Part 5 (2/2)
But when he was still a long way off he saw a pale flare against the sky which he knew was a bonfire outside the warehouse, and by the brightening of that beacon from pallor to crimson glow he measured his progress.
Inside the building itself another battle against time was being fought: a battle to hold the attention of a crowd in the background of whose minds lurked the distrait suspense of waiting for a graver climax than that of oratorical peroration. About the interior blazed pine torches and occasional lanterns with tin reflectors. Even this unaccustomed effort at illumination failed to penetrate the obscurity of the corners or to carry its ragged brightness aloft into the rafters.
Beyond the sooty formlessness of encroaching shadows one felt rather than saw the walls, with their rifts through which gusty draught caused the torches to flare and gutter, sending out the incense of their resin.
Between the Circuit Judge, before whom Asa must face trial and the County Judge, sat Basil Prince, the princ.i.p.al speaker of the evening, and his quiet eyes were missing nothing of the mediaevalism of the picture.
Yet one might have inferred from his tranquillity of expression that he had never addressed a gathering where the fitful glare of torches had not shone upon repeating rifles and c.o.o.n skin caps: where the faces had not been set and grim as though keyed to an ordeal of fire and lead.
He was noting how every fresh arrival hesitated near the door and glanced about him. In that brief pause and scrutiny he recognized the purport of a division, for as each newcomer stepped to the left or the right of the centre aisle he thereby proclaimed himself a Carr or a Gregory--taking shrewd thought of clan-mobilization. Then as a low drone of talk went up from the body of the house and a restless shuffling of feet, the speaker and his reception committee could not escape the realization of an ugly tension; of an undertow of anxiety moving deep beneath the surface affectation of calm. A precarious spirit brooded there.
The Circuit Judge leaned over toward Prince, whispering nervously through a smile of courteous commonplace: ”Maybe we've made a mistake to attempt it, General. They seem dangerously restless and tight-strung, and they've got to be so gripped that they'll forget everything but your words for a spell!” The speaker, in his abstraction, relapsed abruptly out of judicial dignity into mountain crudity of speech. ”Hit's ergoin' ter be like holdin' back a flood tide with a splash-dam. Thank G.o.d ef any man kin do thet, I reckon hit's you.”
The Louisville lawyer nodded, ”I'll try, sir,” was his brief response.
As the speaker of the moment dropped back, General Prince came to his feet and with him rose the Circuit Judge who was to introduce him. That prefatory address was brief, for the infection of restiveness was spreading and loosely held interests were gravitating to mischief.
Yet as General Prince stood quietly waiting, with his slender and elderly figure straight poised and his fine face, for all its intellectuality, remaining the steel-jawed face of a fighter, the shuffling feet quieted and straying glances came to focus. There was a commanding light in the unquailing eyes and these men who knew few celebrities from the world without, knew both his name and his record.
They gazed steadfastly at him because, though he came now as a friend he had in another day come as a foe, and the weight of his inimical hand had come down to them through the mists of the past as word-of-mouth. In the days of the war between the States, the mountains had thrust their wedge of rock and granite-loyal Unionism through the vitals of Confederate territory. While the mobility of the gray forces were balked there to a heavy congestion, one command, bitterly hated and grudgingly admired, had seemed capable of defying mountain ranges and of laughing at torrents. Like a scathe that admitted no gainsaying, it came from nowhere, struck, without warning, and was gone again unpunished. Its name had been a metaphor for terror.
Morgan's Men! That brilliant organization of partisan raiders who slept in their saddles and smote Vulcan-like. The world knew of them and the c.u.mberlands had felt their blows. General Basil Prince had been one of their commanders. Now, a recognized authority on the use of cavalry, a lawyer of distinction, a life-long Democrat, he stood before Republicans pouring out the vials of his wrath upon the head of the man whom he charged with having betrayed and disrupted his own party and with attempting to yoke freedom into bondage.
Faces bent forward with eyes lighting into an altered mood, and the grimness which spelled danger relaxed grudgingly into attention.
The speaker did not underestimate his task. It was not enough to play the spell-binder for a definite period. He must unflaggingly hold them va.s.sals to his voice until the entrance of Asa Gregory gave him pause.
Never had Basil Prince spoken with a more compelling force or a fierier power of invective, and his voice had rung like a bugle for perhaps three-quarters of an hour when in the shadowed darkness beyond the walls the figure of a boy halted, heavily panting.
Boone paused only for a little, testing the condition of his rifle's breech and bolt, recovering his spent breath. Then he slipped nearer and peered through the slit where a board had been broken away in the wall itself. Within he saw figures bending forward and intent--and his brow knit into furrows as he took in at a glance the division of the clans, each to its separate side of the house. They had come, Saul said, to bring peace out of dissension, but they had paradoxically arranged themselves in readiness for conflict.
Through a gaping door at the rear, of which he knew, and which lay as invisible as a rent in a black curtain, because the shadows held undisputed sway back there, the boy made a noiseless entrance. Up a ladder, for the rungs of which he had to feel blindly, he climbed to a perch on the cross-beams, under the eaves, and still he was as blanketed from view as a bat in an unlighted cavern. The only dim ghost of glow that went with him were two faint phosph.o.r.escent points where he had rubbed the sights of his rifle with the moistened heads of matches.
For the eloquence of the speaker, which would at another time have enthralled him, he had now no thought, because lying flattened on a great square-hewn timber, he was searching the crowd for the face of Tom Carr.
Soon he made it out below him, to his right, and slowly he trained his rifle upon the breast beneath the face.
That was all he had to do for the present--except to wait.
When Asa came in, if matters went badly and if Tom made a motion to his holster or a gesture to his minions, there would be one thing more, but it involved only the crooking of a finger which snuggled ready in the trigger-guard.
The boy's muscles were badly cramped up there as the minutes lengthened and multiplied. The timber was hard and the air chill, but he dared not invite discovery by free movement.
Then suddenly with a short and incisive sentence following on longer and more rounded phrases, the speaker fell silent. Boone could not properly appreciate the ready adroitness with which General Prince had clipped his oratory short without the seeming of a marred effect. He only knew that the voice spoke crisply and halted and that the speaker was reaching out his hand, with matter-of-fact gesture, toward the gourd in the water bucket on the table.
Instantly the shuffling of feet grated its signal of an awakening apprehension--an uneasiness which had been temporarily lulled. There was an instant, after that, of dead hush, and then a twisting of necks as all eyes went to the door.
The men on each side of the house drew a little closer and more compactly together, widening and emphasizing the line of the aisle between; becoming two distinct crowds where there had been one, loosely joined. Hands gestured instinctively toward guns laid by, and halted in cautious abeyance. Through the cobwebbed s.p.a.ciousness and breathless quiet of the place sounded the ill-omened quaver of a barn owl.
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