Читать книгу The Red Debt: Echoes from Kentucky - Everett MacDonald - Страница 11

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A veil of azure morning mist lingered at the apex of Henhawk's knob. A young eagle—aggressively bold in his youth—sallied forth into the mystic dawn, setting himself high on Eagle Crown rock, and surveyed the dim world with a challenge in his blinkless agate eye. The air was fragrant with the perfume of a thousand blossoms.

Splashes of crimson and gold dappled the east, and a great sun shot its lances of molten glory beyond the mountain-tops.

Before the sun showed half its russet disk the deputy sheriff sat his horse at the witch-elm block in front of the Lutts cabin, preparatory to departure.

The Lutts household, including Slab, was on hand with hospitable farewells—though little Bud hung back suspiciously.

At no time during the sheriff's stop had Cap Lutts uttered a word of reference to the business that had brought the officer to his door. Nor had the sheriff broached the subject again. With keen understanding and quick insight he waited patiently for the answer to his mission.

But now, as he sat his horse on the verge of departure, he looked at old Lutts expectantly and with direct inquiry in his eyes. Lutts caught the import, and answered with small concern.

"Oh, yes! Yo' jest tell th' sheriff an' them revenuers down below thet ef they want th' ole man bad 'nough, t' cum up an' root em out."

The deputy knew this was final, and as the old moonshiner's great hand closed over his in parting the officer secretly hoped that the arm of the law would fall short of the Lutts domicile.

"Well, captain, I'm afraid they'll start something below—especially that man over from Frankfort—that Burton. He's awful determined, and he blames us some. Good-by!"

A short distance away the officer pulled up short and, turning in his saddle, beckoned to the old man.

The deputy leaned over and spoke in undertones, as though the rocks and trees had ears.

"Captain," he asked significantly, "is that fellow, Jutt Orlick, a friend of yours? Remember, I haven't said a word, captain; not a word!"

For a full minute the old man stood looking after the rider. Then a new light was added to his fixed suspicion of Jutt Orlick.

High noon of the following day found Orlick riding slowly, with loose rein, up the twisted trail toward the Lutts cabin. His horse was lathered and blown.

He had covered the rugged distance from the junction since dawn, where he had held all-night counsel with Peter Burton, the revenuer.

With astuteness and cunning Orlick had instigated a conspiracy that would have done credit to a city-bred malefactor, and for which Burton praised him extravagantly and, incidentally, liquorously.

Burton had offered to secure Orlick an appointment as deputy marshal in the eighth district at Danville as recompense for his espionage and treason against his people. But even Orlick's audacious spirit cast the thought of this honor out of his mind decisively, and not without a shudder.

Providing the raid succeeded, upon the plea that Orlick feared the Luttses, Burton had pledged himself to keep Lem and old Captain Lutts in jail to the last technical hour. He further promised to frustrate any attempt at communication with the Lutts faction and intercept any messages that they might attempt to launch from the prison.

Burton confided to Orlick that his chief aim now was to capture and take the Luttses to Frankfort, out of the jurisdiction of the county, and isolate them from the subtle influences that had always favored them in the surrounding counties.

The revenuer admitted that he entertained grave doubts as to taking old Captain Lutts alive; but he hoped to capture Lem Lutts, at any rate, and break the boy's stoic spirit and coerce him into disclosing the whereabouts of the old still that had flooded Hellsfork with moonshine for two decades.

But Burton did not know Lem as Orlick knew him, and to Orlick the prospect of a long term of confinement for Lem Lutts was very pleasing. Notwithstanding, Orlick knew that Lem would get out of jail subsequently, and that he—Orlick—might by then be a marked man.

Orlick was fully aware that when the suspicions already against him on Hellsfork had shaped themselves into convincing proofs of treason, his life would be worth nothing in Kentucky.

The Lutts faction would follow him even into the blue-grass precincts. They would dog him to the very threshold of the sheriff's office. His undoing would be swift and certain—and pitiless.

But all this was now a remote contingency in the face of his unbridled passion for Belle-Ann, and it was with a sense of bravado that he realized it was a mere matter of time before the calamity of exposure would overtake him.

But against the advent of this unerring nemesis, he banked on at least a few weeks, and probably a few months, during which, he told himself, he might win out and have Belle-Ann ensconced safely in some big city, far removed from the arm of the law and the limits of Kentucky.

After that he did not care.

He had cast the die, and had staked his life upon the outcome. If by any ill luck the outcome demanded his life, he stood ready to pay the toll. That Lem Lutts should never get Belle-Ann he had fully determined.

He regretted that Peter Burton had not killed Lem long ago, as he had always hoped.

He would have risked the chance and steered Burton up to the Lutts still, but he could not do so for the ample reason that he did not know where it was. He had known, so long as he had remained a mountaineer in good standing; but old Captain Lutts had moved the still in the early stages of Orlick's mysterious sojourns, and the faction had not since volunteered to tell him its whereabouts, and he was loath to jeopardize his own skin in looking for it.

However, while Orlick was serving Burton, he had served himself doubly. The smooth, unruffled manner in which his plans were unfolding up to date filled him with high glee, and his spirits soared to the skies.

Wild and desolate as this wilderness country is, it is nevertheless almost impossible for an outsider to invade its precincts without his presence being mysteriously communicated to the denizens of the hills. Whenever an invasion is accomplished secretly it is invariably engineered by some traitor who knows every nook and cranny in the mountains.

But Orlick had determined to double-cross Burton and circumvent his plan, if Belle-Ann manifested any substantial symptom of requiting his suit for her hand or yielded to his persuasions.

To-day as Orlick halted in the shade of a poplar to rest his spent horse, he rolled a cigarette contemplatively with a half smile on his lips. If Belle-Ann favored him, he told himself that he would remove every seeming obstacle that promised to come between them. This was a compact ratified with himself when he rolled the cigarette and smiled; and if he could not win her, he would at least deprive her of Lem Lutts, through the medium of a quick, desperate coup, the details of which he had already confided to Burton.

As Orlick lit his cigarette, cast the match away, and hooked his right leg over the saddle-horn, he gave himself up to the favorite meditation upon which his fancy had fed for months. With a vain-glorious grunt he regarded his new trooper's outfit.

He was exuberantly conscious of the great roll of bank-notes bulging in his pocket. And, too, it was all easy money. He confessed this as he muttered above his breath:

"Dead easy—easier 'n easy!"

In truth, he had never imagined that one man could get hold of so much money so easily as he had done since his lucky affiliations with a certain one-eyed gentleman known as Red Herron, who engineered a nocturnal business in Louisville.

Money was a necessary adjunct, especially to a lover, and lent an atmosphere of reality to this lover's stock of artifices.

Moreover, Orlick nurtured a robust desire to see Belle-Ann's physical beauty adorned and enhanced with smart attire in emulation of the handsome girls that met his admiring eyes in the streets of Louisville. Orlick's fancy, furthermore, had the hardihood to picture his wedding tour, with Belle-Ann as his wife.

Their trip on a luxurious Pullman train to Omaha! Ah, how the people would stare at this lovely, stylish girl—his wife! And he had the money in his pocket at this moment, and knew where to get more.

So excited was he by this scintillating dream of requited love that, as if to hasten to its glorious reality, he threw his foot suddenly into the stirrup, rolled the spur against the horse's ribs, and proceeded toward the Lutts abode, flushed with a mighty confidence.

Nearing the cabin, Orlick's brow grew black as he thought that Lem Lutts's possible presence at home might thwart his conquest.

A young hound, with a fore-leg bandaged in splints, lay in the shade near the horse-block. The dog, emitting barks of alarm, sidled up on three legs and sniffed suspiciously.

The Lutts' dogs knew Orlick well enough, but they had always met him with growls of distrust, and had never become reconciled to his presence.

Orlick cast his eyes about, but he saw no signs of the family. He stripped the horse; and, picking up a cob, made shift to clean the animal's hind quarters, where the lather had congealed into hard, salty cakes, while his eyes were searching the premises for the object of his visit.

Leaving the horse to follow his own will, Orlick sat down on the bench and waited.

He remained there for a full half-hour, in compliance with ethics of the mountains, which prescribes that a caller shall wait at a distance, especially where there are womenfolk, until invited to advance.

When the dogs bark and the inmates fail to appear there is all the more reason why he should wait.

With the peculiar instinct a horse has for locating water, Orlick's animal had taken himself off at a brisk trot toward the log stable.

Missing his horse, Orlick looked about and caught a fleeting glimpse of him through the vista of trees, and, knowing that if he got to the water in his heated condition he would founder, Orlick dashed away in pursuit.

Thus it happened that he came unexpectedly upon Belle-Ann, who stood at the horse-trough, urging Orlick's animal away from the water. Orlick stopped short, regarded her confusedly; then, removing his trooper's hat, executed a bow and smirked copiously.

His heart thumped wildly in that instant. Each time he saw Belle-Ann he vowed mentally that she was more beautiful than before. The sight of her invariably threw him into a state of nervous flurry, and drove from his mind the pretty things he had previously decided to say to her.

Small wonder then that he stood abashed before her. Never in all his travels had he seen her equal.

"Yo' wusn't jest a lookin' fo' me—eh—Belle-Ann?" he managed to say awkwardly. She scanned him deprecatingly.

"No—I jest wusn't," she agreed. "Th' boys hain't home, Orlick," she added pointedly, seating herself upon an inverted wagon-bed near by.

Orlick sauntered over and sat down, too, now regaining his poise.

"I didn't know I wus comin', either—till a short spell 'fore I started," he said tentatively.

Belle-Ann eyed the horse, now standing under a poplar, too tired to crop.

"Yo' must hev started frum th' ocean, didn't yo'?" she asked, with a gesture toward the animal.

"Aw—he's soft, Belle-Ann. I 'lowed I'd rest em up a bit—till th' boys cum," he ended lamely.

"Why don't yo'-all buy a mountain hoss? Thes hoss wasn't cut out fo' thes country," observed Belle-Ann.