All this time he held the small, dignified atom of humanity in a merciless grip that made Little Buck ridiculous before his beloved, and fired his childish soul to a very ecstasy of helpless rage.
"I"ll--kill--you when I git to be a man!" the child gasped, between tears and terror. "I"ll thest kill you--and I"ll wed Jude. You turn me a-loose--that"s what you do."
Blatch laughed tauntingly and raised the little fellow high in air.
"Ef I was to turn you a-loose now hit"d bust ye," he drawled.
"I don"t keer. I----"
Around the corner of the cabin drifted Nicodemus, the wooden-legged rooster, stumping gravely with his dot-and-carry-one gait.
"Lord, Nancy, thar comes the one patient ye ever cured!" chuckled old Jephthah. "I don"t wonder yo"re proud enough of him to roof him and affectionate him for the balance of his life."
"I reckon you"d do the same, ef so be ye should ever cure one," snapped Nancy, rising instantly to the bait, and turning her back on the others.
"As "t is, ef they hilt the buryin" from the house of the feller that killed the patient I reckon Jude wouldn"t have nothin" to do but git up funeral dinners."
Little Buck, despairing of granny"s interference, began to cry. At the sound Judith came suddenly out of a revery to spring up and catch him away from the hateful restraining hands.
"I don"t know what the Lord"s a-thinkin" about to let sech men as you live, Blatch Turrentine!" she said almost mechanically. "Ef I was a-tendin" to matters I"d "a" had you dead long ago. Ef you"re good for anything on this earth I don"t know what it is."
"Oh, yes you do," Blatchley returned as the old man started down the steps. "I"d make the best husband for you of any feller in the two Turkey Tracks--and you"ll find it out one of these days."
The girl answered only with a contemptuous glance.
"Come again--when you ain"t got so long to stay," Nancy sped them sourly.
"Jude, you"d better set awhile and get your skirts dry." She looked after Blatch as he moved up the road, then at little Buck, so ashamed of his trembling lip. Her face darkened angrily. She turned slowly to Judith.
"What you gwine to do with that feller, Jude?" she queried significantly.
"Do? Why, nothin". He ain"t nothin" to me," responded the girl indifferently.
"He ain"t, hey? Well, he"s bound to marry ye, honey," said the older woman.
"Huh, he ain"t the first--and won"t be the last, I reckon," a.s.sented Judith easily.
"Ye"d better watch out fer that man, Jude," persisted Nancy, after a moment"s silence. "He"ll git ye, yet. I know his kind. He ain"t a-keerin"
fer yo" ruthers--whether you want him or no. He jest aims to have _you_."
"Well, I reckon he"ll about have to aim over agin," observed the unmoved Judith.
"An" Elder Drane? Air ye gwine to take him?--I know he"s done axed ye,"
pursued Nancy hesitantly.
""Bout "leven times," agreed Judith with perfect seriousness. "No--I wouldn"t have the man, not ef he"s made of pure gold." She added with a sudden little smile and a catch of the breath: "Them"s awful nice chaps o" his; I"d most take him to git them. The baby now--hit"s the sweetest thing!" And she tumbled Beezy tumultuously in her lap, then suddenly inquired, apparently without any volition of her own, "Aunt Nancy, did you know Creed Bonbright"s folks?"
"Good Lord, yes!" returned old Nancy. "But come on inside and set, Jude.
This sun ain"t a-goin" to dry yo" skirt. Come in to the fire. Don"t take that thar cheer, the behime legs is broke, an" it"s apt to lay you sprawling. I"ve knowed Creed Bonbright sence he wasn"t knee-high to a turkey, and I knowed his daddy afore him, and his grand-daddy, for the matter of that."
Avoiding the treacherous piece of furniture against which she had been warned, Judith slipped out of her wet riding-skirt and arranged it in front of the fire to dry, turning then and seating herself on the broad hearth at Nancy"s knee, where she prompted feverishly,
"And is all the Bonbrights moved out of the neighbourhood?"
The old woman drew a few meditative whiffs on her pipe.
"All gone," she nodded; "some of "em killed up in the big feud, and some moved away--mostly to Texas." Presently she added:
"That there Bonbright tribe is a curious nation of folks. They"re always after great things, and barkin" their shins against rocks in the way.
Creed"s mammy--she was Judge Gillenwaters"s sister, down in Hepzibah--died when he was no bigger"n Little Buck, and his pappy never wedded again. We used to name him and Creed Big "Fraid and Little "Fraid; they was always round together, like a man and his shadder. Then the feuds broke out mighty bad, and the Blackshea.r.s.es got Esher Bonbright one night in a mistake for some of my kin--or so it was thort. Anyhow, the man was dead, and Creed lived with me fer a spell till his uncle down in Hepzibah wanted him to come and learn to be a lawyer."
"Lived right here--in this house?" inquired Judith, looking around her, as she rose and turned the riding-skirt.
"Lord, yes--why not? You would a-knowed all about it, only your folks never moved in from the Fur Cove neighbourhood till the year Creed went down to the settlement."
The girl sank back on the hearth, but continued to gaze about her, and the tell-tale expression in her eyes seemed to afford Nancy Card much quiet amus.e.m.e.nt.
"Do you reckon he"ll live with you again when he comes back into the mountains?" she inquired finally.
"I reckon he"ll be weddin" one of them thar town gals and fetchin" a wife home to his own farm over by yo" house," suggested the inveterate tease.
Judith went suddenly white, and then red. "You don"t know of anybody--you hain"t heard he was promised, have you?" she hesitated.
"I ain"t hearn that he was, and I ain"t hearn that he wasn"t," returned Nancy serenely. "The gal that gits Creed Bonbright"ll be doin" mighty well; but also she may not find hit right easy for to trap him. I"ll promise ef he does come up hyer again I"ll speak a good word for you, Jude. The Lord knows I don"t see how you make out to live with that thar old man. You"ll deserve a crown and a harp o" gold sot with diamonds ef you stan" it much longer."
Judith put on the now thoroughly dried riding-skirt, and the two women went outside together.
"Well, good-bye, Aunt Nancy," she said, as she led the sorrel nag to the edge of the porch and made ready to mount. "I"ll be over and bring the pieces for you to start me out on that Risin" Sun quilt a-Wednesday."
It was late afternoon as she took her homeward way across the level of the broad mountain-top to the Turrentine place. She left the main-travelled road and struck directly into a forest short-cut. After the rain earth and sky were newly washed; the clear, sweetened air was full of the scent of damp loam and new-ploughed fields; the colours about her were freshened and glad, and each distant bird-note rang clear and vivid. To Mrs. Rhody Staggart and her likes at Hepzibah she might be a crude, awkward country girl; here she was a princess in her own domain; and it was a n.o.ble realm through which she moved as she went forward under the great trees that rose straight and tall from a black soil, making pillared aisles away from her on every side. The fern was thick under foot--it would brush her saddle-girth, come midsummer. Down the long vistas under the greening trees, where the moist air hung thick, her bemused eyes caught the occasional roseflash of azalea through the pearly mist, her nostril was greeted by their wandering, intensely sweet perfume, with its curious undernote of earth smell.
She smiled vaguely at the first b.u.t.terfly she had seen, and again as she noted the earliest lizard basking in the sun-warmed hollow of a big rock.
Absently her gaze sought for cinnamon fern in low woods, sweet fern in the thickets, and exquisite maidenhair just beginning to uncurl from the black leaf mould of dripping brakes.
Like a woman in a dream she made her progress, riding through the wonderful stillness of the vast wild land, an ocean on which each littlest sound was afloat, so that each was given its true value almost like a musical tone. An awful, beautiful silence this, brooding back of every sound; nothing in such a place gives forth mere senseless noise; the ripple of frogs in marsh and spring branch fall upon the sense as sweet as bird-songs. The clamour of little falls, the solemn suggestion of wind in the pines, the sweet broken jangle of cow-bells, a catbird in a tree--a continuous yet zigzag sort of warble, silver and sibilant notes alternating,--the rare wild turkey"s call along a deeply embowered creek--one by one all these came to Judith"s dreaming ears, clear, perfect, individual, on the majestic sea of silence about her.
She turned Selim"s head at a little intersecting trail, and rode considerably out of her way to pa.s.s the old Bonbright place and brood upon its darkened windows and gra.s.s-besieged doorstone. Some day all that would be changed. Still in her waking dream she unsaddled Selim at the log barn, and turned him loose in his open pasture. She laid off her town attire, put on her cotton working-dress, kindled afresh the fire on the broad hearthstone and got supper. Her Uncle Jephthah and Blatch Turrentine came in late, weary from their work of hauling corn to that destination which old Nancy had announced as disreputably indefinite. The second son of the family, Wade, a man of perhaps twenty-four, was with them, and had already been told of the mishap to Andy and Jeff.
Old Jephthah sat at the head of the board, his black beard falling to his lap, his finely domed brow relieved against a background of shadows.
Judith needed the small bra.s.s lamp at the hearthstone, and a tallow candle rather inadequately lit the supper-table. The corners of the room were in darkness; only the cloth and dishes, the faces and hands of those about the table showed forth in sudden light or motion.
Hung on the rough walls, and glimpsed in occasional flickers only, were Judith"s big maple bread-bowl, the churn-dash, spurtle, sedge-broom, and a round gla.s.s bottle for rolling piecrust; cheek by jowl with old Jephthah"s bullet moulds and the pot-hooks he had forged for Judith.
There were strings of dried pumpkin, too, and of shining red peppers. On a low shelf, scarce visible at all in the dense shadow, stood a keg of sorghum, and one beside it of vinegar, flanked by the b.u.t.ter-keeler and the salt piggin with its cedar staves and hickory hoops. And there, too, was the broken coffee-pot in which garden seeds were h.o.a.rded.
"What"s all this I hear about Andy and Jeff bein" took?" inquired a plaintive voice from the darkened doorway whose door, with its heavy, home-made latch, swung back against the wall on its great, rude, wooden hinges, as abruptly out of the shadow appeared a man who set a plump hand on either jamb and stared into the room with a round, white, anxiously inquiring face. It was Jim Cal, eldest of the sons of Jephthah Turrentine, married, and living in a cabin a short distance up the slope.
"Who give the information?" he asked as soon as he had peered all about the room and found no outsider present.
"Well, we hearn that _you_ did, podner," jeered Blatch.
"Come in and set," invited the head of the household, with the mountaineer"s unforgetting hospitality. "Draw up--draw up. Reach and take off."