Mary Noailles Murfree - 7 best short stories by Mary Noailles Murfree

A thrill of masculine logic stirred uneasily in the old man's disused brain. "Tell me one thing, Ethelindy," he said, lifting his bleared eyes as he clasped his tremulous hands more firmly on the head of his stick—"tell me this—which side air you-uns on, ennyhow, Ethelindy?"

"I'm fur the Union," said Ethelinda, still weeping, and now and then wiping her sapphire eyes with the back of her hand, hard and tanned, but small in proportion to her size. "I'm fur the Union—fust an' last an' all the time."

The old man wagged his head solemnly with a blight of forecast on his wrinkled, aged face. "That thar sayin' is goin' ter be mighty hard ter live up to whilst Jerome Ackert's critter company is a-raidin' of Tanglefoot Cove."

The presence of the "critter company" was indeed calculated to inspire a most obsequious awe. It was an expression of arbitrary power which one might ardently wish directed elsewhere. From the moment that the echoes of the Cove caught the first elusive strain of the trumpet, infinitely sweet and clear and compelling, yet somehow ethereal, unreal, as if blown down from the daylight moon, a filmy lunar semblance in the bland blue sky, the denizens of Tanglefoot began to tremulously confer together, and to skitter like frightened rabbits from house to house. Tanglefoot Cove is some four miles long, and its average breadth is little more than a mile. On all sides the great Smoky Mountains rise about the cuplike hollow, and their dense gigantic growths of hickory and poplar, maple and gum, were aglow, red and golden, with the largesse of the generous October. The underbrush or the jungles of laurel that covered the steeps rendered outlet through the forests impracticable, and indeed the only road was invisible save for a vague line among the dense pines of a precipitous slope, where on approach it would materialize under one's feet as a wheel track on either side of a line of frosted weeds, which the infrequent passing of wagon-beds had bent and stunted, yet had not sufficed to break.

The blacksmith's shop, the centre of the primitive civilization, had soon an expectant group in its widely flaring doors, for the smith had had enough of the war, and had come back to wistfully, hopelessly haunt his anvil like some uneasy ghost visiting familiar scenes in which he no more bears a part;—a minié-ball had shattered his stanch hammer-arm, and his duties were now merely advisory to a clumsy apprentice. This was a half-witted fellow, a giant in strength, but not to be trusted with firearms. In these days of makeweights his utility had been discovered, and now with the smith's hammer in his hand he joined the group, his bulging eyes all a-stare and his loose lips hanging apart. The old justice of the peace, whose office was a sinecure, since the war had run the law out of the Cove, came with a punctilious step, though with a sense of futility and abated dignity, and at every successive note of the distant trumpet these wights experienced a tense bracing of the nerves to await helplessly the inevitable and, alas! the inexorable.

"They say that he is a turrible, turrible man," the blacksmith averred, ever and anon rubbing the stump of his amputated hammer-arm, in which, though bundled in its jeans sleeve, he had the illusion of the sensation of its hand and fingers. He suddenly shaded his brow with his broad palm to eye that significant line which marked the road among the pines on the eastern slope, beyond the Indian corn that stood tall and rank of growth in the rich bottom-lands.

Ethelinda's heart sank. All unprescient of the day's impending event, she had come to the forge with the sley of her loom to be mended, and she now stood holding the long shaft in her mechanical clasp, while she listened spell-bound to the agitated talk of the group. The boughs of a great yellow hickory waved above her head; near by was the trough, and here a horse, brought to be shod, was utilizing the interval by a draught; he had ceased to draw in the clear, cold spring water, but still stood with his muzzle close to the surface, his lips dripping, gazing with unimagined thoughts at the reflection of his big equine eyes, the blue sky inverted, the dappling yellow leaves, more golden even than the sunshine, and the glimmering flight of birds, with a stellular light upon their wings.

"A turrible man?—w-w-well," stuttered the idiot, who had of late assumed all the port of coherence; he snatched and held a part in the colloquy, so did the dignity of labor annul the realization of his infirmity, "then I'd be obleeged ter him ef—ef—ef he'd stay out'n Tanglefoot Cove."

"So would I." The miller laughed uneasily. But for the corrugations of time, one might not have known if it were flour or age that had so whitened his long beard, which hung quivering down over the breast of his jeans coat, of an indeterminate hue under its frosting from the hopper. "He hev tuk up a turrible spite at Tanglefoot Cove."

The blacksmith nodded. "They say that he 'lowed ez traitors orter be treated like traitors. But I be a-goin' ter tell him that the Confederacy hev got one arm off'n me more'n its entitled to, an' I'm willin' ter call it quits at that."

"'Tain't goin' ter do him no good ter raid the Cove," an ancient farmer averred; "an' it's agin' the rebel rule, ennyhows, ter devastate the kentry they live off'n—it's like sawin' off the bough ye air sittin' on." His eyes dwelt with a fearful affection on the laden fields; his old stoop-shouldered back had bent yet more under the toil that had brought his crop to this perfection, with the aid of the children whose labor was scarcely worth the strenuosity requisite to control their callow wiles.

"Shucks! He's a guerilla—he is!" retorted the blacksmith. "Accountable ter nobody! Hyar ter-day an' thar ter-morrer. Rides light. Two leetle Parrott guns is the most weight he carries."

The idiot's eyes began to widen with slow and baffled speculation. "Whut—w-whut ails him ter take arter Tanglefoot? W-w—" his great loose lips trembled with unformed words as he gazed his eager inquiry from one to another. Under normal circumstances it would have remained contemptuously unanswered, but in these days in Tanglefoot Cove a man, though a simpleton, was yet a man, and inherently commanded respect.

"A bird o' the air mus' hev carried the matter that Tolhurst's troops hed rid inter Tanglefoot Cove by mistake fur Greenbrier, whar they war ter cross ter jine the Fed'rals nigh the Cohuttas. An' that guerilla, Ackert, hed been ridin' a hundred mile at a hand-gallop ter overhaul him, an' knowin' thar warn't but one outlet to Tanglefoot Cove, he expected ter capshur the Feds as they kem out agin. So he sot himself ter ambush Tolhurst, an' waited fur him up thar amongst the pines an' the laurel—an' he waited—an' waited! But Tolhurst never came! So whenst the guerilla war sure he hed escaped by ways unknownst he set out ter race him down ter the Cohutty Mountings. But Tolhurst had j'ined the main body o' the Federal Army, an' now Ackert is showing a clean pair o' heels comin' back. But he be goin' ter take time ter raid the Cove—his hurry will wait fur that! Somebody in Tanglefoot—the Lord only knows who—showed Tolhurst that underground way out ter Greenbrier Cove, through a sorter cave or tunnel in the mountings."

"Now—now—neighbor—that's guesswork," remonstrated the miller, in behalf of Tanglefoot Cove repudiating the responsibility. Perhaps the semi-mercantile occupation of measuring toll sharpens the faculties beyond natural endowments, and he began to perceive a certain connection between cause and effect inimical to personal interest.

"Waal, that is the way they went, sartain sure," protested the blacksmith. "I tracked 'em, the ground bein' moist, kase I wanted ter view the marks o' their horses' hoofs. They hev got some powerful triflin' blacksmiths in the army—farriers, they call 'em. I los' the trail amongst the rocks an' ledges down todes the cave—though it's more like one o' them tunnels we-uns used ter go through in the railroads in the army, but this one was never made with hands; jes' hollowed out by Sinking Creek. So I got Jube thar ter crope through, an' view ef thar war any hoofmarks on t'other side whar the cave opens out in Greenbrier Cove."