Later, a great yellow mule paced out of the west, bearing a tall figure garbed in black, and the voices were hushed to a murmur and the church-bell began its tolling.

When the circuit rider reached the clearing the ma.s.s of awed humanity parted and opened an aisle leading to the mammoth bier, where smiling death reposed, cradled amidst billows of blossoms. The parson had been a lifelong friend of old Cap Lutts.

His towering figure moved on toward the bier and his clean-shaven features were drawn in a terrible sorrow. When his anguished eyes rested upon the still form, a great sob convulsed him; and like an echo the pent-up achings burst in a horde of throats; subdued, piteous weeping ebbed and rolled over the dead hero of the host.

Two benches had been carried from the church and placed near the dead man. One was for the parson; on the other sat Lem and Bud and Belle-Ann.

Little Bud crouched like a shrunken, lifeless thing. Belle-Ann's beautiful eyes were swollen and her heart wrung dry of tears.

Lem's eyes, too, were dry as bone; not a single tear had he shed. For hours he sat staring over the heads of the people, and on his bruised and swollen face was stamped a grief more soul-searing than words or tears could tell.

At eventide a cortege reaching from the church to the cabin bore the old man to the barren orchard, and there they laid him beside Maw Lutts. Old Cap Lutts, monarch of Moon mountain, had pa.s.sed out of feudal history, and beyond Federal jurisdiction; his church on h.e.l.lsfork had been dedicated with his blood!

CHAPTER VIII

"LESSEN HE KILLS THE REVENUER"

Tom-John Benson did not come up to Moon mountain the following week, nor the next. But at the end of the third week he appeared to take Belle-Ann below to Beattyville and across the Kentucky River to the mission school at Proctor.

He came riding a strong, mountain horse and leading another for Belle-Ann. He unwrapped a huge bundle, and displayed an entire new outfit for the girl--two blue sailor dresses with white collars, shoes, hat, and kindred articles of apparel.

Belle-Ann dressed herself in these store things; and while Slab prepared a lunch for Benson, she walked out and down toward the spring, where she thought Lem was lingering. But Lem was not there, and she continued on to the old honeybee tree, where he sat on a log in deep meditation.

He wished to see her alone. He knew she would find him.

He looked up with a smile when he saw her trim, round figure approach, beautiful even in the cheap clothes.

She tossed the black curls from her oval face, smiled back at him, and stood demurely waiting his approval of her apparel.

"Yo' sho' do look purty, Belle-Ann," he observed. "Air yore pap ready yet?"

"Yes. When he's done his snack, I 'low we-uns 'll be goin', Lem," she answered, with an a.s.sumed cheerfulness she was far from feeling.

Although her heart ached, she had determined before she came to meet Lem that she would not cry. She had been steeling herself for days for the ordeal of this parting. Down in the depth of her heart she held fast to one great purpose; and if she gave way to her feelings and cried, she knew that it would be shattered.

"I 'lowed yo'-all wanted t' say good-by, Lem," she said presently. He aroused himself and stood up before her, his eyes full of a meaning she had never seen there before.

"Naw, Belle-Ann, I hain't wantin' t' say good-by; but I 'low I hev t'.

But thar air one thing I air wantin' yo' t' promise me, Belle-Ann," he said soberly as he reached down and took her small, tanned hand.

Belle-Ann's heart was throbbing wildly now. This was the crucial moment she had foreseen, and now was the time to summon all the forces at her command.

"Mebby I cayn't promise hit, Lem," she rejoined almost inaudibly, with violet eyes that wandered guiltily away from his face.

He stared at her. There was a timbre in her tone that startled him. He saw and felt instinctively that she had discerned what he held in his mind. The fact that she had divined correctly, and answered in this way, filled him with a sudden, sinking apprehension.

Her words shocked him into a stupor. He thought that he knew her very soul as he knew his own soul. Had the years that had unfolded her young life before him, betrayed him and withheld deep things from his understanding? Things that would join in the pursuit with other searing grievances to sting and urge his being onward toward desperation? There was, in truth, a depth to this girl, whom he had known all her life, that his cursory penetration had failed utterly to fathom. When Lem's parents had been killed by the revenuer, then it was that an inexorable avowal had resolved itself in the soul of Belle-Ann. An inviolable thing, the evulsion of which could never obtain save at the shrine of death--the death of the hated Ghost-man. Lem had only a general and superficial conception of the intrinsic intensity of this thing that had taken hold of the girl. Little did he know of the doleful hours she had brooded away over this theme of vengeance. Long, brain-dulling hours during her waking time. Haunting, troublous hours during her dream-time.

And always in the imaginings of her girl-heart she nurtured and built up an ideal, who would kill the revenuer. A hero who would hasten to her with the affiliating tribute, and lay the crimson laurels of the deed at her feet. She well knew that Lem thirsted for the life of this uncanny man, who had come and deprived him of his beloved mother and father. She knew that day and night as he traversed the hills he was ever waiting and watching for him. She was keen, and appreciatively sensible to this, and ever prayed that Lem would succeed. But all this was not the deed.

Theoretically, it occupied the tenure of a debt. A premise that looked for no advancement save payment. Until this thing was done they would both suffer. She told herself over and over again that she would never betray her true feelings to Lem until he had killed Burton, and appeased her vengeance. Love him as she thought she did, some vital element was poignantly amiss. However unwarranted, and fatuous, an indefinable barrier would stand between them until the culmination of the yearning that had made ugly crosses in her heart.

Never could she forget the past. As she stood now before Lem, with downcast eyes, the past rushed upon her more vividly than ever. That sun-smitten day, made dark and dreadful, when she had hovered over the still form of Maw Lutts in the yard. Maw Lutts, who from Belle-Ann's baby-days to the woman's last minute in the yard, had never uttered to the girl a cross word, or cast her an impatient look. Her parting smile was rooted in Belle-Ann's soul, climbing and wrapping its tendrils around her heart like an evergreen.

Even at this instant in her gloomy retrospection, she could put her finger on her own bosom, precisely where the bullet had struck. That reddish-purple spot that did not bleed. Very often the vision of that small, round death-sore multiplied and floated in one gesticulating mirage before her eyes. Often they consolidated into one compact darkish background, against which would develop the satanic, puffed visage of the revenuer who had done this thing. When old Cap Lutts' spirit went out by the same hand, the girl's soul had sickened to a distortion of mingled fear and hate, which at times bade fair to drive her primitive mind bereft.

A devouring monitor of revenge had skulked into her life, following her better self relentlessly, as a panther stalks a spent beast. To her it was all like the happening of the past hour. Three weeks only had elapsed since she had witnessed the last withering stroke of this evil creature bent upon their destruction. Across her every mood the p.r.i.c.kling echoes of that frantic bell-scream raked. It filled her ears when she strove to shut it out, and projected its curse into her slumbering hours.

She felt that unhallowed hour upon her--the moonlit night when the very trees shuddered as she and little Buddy, clinging to each other, had crept through the ghastly shadows back to the meeting-house after the mad bell's appeal had died and the demon had gone.

Never, while reason held its throne, could she obliterate from her eyes what they two saw in the church that night. So it was that Belle-Ann had long since, secretly, reared a citadel within her, and down in a remote grotto therein, had locked away her love; isolated it from her impulses and fealty.

With valiant, tender delicacy, she always tried not to sully and overshadow Lem's life with this that she knew was in her. She knew that Lem had a cross of his own to bear. Although she fancied, as humans are p.r.o.ne to do, that his burden did not parallel her own. But she would not contaminate the boy's love with the presence of this red-rare oath sticking like a projectile in her being. This rubric, monastic avowal of vengeance that now hung in her soul like a garnet etching. But always she prayed that G.o.d might direct Lem to avenge her, and thus tear down this phantom picture that overshadowed her life, and thereby redeem her peace.

Like animated photography, all this dashed through the girl's mind in a trice when Lem expressed a wish that she would promise him something.

And with it her cryptic avowal centralized and surged up strong within her. Taking a firm hold on her will, she raised her eyes full upon his supplicant figure suing before her. Lem looked, and acted like a man who had been stunned by a blow. He was confronted with a new and unexpected phase of her nature. As his own gaze met her eyes, he discerned the indelible lettering of some palpable, deep purpose. What strange alien agency had laid hold of her? Was this the call of her blue-gra.s.s blood a.s.serting itself in this, the hour of parting? The celerity of the transition, from his romping, hilarious play-fellow, to this serious, solemn, sudden incarnation, who denied him so unexpectedly, the pledge upon which he had staked his future, was a cyclonic blow that left his faculties bereft and numbed. Belle-Ann was looking fixedly at him. His lips were palsied. His mouth moved mutely to form words. Suddenly he found his voice and launched forth out of a daze.

"Why, Belle-Ann, yo' kin sho' promise me thes, cyan't yo' now?"

"Yo' hain't tol' me whut hit air yet, Lem," she protested faintly.

"Belle-Ann," he blurted out huskily, "I air pizen sho' yo'-all knows whut I air a firin' at."

She shook the silken ma.s.s of black curls that would insist in tumbling down on her small face, and elevated her pretty brows negatively. But beneath her drooping lids a flicker of tell-tale light was playing.

"Looky heah, Belle-Ann,"--his voice dropped to pleading tones--"Lem wants thet yo' should promise em sompin' 'fore yo'-all goes away. I want yo' t' promise, Belle-Ann," he went on earnestly, recovering the hand he had dropped in his amazement. "I want yo' t' promise thet when yo'-all c.u.ms back t' home thet yo'll marry me--eh?"

Not rudely, but reverently and slowly she drew her hand away from him.

With eyes averted, her bosom stirred and she struggled with the choking in her throat.

She removed her sun-hat, and stood swinging it in her perturbation. With a great will she steadied her voice.

"I cyan't promise thet, Lem--leastways not now," she answered slowly, without looking at him.

He fell back, crestfallen and hurt.

For a minute silence stood between them. Never before had he seen her so bewitching.

Then she turned her matchless violet eyes upon him.

"I hain't a spitin' yo', Lem," she explained hurriedly. "I hain't a spitin' you, cose yo' air a good boy an'--an' I like yo', Lem. But I jest cyant promise whut yo' want me t' now."

Astounded, he stood fumbling for words. Then he suddenly tossed his long hair back with a jerk of his head--a gesture that had characterized his father.

"Belle-Ann," he cried hotly, "whut ails yo', little gal; air hit some tuther bein' yo' love? Air thet Jutt Orlick bin a pesterin' yo' an'

yo're afeerd t' tell me? Belle-Ann, little gal, do yo'-all love Orlick?

Air hit em whut yo' love, an' afeerd t' own on hit? Air ye 'lowin' t'