Home / The Trail of the Lonesome Pine / XX
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, by John Fox, Jr.
The boom started after its shadow through the hills now, and Hale watched it sweep toward him with grim satisfaction at the fulfilment of his own prophecy and with disgust that, by the irony of fate, it should come from the very quarters where years before he had played the maddening part of lunatic at large. The avalanche was sweeping southward; Pennsylvania was creeping down the Alleghanies, emissaries of New York capital were pouring into the hills, the tide-water of Virginia and the Bluegrass region of Kentucky were sending in their best blood and youth, and friends of the helmeted Englishmen were hurrying over the seas. Eastern companies were taking up principalities, and at Cumberland Gap, those helmeted Englishmen had acquired a kingdom. They were building a town there, too, with huge steel plants, broad avenues and business blocks that would have graced Broadway; and they were pouring out a million for every thousand that it would have cost Hale to acquire the land on which the work was going on. Moreover they were doing it there, as Hale heard, because they were too late to get control of his gap through the Cumberland. At his gap, too, the same movement was starting. In stage and wagon, on mule and horse, "riding and tying" sometimes, and even afoot came the rush of madmen. Horses and mules were drowned in the mud holes along the road, such was the traffic and such were the floods. The incomers slept eight in a room, burned oil at one dollar a gallon, and ate potatoes at ten cents apiece. The Grand Central Hotel was a humming Real-Estate Exchange, and, night and day, the occupants of any room could hear, through the thin partitions, lots booming to right, left, behind and in front of them. The labour and capital question was instantly solved, for everybody became a capitalist-carpenter, brick-layer, blacksmith, singing teacher and preacher. There is no difference between the shrewdest business man and a fool in a boom, for the boom levels all grades of intelligence and produces as distinct a form of insanity as you can find within the walls of an asylum. Lots took wings sky-ward. Hale bought one for June for thirty dollars and sold it for a thousand. Before the autumn was gone, he found himself on the way to ridiculous opulence and, when spring came, he had the world in a sling and, if he wished, he could toss it playfully at the sun and have it drop back into his hand again. And the boom spread down the valley and into the hills. The police guard had little to do and, over in the mountains, the feud miraculously came to a sudden close.
So pervasive, indeed, was the spirit of the times that the Hon. Sam Budd actually got old Buck Falin and old Dave Tolliver to sign a truce, agreeing to a complete cessation of hostilities until he carried through a land deal in which both were interested. And after that was concluded, nobody had time, even the Red Fox, for deviltry and private vengeance—so busy was everybody picking up the manna which was dropping straight from the clouds. Hale bought all of old Judd's land, formed a stock company and in the trade gave June a bonus of the stock. Money was plentiful as grains of sand, and the cashier of the bank in the back of the furniture store at the Gap chuckled to his beardless directors as he locked the wooden door on the day before the great land sale:
"Capital stock paid in—thirteen thousand dollars;
"Deposits—three hundred thousand;
"Loans—two hundred and sixty thousand—interest from eight to twelve per cent." And, beardless though those directors were, that statement made them reel.
A club was formed and the like of it was not below Mason and Dixon's line in the way of furniture, periodicals, liquors and cigars. Poker ceased—it was too tame in competition with this new game of town-lots. On the top of High Knob a kingdom was bought. The young bloods of the town would build a lake up there, run a road up and build a Swiss chalet on the very top for a country club. The "booming" editor was discharged. A new paper was started, and the ex-editor of a New York Daily was got to run it. If anybody wanted anything, he got it from no matter where, nor at what cost. Nor were the arts wholly neglected. One man, who was proud of his voice, thought he would like to take singing lessons. An emissary was sent to Boston to bring back the best teacher he could find. The teacher came with a method of placing the voice by trying to say "Come!" at the base of the nose and between the eyes. This was with the lips closed. He charged two dollars per half hour for this effort, he had each pupil try it twice for half an hour each day, and for six weeks the town was humming like a beehive. At the end of that period, the teacher fell ill and went his way with a fat pocket-book and not a warbling soul had got the chance to open his mouth. The experience dampened nobody. Generosity was limitless. It was equally easy to raise money for a roulette wheel, a cathedral or an expedition to Africa. And even yet the railroad was miles away and even yet in February, the Improvement Company had a great land sale. The day before it, competing purchasers had deposited cheques aggregating three times the sum asked for by the company for the land. So the buyers spent the night organizing a pool to keep down competition and drawing lots for the privilege of bidding. For fairness, the sale was an auction, and one old farmer who had sold some of the land originally for a hundred dollars an acre, bought back some of that land at a thousand dollars a lot.
That sale was the climax and, that early, Hale got a warning word from England, but he paid no heed even though, after the sale, the boom slackened, poised and stayed still; for optimism was unquenchable and another tide would come with another sale in May, and so the spring passed in the same joyous recklessness and the same perfect hope.
In April, the first railroad reached the Gap at last, and families came in rapidly. Money was still plentiful and right royally was it spent, for was not just as much more coming when the second road arrived in May? Life was easier, too—supplies came from New York, eight o'clock dinners were in vogue and everybody was happy. Every man had two or three good horses and nothing to do. The place was full of visiting girls. They rode in parties to High Knob, and the ring of hoof and the laughter of youth and maid made every dusk resonant with joy. On Poplar Hill houses sprang up like magic and weddings came. The passing stranger was stunned to find out in the wilderness such a spot; gayety, prodigal hospitality, a police force of gentlemen—nearly all of whom were college graduates—and a club, where poker flourished in the smoke of Havana cigars, and a barrel of whiskey stood in one corner with a faucet waiting for the turn of any hand. And still the foundation of the new hotel was not started and the coming of the new railroad in May did not make a marked change. For some reason the May sale was postponed by the Improvement Company, but what did it matter? Perhaps it was better to wait for the fall, and so the summer went on unchanged. Every man still had a bank account and in the autumn, the boom would come again. At such a time June came home for her vacation, and Bob Berkley came back from college for his. All through the school year Hale had got the best reports of June. His sister's letters were steadily encouraging. June had been very homesick for the mountains and for Hale at first, but the homesickness had quickly worn off—apparently for both. She had studied hard, had become a favourite among the girls, and had held her own among them in a surprising way. But it was on June's musical talent that Hale's sister always laid most stress, and on her voice which, she said, was really unusual. June wrote, too, at longer and longer intervals and in her letters, Hale could see the progress she was making—the change in her handwriting, the increasing formality of expression, and the increasing shrewdness of her comments on her fellow-pupils, her teachers and the life about her. She did not write home for a reason Hale knew, though June never mentioned it—because there was no one at home who could read her letters—but she always sent messages to her father and Bub and to the old miller and old Hon, and Hale faithfully delivered them when he could.
From her people, as Hale learned from his sister, only one messenger had come during the year to June, and he came but once. One morning, a tall, black-haired, uncouth young man, in a slouch hat and a Prince Albert coat, had strode up to the school with a big paper box under his arm and asked for June. As he handed the box to the maid at the door, it broke and red apples burst from it and rolled down the steps. There was a shriek of laughter from the girls, and the young man, flushing red as the apples, turned, without giving his name, and strode back with no little majesty, looking neither to right nor left. Hale knew and June knew that the visitor was her cousin Dave, but she never mentioned the incident to him, though as the end of the session drew nigh, her letters became more frequent and more full of messages to the people in Lonesome Cove, and she seemed eager to get back home. Over there about this time, old Judd concluded suddenly to go West, taking Bud with him, and when Hale wrote the fact, an answer came from June that showed the blot of tears. However, she seemed none the less in a hurry to get back, and when Hale met her at the station, he was startled; for she came back in dresses that were below her shoe-tops, with her wonderful hair massed in a golden glory on the top of her head and the little fairy-cross dangling at a woman's throat. Her figure had rounded, her voice had softened. She held herself as straight as a young poplar and she walked the earth as though she had come straight from Olympus. And still, in spite of her new feathers and airs and graces, there was in her eye and in her laugh and in her moods all the subtle wild charm of the child in Lonesome Cove. It was fairy-time for June that summer, though her father and Bud had gone West, for her step-mother was living with a sister, the cabin in Lonesome Cove was closed and June stayed at the Gap, not at the Widow Crane's boarding-house, but with one of Hale's married friends on Poplar Hill. And always was she, young as she was, one of the merry parties of that happy summer—even at the dances, for the dance, too, June had learned. Moreover she had picked up the guitar, and many times when Hale had been out in the hills, he would hear her silver-clear voice floating out into the moonlight as he made his way toward Poplar Hill, and he would stop under the beeches and listen with ears of growing love to the wonder of it all. For it was he who was the ardent one of the two now.
June was no longer the frank, impulsive child who stood at the foot of the beech, doggedly reckless if all the world knew her love for him. She had taken flight to some inner recess where it was difficult for Hale to follow, and right puzzled he was to discover that he must now win again what, unasked, she had once so freely given.
Bob Berkley, too, had developed amazingly. He no longer said "Sir" to Hale—that was bad form at Harvard—he called him by his first name and looked him in the eye as man to man: just as June—Hale observed—no longer seemed in any awe of Miss Anne Saunders and to have lost all jealousy of her, or of anybody else—so swiftly had her instinct taught her she now had nothing to fear. And Bob and June seemed mightily pleased with each other, and sometimes Hale, watching them as they galloped past him on horseback laughing and bantering, felt foolish to think of their perfect fitness—the one for the other—and the incongruity of himself in a relationship that would so naturally be theirs. At one thing he wondered: she had made an extraordinary record at school and it seemed to him that it was partly through the consciousness that her brain would take care of itself that she could pay such heed to what hitherto she had had no chance to learn—dress, manners, deportment and speech. Indeed, it was curious that she seemed to lay most stress on the very things to which he, because of his long rough life in the mountains, was growing more and more indifferent. It was quite plain that Bob, with his extreme gallantry of manner, his smart clothes, his high ways and his unconquerable gayety, had supplanted him on the pedestal where he had been the year before, just as somebody, somewhere—his sister, perhaps—had supplanted Miss Anne. Several times indeed June had corrected Hale's slips of tongue with mischievous triumph, and once when he came back late from a long trip in the mountains and walked in to dinner without changing his clothes, Hale saw her look from himself to the immaculate Bob with an unconscious comparison that half amused, half worried him. The truth was he was building a lovely Frankenstein and from wondering what he was going to do with it, he was beginning to wonder now what it might some day do with him. And though he sometimes joked with Miss Anne, who had withdrawn now to the level plane of friendship with him, about the transformation that was going on, he worried in a way that did neither his heart nor his brain good. Still he fought both to little purpose all that summer, and it was not till the time was nigh when June must go away again, that he spoke both. For Hale's sister was going to marry, and it was her advice that he should take June to New York if only for the sake of her music and her voice. That very day June had for the first time seen her cousin Dave. He was on horseback, he had been drinking and he pulled in and, without an answer to her greeting, stared her over from head to foot. Colouring angrily, she started on and then he spoke thickly and with a sneer:
"'Bout fryin' size, now, ain't ye? I reckon maybe, if you keep on, you'll be good enough fer him in a year or two more."
"I'm much obliged for those apples, Dave," said June quietly—and Dave flushed a darker red and sat still, forgetting to renew the old threat that was on his tongue.
But his taunt rankled in the girl—rankled more now than when Dave first made it, for she better saw the truth of it and the hurt was the greater to her unconquerable pride that kept her from betraying the hurt to Dave long ago, and now, when he was making an old wound bleed afresh. But the pain was with her at dinner that night and through the evening. She avoided Hale's eyes though she knew that he was watching her all the time, and her instinct told her that something was going to happen that night and what that something was. Hale was the last to go and when he called to her from the porch, she went out trembling and stood at the head of the steps in the moonlight.
"I love you, little girl," he said simply, "and I want you to marry me some day—will you, June?" She was unsurprised but she flushed under his hungry eyes, and the little cross throbbed at her throat.
"SOME day—not NOW," she thought, and then with equal simplicity: "Yes, Jack."
"And if you should love somebody else more, you'll tell me right away—won't you, June?" She shrank a little and her eyes fell, but straight-way she raised them steadily:
"Yes, Jack."
"Thank you, little girl—good-night."
"Good-night, Jack."
Hale saw the little shrinking movement she made, and, as he went down the hill, he thought she seemed to be in a hurry to be alone, and that she had caught her breath sharply as she turned away. And brooding he walked the woods long that night.
Only a few days later, they started for New York and, with all her dreaming, June had never dreamed that the world could be so large. Mountains and vast stretches of rolling hills and level land melted away from her wondering eyes; towns and cities sank behind them, swift streams swollen by freshets were outstripped and left behind, darkness came on and, through it, they still sped on. Once during the night she woke from a troubled dream in her berth and for a moment she thought she was at home again. They were running through mountains again and there they lay in the moonlight, the great calm dark faces that she knew and loved, and she seemed to catch the odour of the earth and feel the cool air on her face, but there was no pang of homesickness now—she was too eager for the world into which she was going. Next morning the air was cooler, the skies lower and grayer—the big city was close at hand. Then came the water, shaking and sparkling in the early light like a great cauldron of quicksilver, and the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge—a ribbon of twinkling lights tossed out through the mist from the mighty city that rose from that mist as from a fantastic dream; then the picking of a way through screeching little boats and noiseless big ones and white bird-like floating things and then they disappeared like two tiny grains in a shifting human tide of sand. But Hale was happy now, for on that trip June had come back to herself, and to him, once more—and now, awed but unafraid, eager, bubbling, uplooking, full of quaint questions about everything she saw, she was once more sitting with affectionate reverence at his feet. When he left her in a great low house that fronted on the majestic Hudson, June clung to him with tears and of her own accord kissed him for the first time since she had torn her little playhouse to pieces at the foot of the beech down in the mountains far away. And Hale went back with peace in his heart, but to trouble in the hills.
Not suddenly did the boom drop down there, not like a falling star, but on the wings of hope—wings that ever fluttering upward, yet sank inexorably and slowly closed. The first crash came over the waters when certain big men over there went to pieces—men on whose shoulders rested the colossal figure of progress that the English were carving from the hills at Cumberland Gap. Still nobody saw why a hurt to the Lion should make the Eagle sore and so the American spirit at the other gaps and all up the Virginia valleys that skirt the Cumberland held faithful and dauntless—for a while. But in time as the huge steel plants grew noiseless, and the flaming throats of the furnaces were throttled, a sympathetic fire of dissolution spread slowly North and South and it was plain only to the wise outsider as merely a matter of time until, all up and down the Cumberland, the fox and the coon and the quail could come back to their old homes on corner lots, marked each by a pathetic little whitewashed post—a tombstone over the graves of a myriad of buried human hopes. But it was the gap where Hale was that died last and hardest—and of the brave spirits there, his was the last and hardest to die.
In the autumn, while June was in New York, the signs were sure but every soul refused to see them. Slowly, however, the vexed question of labour and capital was born again, for slowly each local capitalist went slowly back to his own trade: the blacksmith to his forge, but the carpenter not to his plane nor the mason to his brick—there was no more building going on. The engineer took up his transit, the preacher-politician was oftener in his pulpit, and the singing teacher started on his round of raucous do-mi-sol-dos through the mountains again. It was curious to see how each man slowly, reluctantly and perforce sank back again to his old occupation—and the town, with the luxuries of electricity, water-works, bath-tubs and a street railway, was having a hard fight for the plain necessities of life. The following spring, notes for the second payment on the lots that had been bought at the great land sale fell due, and but very few were paid. As no suits were brought by the company, however, hope did not quite die. June did not come home for the summer, and Hale did not encourage her to come—she visited some of her school-mates in the North and took a trip West to see her father who had gone out there again and bought a farm. In the early autumn, Devil Judd came back to the mountains and announced his intention to leave them for good. But that autumn, the effects of the dead boom became perceptible in the hills. There were no more coal lands bought, logging ceased, the factions were idle once more, moonshine stills flourished, quarrelling started, and at the county seat, one Court day, Devil Judd whipped three Falins with his bare fists. In the early spring a Tolliver was shot from ambush and old Judd was so furious at the outrage that he openly announced that he would stay at home until he had settled the old scores for good. So that, as the summer came on, matters between the Falins and the Tollivers were worse than they had been for years and everybody knew that, with old Judd at the head of his clan again, the fight would be fought to the finish. At the Gap, one institution only had suffered in spirit not at all and that was the Volunteer Police Guard. Indeed, as the excitement of the boom had died down, the members of that force, as a vent for their energies, went with more enthusiasm than ever into their work. Local lawlessness had been subdued by this time, the Guard had been extending its work into the hills, and it was only a question of time until it must take a part in the Falin-Tolliver troubles. Indeed, that time, Hale believed, was not far away, for Election Day was at hand, and always on that day the feudists came to the Gap in a search for trouble. Meanwhile, not long afterward, there was a pitched battle between the factions at the county seat, and several of each would fight no more. Next day a Falin whistled a bullet through Devil Judd's beard from ambush, and it was at such a crisis of all the warring elements in her mountain life that June's school-days were coming to a close. Hale had had a frank talk with old Judd and the old man agreed that the two had best be married at once and live at the Gap until things were quieter in the mountains, though the old man still clung to his resolution to go West for good when he was done with the Falins. At such a time, then, June was coming home.
Hale was beyond Black Mountain when her letter reached him. His work over there had to be finished and so he kept in his saddle the greater part of two days and nights and on the third day rode his big black horse forty miles in little more than half a day that he might meet her at the train. The last two years had wrought their change in him. Deterioration is easy in the hills—superficial deterioration in habits, manners, personal appearance and the practices of all the little niceties of life. The morning bath is impossible because of the crowded domestic conditions of a mountain cabin and, if possible, might if practised, excite wonder and comment, if not vague suspicion. Sleeping garments are practically barred for the same reason. Shaving becomes a rare luxury. A lost tooth-brush may not be replaced for a month. In time one may bring himself to eat with a knife for the reason that it is hard for a hungry man to feed himself with a fork that has but two tines. The finger tips cease to be the culminating standard of the gentleman. It is hard to keep a supply of fresh linen when one is constantly in the saddle, and a constant weariness of body and a ravenous appetite make a man indifferent to things like a bad bed and worse food, particularly as he must philosophically put up with them, anyhow. Of all these things the man himself may be quite unconscious and yet they affect him more deeply than he knows and show to a woman even in his voice, his walk, his mouth—everywhere save in his eyes, which change only in severity, or in kindliness or when there has been some serious break-down of soul or character within. And the woman will not look to his eyes for the truth—which makes its way slowly—particularly when the woman has striven for the very things that the man has so recklessly let go. She would never suffer herself to let down in such a way and she does not understand how a man can.
Hale's life, since his college doors had closed behind him, had always been a rough one. He had dropped from civilization and had gone back into it many times. And each time he had dropped, he dropped the deeper, and for that reason had come back into his own life each time with more difficulty and with more indifference. The last had been his roughest year and he had sunk a little more deeply just at the time when June had been pluming herself for flight from such depths forever. Moreover, Hale had been dominant in every matter that his hand or his brain had touched. His habit had been to say "do this" and it was done. Though he was no longer acting captain of the Police Guard, he always acted as captain whenever he was on hand, and always he was the undisputed leader in all questions of business, politics or the maintenance of order and law. The success he had forged had hardened and strengthened his mouth, steeled his eyes and made him more masterful in manner, speech and point of view, and naturally had added nothing to his gentleness, his unselfishness, his refinement or the nice consideration of little things on which women lay such stress. It was an hour by sun when he clattered through the gap and pushed his tired black horse into a gallop across the valley toward the town. He saw the smoke of the little dummy and, as he thundered over the bridge of the North Fork, he saw that it was just about to pull out and he waved his hat and shouted imperiously for it to wait. With his hand on the bell-rope, the conductor, autocrat that he, too, was, did wait and Hale threw his reins to the man who was nearest, hardly seeing who he was, and climbed aboard. He wore a slouched hat spotted by contact with the roof of the mines which he had hastily visited on his way through Lonesome Cove. The growth of three days' beard was on his face. He wore a gray woollen shirt, and a blue handkerchief—none too clean—was loosely tied about his sun-scorched column of a throat; he was spotted with mud from his waist to the soles of his rough riding boots and his hands were rough and grimy. But his eye was bright and keen and his heart thumped eagerly. Again it was the middle of June and the town was a naked island in a sea of leaves whose breakers literally had run mountain high and stopped for all time motionless. Purple lights thick as mist veiled Powell's Mountain. Below, the valley was still flooded with yellow sunlight which lay along the mountain sides and was streaked here and there with the long shadow of a deep ravine. The beech trunks on Imboden Hill gleamed in it like white bodies scantily draped with green, and the yawning Gap held the yellow light as a bowl holds wine. He had long ago come to look upon the hills merely as storehouses for iron and coal, put there for his special purpose, but now the long submerged sense of the beauty of it all stirred within him again, for June was the incarnate spirit of it all and June was coming back to those mountains and—to him.
And June—June had seen the change in Hale. The first year he had come often to New York to see her and they had gone to the theatre and the opera, and June was pleased to play the part of heroine in what was such a real romance to the other girls in school and she was proud of Hale. But each time he came, he seemed less interested in the diversions that meant so much to her, more absorbed in his affairs in the mountains and less particular about his looks. His visits came at longer intervals, with each visit he stayed less long, and each time he seemed more eager to get away. She had been shy about appearing before him for the first time in evening dress, and when he entered the drawing-room she stood under a chandelier in blushing and resplendent confusion, but he seemed not to recognize that he had never seen her that way before, and for another reason June remained confused, disappointed and hurt, for he was not only unobserving, and seemingly unappreciative, but he was more silent than ever that night and he looked gloomy. But if he had grown accustomed to her beauty, there were others who had not, and smart, dapper college youths gathered about her like bees around a flower—a triumphant fact to which he also seemed indifferent. Moreover, he was not in evening clothes that night and she did not know whether he had forgotten or was indifferent to them, and the contrast that he was made her that night almost ashamed for him. She never guessed what the matter was, for Hale kept his troubles to himself. He was always gentle and kind, he was as lavish with her as though he were a king, and she was as lavish and prodigally generous as though she were a princess. There seemed no limit to the wizard income from the investments that Hale had made for her when, as he said, he sold a part of her stock in the Lonesome Cove mine, and what she wanted Hale always sent her without question. Only, as the end was coming on at the Gap, he wrote once to know if a certain amount would carry her through until she was ready to come home, but even that question aroused no suspicion in thoughtless June. And then that last year he had come no more—always, always he was too busy. Not even on her triumphal night at the end of the session was he there, when she had stood before the guests and patrons of the school like a goddess, and had thrilled them into startling applause, her teachers into open glowing pride, the other girls into bright-eyed envy and herself into still another new world. Now she was going home and she was glad to go.
She had awakened that morning with the keen air of the mountains in her nostrils—the air she had breathed in when she was born, and her eyes shone happily when she saw through her window the loved blue hills along which raced the train. They were only a little way from the town where she must change, the porter said; she had overslept and she had no time even to wash her face and hands, and that worried her a good deal. The porter nearly lost his equilibrium when she gave him half a dollar—for women are not profuse in the way of tipping—and instead of putting her bag down on the station platform, he held it in his hand waiting to do her further service. At the head of the steps she searched about for Hale and her lovely face looked vexed and a little hurt when she did not see him.
"Hotel, Miss?" said the porter.
"Yes, please, Harvey!" she called.
An astonished darky sprang from the line of calling hotel-porters and took her bag. Then every tooth in his head flashed.
"Lordy, Miss June—I never knowed you at all."
June smiled—it was the tribute she was looking for.
"Have you seen Mr. Hale?"
"No'm. Mr. Hale ain't been here for mos' six months. I reckon he aint in this country now. I aint heard nothin' 'bout him for a long time."
June knew better than that—but she said nothing. She would rather have had even Harvey think that he was away. So she hurried to the hotel—she would have four hours to wait—and asked for the one room that had a bath attached—the room to which Hale had sent her when she had passed through on her way to New York. She almost winced when she looked in the mirror and saw the smoke stains about her pretty throat and ears, and she wondered if anybody could have noticed them on her way from the train. Her hands, too, were dreadful to look at and she hurried to take off her things.
In an hour she emerged freshened, immaculate from her crown of lovely hair to her smartly booted feet, and at once she went downstairs. She heard the man, whom she passed, stop at the head of them and turn to look down at her, and she saw necks craned within the hotel office when she passed the door. On the street not a man and hardly a woman failed to look at her with wonder and open admiration, for she was an apparition in that little town and it all pleased her so much that she became flushed and conscious and felt like a queen who, unknown, moved among her subjects and blessed them just with her gracious presence. For she was unknown even by several people whom she knew and that, too, pleased her—to have bloomed so quite beyond their ken. She was like a meteor coming back to dazzle the very world from which it had flown for a while into space. When she went into the dining-room for the midday dinner, there was a movement in almost every part of the room as though there were many there who were on the lookout for her entrance. The head waiter, a portly darky, lost his imperturbable majesty for a moment in surprise at the vision and then with a lordly yet obsequious wave of his hand, led her to a table over in a corner where no one was sitting. Four young men came in rather boisterously and made for her table. She lifted her calm eyes at them so haughtily that the one in front halted with sudden embarrassment and they all swerved to another table from which they stared at her surreptitiously. Perhaps she was mistaken for the comic-opera star whose brilliant picture she had seen on a bill board in front of the "opera house." Well, she had the voice and she might have been and she might yet be—and if she were, this would be the distinction that would be shown her. And, still as it was she was greatly pleased.
At four o'clock she started for the hills. In half an hour she was dropping down a winding ravine along a rock-lashing stream with those hills so close to the car on either side that only now and then could she see the tops of them. Through the window the keen air came from the very lungs of them, freighted with the coolness of shadows, the scent of damp earth and the faint fragrance of wild flowers, and her soul leaped to meet them. The mountain sides were showered with pink and white laurel (she used to call it "ivy") and the rhododendrons (she used to call them "laurel") were just beginning to blossom—they were her old and fast friends—mountain, shadow, the wet earth and its pure breath, and tree, plant and flower; she had not forgotten them, and it was good to come back to them. Once she saw an overshot water-wheel on the bank of the rushing little stream and she thought of Uncle Billy; she smiled and the smile stopped short—she was going back to other things as well. The train had creaked by a log-cabin set in the hillside and then past another and another; and always there were two or three ragged children in the door and a haggard unkempt woman peering over their shoulders. How lonely those cabins looked and how desolate the life they suggested to her now—NOW! The first station she came to after the train had wound down the long ravine to the valley level again was crowded with mountaineers. There a wedding party got aboard with a great deal of laughter, chaffing and noise, and all three went on within and without the train while it was waiting. A sudden thought stunned her like a lightning stroke. They were HER people out there on the platform and inside the car ahead—those rough men in slouch hats, jeans and cowhide boots, their mouths stained with tobacco juice, their cheeks and eyes on fire with moonshine, and those women in poke-bonnets with their sad, worn, patient faces on which the sympathetic good cheer and joy of the moment sat so strangely. She noticed their rough shoes and their homespun gowns that made their figures all alike and shapeless, with a vivid awakening of early memories. She might have been one of those narrow-lived girls outside, or that bride within had it not been for Jack—Hale. She finished the name in her own mind and she was conscious that she had. Ah, well, that was a long time ago and she was nothing but a child and she had thrown herself at his head. Perhaps it was different with him now and if it was, she would give him the chance to withdraw from everything. It would be right and fair and then life was so full for her now. She was dependent on nobody—on nothing. A rainbow spanned the heaven above her and the other end of it was not in the hills. But one end was and to that end she was on her way. She was going to just such people as she had seen at the station. Her father and her kinsmen were just such men—her step-mother and kinswomen were just such women. Her home was little more than just such a cabin as the desolate ones that stirred her pity when she swept by them. She thought of how she felt when she had first gone to Lonesome Cove after a few months at the Gap, and she shuddered to think how she would feel now. She was getting restless by this time and aimlessly she got up and walked to the front of the car and back again to her seat, hardly noticing that the other occupants were staring at her with some wonder. She sat down for a few minutes and then she went to the rear and stood outside on the platform, clutching a brass rod of the railing and looking back on the dropping darkness in which the hills seemed to be rushing together far behind as the train crashed on with its wake of spark-lit rolling smoke. A cinder stung her face, and when she lifted her hand to the spot, she saw that her glove was black with grime. With a little shiver of disgust she went back to her seat and with her face to the blackness rushing past her window she sat brooding—brooding. Why had Hale not met her? He had said he would and she had written him when she was coming and had telegraphed him at the station in New York when she started. Perhaps he HAD changed. She recalled that even his letters had grown less frequent, shorter, more hurried the past year—well, he should have his chance. Always, however, her mind kept going back to the people at the station and to her people in the mountains. They were the same, she kept repeating to herself—the very same and she was one of them. And always she kept thinking of her first trip to Lonesome Cove after her awakening and of what her next would be. That first time Hale had made her go back as she had left, in home-spun, sun-bonnet and brogans. There was the same reason why she should go back that way now as then—would Hale insist that she should now? She almost laughed aloud at the thought. She knew that she would refuse and she knew that his reason would not appeal to her now—she no longer cared what her neighbours and kinspeople might think and say. The porter paused at her seat.
"How much longer is it?" she asked.
"Half an hour, Miss."
June went to wash her face and hands, and when she came back to her seat a great glare shone through the windows on the other side of the car. It was the furnace, a "run" was on and she could see the streams of white molten metal racing down the narrow channels of sand to their narrow beds on either side. The whistle shrieked ahead for the Gap and she nerved herself with a prophetic sense of vague trouble at hand.
At the station Hale had paced the platform. He looked at his watch to see whether he might have time to run up to the furnace, half a mile away, and board the train there. He thought he had and he was about to start when the shriek of the coming engine rose beyond the low hills in Wild Cat Valley, echoed along Powell's Mountain and broke against the wrinkled breast of the Cumberland. On it came, and in plain sight it stopped suddenly to take water, and Hale cursed it silently and recalled viciously that when he was in a hurry to arrive anywhere, the water-tower was always on the wrong side of the station. He got so restless that he started for it on a run and he had gone hardly fifty yards before the train came on again and he had to run back to beat it to the station—where he sprang to the steps of the Pullman before it stopped—pushing the porter aside to find himself checked by the crowded passengers at the door. June was not among them and straightway he ran for the rear of the car.
June had risen. The other occupants of the car had crowded forward and she was the last of them. She had stood, during an irritating wait, at the water-tower, and now as she moved slowly forward again she heard the hurry of feet behind her and she turned to look into the eager, wondering eyes of John Hale.
"June!" he cried in amazement, but his face lighted with joy and he impulsively stretched out his arms as though he meant to take her in them, but as suddenly he dropped them before the startled look in her eyes, which, with one swift glance, searched him from head to foot. They shook hands almost gravely.
June sat in the little dummy, the focus of curious eyes, while Hale was busy seeing that her baggage was got aboard. The checks that she gave him jingled in his hands like a bunch of keys, and he could hardly help grinning when he saw the huge trunks and the smart bags that were tumbled from the baggage car—all marked with her initials. There had been days when he had laid considerable emphasis on pieces like those, and when he thought of them overwhelming with opulent suggestions that debt-stricken little town, and, later, piled incongruously on the porch of the cabin on Lonesome Cove, he could have laughed aloud but for a nameless something that was gnawing savagely at his heart.
He felt almost shy when he went back into the car, and though June greeted him with a smile, her immaculate daintiness made him unconsciously sit quite far away from her. The little fairy-cross was still at her throat, but a tiny diamond gleamed from each end of it and from the centre, as from a tiny heart, pulsated the light of a little blood-red ruby. To him it meant the loss of June's simplicity and was the symbol of her new estate, but he smiled and forced himself into hearty cheerfulness of manner and asked her questions about her trip. But June answered in halting monosyllables, and talk was not easy between them. All the while he was watching her closely and not a movement of her eye, ear, mouth or hand—not an inflection of her voice—escaped him. He saw her sweep the car and its occupants with a glance, and he saw the results of that glance in her face and the down-dropping of her eyes to the dainty point of one boot. He saw her beautiful mouth close suddenly tight and her thin nostrils quiver disdainfully when a swirl of black smoke, heavy with cinders, came in with an entering passenger through the front door of the car. Two half-drunken men were laughing boisterously near that door and even her ears seemed trying to shut out their half-smothered rough talk. The car started with a bump that swayed her toward him, and when she caught the seat with one hand, it checked as suddenly, throwing her the other way, and then with a leap it sprang ahead again, giving a nagging snap to her head. Her whole face grew red with vexation and shrinking distaste, and all the while, when the little train steadied into its creaking, puffing, jostling way, one gloved hand on the chased silver handle of her smart little umbrella kept nervously swaying it to and fro on its steel-shod point, until she saw that the point was in a tiny pool of tobacco juice, and then she laid it across her lap with shuddering swiftness.
At first Hale thought that she had shrunk from kissing him in the car because other people were around. He knew better now. At that moment he was as rough and dirty as the chain-carrier opposite him, who was just in from a surveying expedition in the mountains, as the sooty brakeman who came through to gather up the fares—as one of those good-natured, profane inebriates up in the corner. No, it was not publicity—she had shrunk from him as she was shrinking now from black smoke, rough men, the shaking of the train—the little pool of tobacco juice at her feet. The truth began to glimmer through his brain. He understood, even when she leaned forward suddenly to look into the mouth of the gap, that was now dark with shadows. Through that gap lay her way and she thought him now more a part of what was beyond than she who had been born of it was, and dazed by the thought, he wondered if he might not really be. At once he straightened in his seat, and his mind made up, as he always made it up—swiftly. He had not explained why he had not met her that morning, nor had he apologized for his rough garb, because he was so glad to see her and because there were so many other things he wanted to say; and when he saw her, conscious and resentful, perhaps, that he had not done these things at once—he deliberately declined to do them now. He became silent, but he grew more courteous, more thoughtful—watchful. She was very tired, poor child; there were deep shadows under her eyes which looked weary and almost mournful. So, when with a clanging of the engine bell they stopped at the brilliantly lit hotel, he led her at once upstairs to the parlour, and from there sent her up to her room, which was ready for her.
"You must get a good sleep," he said kindly, and with his usual firmness that was wont to preclude argument. "You are worn to death. I'll have your supper sent to your room." The girl felt the subtle change in his manner and her lip quivered for a vague reason that neither knew, but, without a word, she obeyed him like a child. He did not try again to kiss her. He merely took her hand, placed his left over it, and with a gentle pressure, said:
"Good-night, little girl."
"Good-night," she faltered.
Resolutely, relentlessly, first, Hale cast up his accounts, liabilities, resources, that night, to see what, under the least favourable outcome, the balance left to him would be. Nearly all was gone. His securities were already sold. His lots would not bring at public sale one-half of the deferred payments yet to be made on them, and if the company brought suit, as it was threatening to do, he would be left fathoms deep in debt. The branch railroad had not come up the river toward Lonesome Cove, and now he meant to build barges and float his cannel coal down to the main line, for his sole hope was in the mine in Lonesome Cove. The means that he could command were meagre, but they would carry his purpose with June for a year at least and then—who knew?—he might, through that mine, be on his feet again.
The little town was dark and asleep when he stepped into the cool night-air and made his way past the old school-house and up Imboden Hill. He could see—all shining silver in the moonlight—the still crest of the big beech at the blessed roots of which his lips had met June's in the first kiss that had passed between them. On he went through the shadowy aisle that the path made between other beech-trunks, harnessed by the moonlight with silver armour and motionless as sentinels on watch till dawn, out past the amphitheatre of darkness from which the dead trees tossed out their crooked arms as though voicing silently now his own soul's torment, and then on to the point of the spur of foot-hills where, with the mighty mountains encircling him and the world, a dreamland lighted only by stars, he stripped his soul before the Maker of it and of him and fought his fight out alone.
His was the responsibility for all—his alone. No one else was to blame—June not at all. He had taken her from her own life—had swerved her from the way to which God pointed when she was born. He had given her everything she wanted, had allowed her to do what she pleased and had let her think that, through his miraculous handling of her resources, she was doing it all herself. And the result was natural. For the past two years he had been harassed with debt, racked with worries, writhing this way and that, concerned only with the soul-tormenting catastrophe that had overtaken him. About all else he had grown careless. He had not been to see her the last year, he had written seldom, and it appalled him to look back now on his own self-absorption and to think how he must have appeared to June. And he had gone on in that self-absorption to the very end. He had got his license to marry, had asked Uncle Billy, who was magistrate as well as miller, to marry them, and, a rough mountaineer himself to the outward eye, he had appeared to lead a child like a lamb to the sacrifice and had found a woman with a mind, heart and purpose of her own. It was all his work. He had sent her away to fit her for his station in life—to make her fit to marry him. She had risen above and now HE WAS NOT FIT TO MARRY HER. That was the brutal truth—a truth that was enough to make a wise man laugh or a fool weep, and Hale did neither. He simply went on working to make out how he could best discharge the obligations that he had voluntarily, willingly, gladly, selfishly even, assumed. In his mind he treated conditions only as he saw and felt them and believed them at that moment true: and into the problem he went no deeper than to find his simple duty, and that, while the morning stars were sinking, he found. And it was a duty the harder to find because everything had reawakened within him, and the starting-point of that awakening was the proud glow in Uncle Billy's kind old face, when he knew the part he was to play in the happiness of Hale and June. All the way over the mountain that day his heart had gathered fuel from memories at the big Pine, and down the mountain and through the gap, to be set aflame by the yellow sunlight in the valley and the throbbing life in everything that was alive, for the month was June and the spirit of that month was on her way to him. So when he rose now, with back-thrown head, he stretched his arms suddenly out toward those far-seeing stars, and as suddenly dropped them with an angry shake of his head and one quick gritting of his teeth that such a thought should have mastered him even for one swift second—the thought of how lonesome would be the trail that would be his to follow after that day.