Bear Cat lying there incapacitated and helpless!

Her heart missed its beat at the thought. The hills seemed to close in on her stiflingly with all their age-old oppression of fears and impending tragedies, and she sat down by the roadside to think it out. What should she do?

After a while she saw the tall figure of the elder Stacy climbing the mountainside, but he was taking a short cut – and would not come within hailing distance. Her eye, trained to read indications, noted that a rifle swung in his right hand.

Bitterly she had been taught by her father to resent the illicit business to which Turner's service was grudgingly given. But above all ethical hatred of law-breaking rose the very present danger to Turner himself. Laws were abstract things and Turner was Turner!

There was only one answer. She must watch and, if need arose, give warning.

Just where the brook that trickled down from the still gushed out to the creek and the road which followed its course, lay a steeply sloping field of young corn. Along its back grew rows of "shuckybeans," and here Blossom took her station for her self-appointed task of sentry duty.

Jerry Henderson had lost his way.

Aching muscles protested the extra miles because back there at Marlin Town he had been advised to cross Cedar Mountain on foot.

"Unless they suspicions ye, 'most any man'll contrive ter take ye in an' enjoy ye somehow," his counselors had pointed out. "But thar's heaps of them pore fam'lies over thar thet hain't got feed fer a ridin' critter noways."

Now Cedar Mountain is not, as its name mendaciously implies, a single peak but a chain that crawls, zig-zag as herringbone, for more than a hundred miles with few crossings which wheels can follow.

It is a wall twenty-five hundred feet high, separating the world from "back of beyond." Having scaled it since breakfast, Jerry Henderson was tired.

He was tanned and toughened like saddle-leather. He was broad of shoulder, narrow of thigh, and possessed of a good, resolute brow and a straight-cut jaw. His eyes were keen with intelligence and sufficiently cool with boldness.

Arriving at a narrow thread of clear water which came singing out at the edge of a corn-field, his eyes lighted with satisfaction. Tilled ground presumably denoted the proximity of a human habitation where questions could be answered.

So he stood, searching the forested landscape for a thread of smoke or a roof, and as he did so he perceived a movement at the edge of the field where the stalks had grown higher than the average and merged with the confusion of the thicket.

Jerry turned and began making his way along the edge of the patch, respecting the corn rows by holding close to the tangle at the margin. Then suddenly with a rustling of the shrubbery as startling as the sound with which a covey of quail rises from nowhere, a figure stepped into sight and the stranger halted in an astonishment which, had Blossom Fulkerson realized it, was the purest form of flattery.

He had seen many women and girls working in the fields as he had come along the way and most of them had been heavy of feature and slovenly of dress. Here was one who might have been the spirit of the hills themselves in bloom; one who suggested kinship with the free skies and the sunlit foliage.

With frank delight in the astonishing vision, Jerry Henderson stood there, his feet well apart, his pack still on his shoulders and his lips parted in a smile of greeting and friendliness.

"Howdy," he said, but the girl remained motionless, vouchsafing no response.