The callow members of the household had retired to rest, but the elders of the band of moonshiners were up and still actively astir, and Wyatt experienced a prescient vicarious qualm to note their lack of heed or secrecy—the noisy shifting of heavy weights (barrels, kegs, bags of apples, and peaches for pomace), the loud voices and unguarded words. When a door in the floor was lifted, the whiff of chill, subterranean air that pervaded the whole house was heavily freighted with spirituous odors, and gave token to the meanest intelligence, to the most unobservant inmate, that the still was operated in a cellar, peculiarly immune to suspicion, for a cellar is never an adjunct to the ordinary mountain cabin. Thus the infraction of the revenue law went on securely and continuously beneath the placid, simple, domestic life, with its reverent care for the very aged and its tender nurture of the very young.
It was significant, indeed, that the industry should not be pretermitted, however, when a stranger was within the gates. The reason to Wyatt, familiar with the moonshiners’ methods and habits of thought, was only too plain. They intended that the “revenuer” should never go forth to tell the tale. His comrades had evidently failed to follow his trail, either losing it in the wilderness or from ignorance of his intention. He had put himself hopelessly into the power of these desperate men, whom his escape or liberation would menace with incarceration for a long term as Federal prisoners in distant penitentiaries, if, indeed, they were not already answerable to the law for some worse crime than illicit distilling. His murder would be the extreme of brutal craft, so devised as to seem an accident, against the possibility of future investigation.
The reflection turned Wyatt deathly cold, he who could not bear unmoved the plea of a wild thing’s eye. He sturdily sought to pull himself together. It was none of his decree; it was none of his deed, he argued. The older moonshiners, who managed all the details of the enterprise, would direct the event with absolute authority and the immutability of fate. But whatever should be done, he revolted from any knowledge of it, as from any share in the act. He had risen to leave the place, all strange of aspect now, metamorphosed,—various disorderly details of the prohibited industry ever and anon surging up from the still-room below,—when a hoarse voice took cognizance of his intention with a remonstrance.
“Why, Watt Wyatt, ye can’t go out in the cove. Ye air dead! Ye will let that t’other revenue-raider ye seen into the secret o’ the bresh whisky in our wagon ef ye air viewed about whenst ’Gene hev spread the report that ye air dead. Wait till them raiders hev cleared out of the kentry.”
The effort at detention, to interfere with his liberty, added redoubled impetus to Wyatt’s desire to be gone. He suddenly devised a cogent necessity. “I be feared my dad mought hear that fool tale. I ain’t much loss, but dad would feel it.”
“Oh, I sent Jack thar ter tell him better whenst he drove ter mill ter-day ter git the meal fer the mash. Jack made yer dad understand ’bout yer sudden demise.”
“Oh, yeh,” interposed the glib Jack; “an’ he said ez he couldn’t abide sech jokes.”
“Shucks!” cried the filial Wyatt. “Dad war full fresky himself in his young days; I hev hearn his old frien’s say so.”
“I tried ter slick things over,” said the diplomatic Jack. “I ’lowed young folks war giddy by nature. I ’lowed ’t war jes a flash o’ fun. An’ he say: ‘Flash o’ fun be con-sarned! My son is more like a flash o’ lightning; ez suddint an’ mischeevious an’ totally ondesirable.’”
The reproach obviously struck home, for Wyatt maintained a disconsolate silence for a time. At length, apparently goaded by his thoughts to attempt a defense, he remonstrated:
“Nobody ever war dead less of his own free will. I never elected ter be a harnt. ’Gene Barker hed no right ter nominate me fer the dear departed, nohow.”
One of the uncouth younger fellows, his shoulders laden with a sack of meal, paused on his way from the porch to the trap-door to look up from beneath his burden with a sly grin as he said, “’Gene war wishin’ it war true, that’s why.”
“’Count o’ Minta Elladine Riggs,” gaily chimed in another.
“But ’Gene needn’t gredge Watt foothold on this yearth fer sech; she ain’t keerin’ whether Watt lives or dies,” another contributed to the rough, rallying fun.
But Wyatt was of sensitive fibre. He had flushed angrily; his eyes were alight; a bitter retort was trembling on his lips when one of the elder Barkers, discriminating the elements of an uncontrollable fracas, seized on the alternative.
“Could you-uns sure be back hyar by daybreak, Watt!” he asked, fixing the young fellow with a stern eye.
“No ’spectable ghost roams around arter sun-up,” cried Wyatt, fairly jovial at the prospect of liberation.
“Ye mus’ be heedful not ter be viewed,” the senior admonished him.
“I be goin’ ter slip about keerful like a reg’lar, stiddy-goin’ harnt, an’ eavesdrop a bit. It’s worth livin’ a hard life ter view how a feller’s friends will take his demise.”
“I reckon ye kin make out ter meet the wagin kemin’ back from the cross-roads’ store. It went out this evenin’ with that coffin full of jugs that ye lef’ las’ night under the church-house, whenst ’Gene seen you-uns war suspicioned. They will hev time ter git ter the cross-roads with the whisky on’ back little arter midnight, special’ ez we-uns hev got the raider that spied out the job hyar fast by the leg.”
The mere mention of the young prisoner rendered Wyatt the more eager to be gone, to be out of sight and sound. But he had no agency in the disaster, he urged against some inward clamor of protest; the catastrophe was the logical result of the fool-hardiness of the officer in following these desperate men with no backing, with no power to apprehend or hold, relying on his flimsy disguise, and risking delivering himself into their hands, fettered as he was with the knowledge of his discovery of their secret.
“It’s nothin’ ter me, nohow,” Wyatt was continually repeating to himself, though when he sprang through the door he could scarcely draw his breath because of some mysterious, invisible clutch at his throat.
He sought to ascribe this symptom to the density of the pervasive fog without, that impenetrably cloaked all the world; one might wonder how a man could find his way through the opaque white vapor. It was, however, an accustomed medium to the young mountaineer, and his feet, too, had something of that unclassified muscular instinct, apart from reason, which guides in an oft-trodden path. Once he came to a halt, from no uncertainty of locality, but to gaze apprehensively through the blank, white mists over a shuddering shoulder. “I wonder ef thar be any other harnts aloose ter-night, a-boguing through the fog an’ the moon,” he speculated. Presently he went on again, shaking his head sagely. “I ain’t wantin’ ter collogue with sech,” he averred cautiously.
Occasionally the moonlight fell in expansive splendor through a rift in the white vapor; amidst the silver glintings a vague, illusory panorama of promontory and island, bay and inlet, far ripplings of gleaming deeps, was presented like some magic reminiscence, some ethereal replica of the past, the simulacrum of the seas of these ancient coves, long since ebbed away and vanished.
The sailing moon visibly rocked, as the pulsing tides of the cloud-ocean rose and fell, and ever and anon this supernal craft was whelmed in its surgings, and once more came majestically into view, freighted with fancies and heading for the haven of the purple western shores.
In one of these clearances of the mists a light of an alien type caught the eye of the wandering spectre—a light, red, mundane, of prosaic suggestion. It filtered through the