Читать книгу Mountain Blood - Joseph Hergesheimer - Страница 7

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They rose steadily, crossing the roof of a ridge, and descended abruptly beyond. Green prospects opened before them—a broad valley was disclosed, with a broad, shallow stream dividing its meadows; scattered farmhouses, orderly, prosperous, commanded their shorn acres. A mailbag was detached and left at a crossroad in charge of two little girls, primly important, smothered in identical, starched pink sunbonnets. The Greenstream stage splashed through the shallow, shining ford; the ascent on the far side of the valley imperceptibly began.

The sun was almost at the zenith; the shadow of the stage fell short and sharp on the dry, loamy road; a brown film covered the horses and vehicle; it sifted through the apparel of the passengers and coated their lips. The rise to the roof of the succeeding range seemed interminable; the road looped fields blue with buckwheat, groves of towering, majestic chestnut, a rocky slope, where, by a crevice, a swollen and sluggish rattlesnake dropped from sight.

At last, in the valley beyond, the half-way house, dinner and a change of horses were reached. The forest swept down in an unbroken tide to the porch of the isolated roadside tavern; a swift stream filled the wooden structure with the ceaseless murmur of water. In the dusty, gold gloom of a spacious stable Gordon unhitched his team. Outside, in a wooden trough, he splashed his hands and face, then entered the dining-room.

A long table was occupied by an industrious company that broke the absorbed silence only by explosive requests for particularized dishes. Above the table hovered the wife of the proprietor, constantly waving a fly brush—streamers of colored paper fastened to a slender stick—above the heads of her husband and guests.

Gordon Makimmon ate largely and rapidly, ably seconded by the strange passenger and Buckley Simmons. The priest, Merlier, ate sparingly, in an absent, perfunctory manner. Lettice Hollidew, at the opposite end of the table, displayed the generous but dainty appetite of girlhood. The coat to her suit, with a piece of lace pinned about the collar, and a new, flat leather bag with a silver initial, hung from the back of her chair.

They again listlessly took their places in the stage. Buckley Simmons emulated the stranger in lighting a mahogany-colored cigar with an ornamental band which Buckley moved toward his lips before the swiftly approaching conflagration. Gordon drove with his mind pleasantly vacant, lulled by the monotonous miles of road flickering through his vision, the shifting forms of distant peaks, virid vistas, nearby trees and bushes, all saturated in the slumberous, yellow, summer heat.

Gradually the aspect of their surroundings changed, the forms of the mountains grew bolder, streams raced whitely over broken, rocky beds; the ranks of the forest closed up, only a rare trail broke the road. The orderly farmhouses, the tilled fields, disappeared; a rare cabin, roughly constructed of unbarked logs, dominated a parched patch, cut from the heart-breaking tangle of the wild, a thread of smoke creeping from a precarious chimney above the far, unbroken canopy of living green. Children with matted hair, beady-eyed like animals, in bag-like slips, filled the doorways; adults, gaunt-jawed and apathetic, straightened momentarily up from their toil with the stubborn earth.

At the sharpest ascent yet encountered Gordon again left the stage. Buckley Simmons recalled a short cut through the wood, and noisily entreated Lettice Hollidew to accompany him.

“It’s awfully pretty,” he urged, “and easy; no rocks to cut your shoes. I’ll go ahead with a stick to look out for snakes.”

She shuddered charmingly at the final item, and vowed she would not go a step. But he persisted, and in the end persuaded her. The stranger continued unmoved in his place; Merlier shifted not a pound’s weight, but sat with a cold, indifferent face turned upon the straining horses.

Gordon walked ahead, whistling under his breath, and, with a single skilful twist, he rolled a cigarette from a muslin bag of tobacco labeled Green Goose.

The short cut into which Buckley and Lettice Hollidew disappeared refound the road, Gordon knew, over a mile above; and he was surprised, shortly, to see the girl’s white waist moving rapidly into the open. She was alone, breathing in excited gasps, which she struggled to subdue. Her face that five minutes before had been so creamily, placidly composed was now hotly red; her eyes shone with angry, unshed tears.

Gordon’s lips formed a silent exclamation … Buckley evidently had made an error in judgment. Lettice stepped out into the road, and, plainly unwilling to encounter the questioning eyes in the stage, walked rigidly beside Gordon. Behind the obvious confusion, the hurt surprise of her countenance, an unexpected, dormant quality had been stirred into being. The crimson flood in her cheeks had stained more than her clear skin—it had colored her gracile and candid girlhood so that it would never again be pellucid; into it had been spilled some of the indelible dye of woman.

Gordon Makimmon gazed with newly-awakened interest at Lettice; for the first time he thought of her as other than a school-girl; for the first time he discovered in her the potent, magnetic, disturbing quality of sex. Buckley Simmons had clumsily forced it into consciousness. A fleeting, unformulated regret enveloped him in the shadow of its melancholy, an intangible, formless sorrow at the swift passage of youth, the inevitable lapse of time. A mounting anger at Buckley possessed him … she had been in his, Gordon Makimmon’s, care. The anger touched his pride, his self-esteem, and grew cold, deliberate: he watched with a contracted jaw for Simmons’ appearance.

“Why,” he exclaimed, in a lowered voice, “that lown tore your pretty shirtwaist!”

“He had no reason at all,” she protested; “it was just horrid.” A little shiver ran over her. “He … he held me and kissed … hateful.”

“I’ll teach him to keep his kissing where it’s liked,” Gordon proclaimed. His instinctively theatrical manner diminished not a jot the menace of the threat.

“Oh! please, please don’t fight.” She turned a deeply concerned countenance upon him. “That would hurt me very much more—”

“It won’t be a fight,” he reassured her, “only a little hint, something for Buck to think about. No one will know.” He could not resist adding, “Most people go a good length before fighting with me.”

“I have heard that you are awfully—” she hesitated, then, “brave.”

“It was ’ugly’ you heard,” he quickly supplied the pause. “But that’s not true; I don’t fight like some men, just for a good time. Why, in the towns over the West Virginia line they fight all night; they’ll fight—kill each other—for two bits, or a drink of liquor. … There’s Buckley now, coming in above.”

Buckley Simmons entered the road from a narrow trail a number of yards ahead of the stage. He tramped heavily, holding a hickory switch in one hand, cutting savagely at the underbrush. The stage leisurely caught up to him until the horses’ heads were opposite his thickset form. Gordon, from the other side of the team, swung himself into his seat. He grasped the whip, and, leaning out, swept the heavy leather thong in a vicious circle. It whistled above the horses, causing them to plunge, and the lash, stopped suddenly, drew across Buckley Simmons’ face. For an instant his startled countenance was white, and then it was wet, gleaming and scarlet. He pressed his hands to his mouth, and stumbled confused into the ditch.

Gordon stopped the stage. Merlier gave vent to a sibilant exclamation, and Lattice Hollidew covered her eyes. The stranger sprang to the road, and hurried to the injured man’s side. Gordon got down slowly. “Where did it get him?” he inquired, with a shallow show of concern. He regarded with indifferent eyes the gaping cut across Simmons’ jaw, while the stranger was converting a large linen handkerchief into a ready bandage.

Buckley, in stammering, shocked rage, began to curse Gordon’s clumsiness, and, in his excitement, the wound bled more redly. “You will have to keep quiet,” he was told, “for this afternoon anyhow.”

“I’m not a ’dam’ blind bat,” Gordon informed his victim in a rapid undertone; “my eyes are sharper than usual to-day.” Above the stained bandage Simmons’ gaze was blankly enraged. “That won’t danger you none,” Gordon continued, in louder, apparently unstudied tones; “but you can’t kiss the girls for a couple of weeks.”

Buckley Simmons was assisted into the rear seat; Lettice sat alone, her face hidden by the flowery rim of her hat; Merlier was silent, indifferent, bland. The way grew increasingly wilder, and climbed and climbed; at their back dipped and spread mile upon mile of unbroken hemlock; the minute clearings, the solitary cabins, were lost in the still expanse of tree tops; the mountain towered blue, abrupt, before them. The stranger consulted a small map. “This is Buck Mountain,” he announced rather than queried; “Greenstream Village is beyond, west from here, with the valley running north and south.”

“You have got us laid out right,” Gordon assented; “this all’s not new to you.” It was as close to the direct question as Gordon Makimmon could bring himself. And, in the sequel, it proved the wisdom of his creed; for, obviously, the other avoided the implied query. “The Government prints a good map,” he remarked, and turned his shoulder squarely upon any prolongation of the conversation.

They were now at the summit of Buck Mountain, but dense juniper thickets hid from them any extended view. After a turn, over the washed, rocky road, the Greenstream Valley lay outspread below.

The sun was lowering, and the shadow of the western range swept down the great, somber, wooded wall towering against an illimitable vault of rosy light; the lengthening shadows of the groves of trees on the lower slope fell into the dark, cool, emerald cleft. It was scarcely three fields across the shorn, cultivated space to the opposite, precipitous barrier; between, the valley ran narrow and rich into a faint, broken haze of peaks thinly blue on either hand. And, held in the still green heart of that withdrawn, hidden space, the village lay along its white highway.

The stage dropped with short, sharp rushes down the winding road; the houses lost the toy-like aspect of distance; cowbells clashed faintly; a dog’s bark quivered, suspended in hushed space. The stage passed the first, scattered houses, and was speedily in the village: each dwelling had, behind a white picket fence, a strip of sod and a tangle of simple, gay flowers—scarlet, white, purple and yellow, now coated with a fine, chalky, summer dust. The dwellings were, for the most part, frame, with a rare structure of brick under mansard slates green with moss. The back yards were fenced from the fields, on which hay had been cut and stood in high ricks, now casting long, mauve shadows over the close, brilliant green. The stage passed the white board structure of the Methodist Church, and stopped before the shallow portico of the post-office.