THE DESPOT OF BROOMSEDGE COVE.

I.

On a certain steep and savage slope of the Great Smoky Mountains, the primeval wilderness for many miles is unbroken save by one meagre clearing. The presence of humanity upon the earth is further attested only by a log cabin, high on the rugged slant. At night the stars seem hardly more aloof than the valley below. By day the mountains assert their solemn vicinage, an austere company. The clouds that silently commune with the great peaks, the sinister and scathing deeds of the lightnings, the passionate rhetoric of the thunders, the triumphal pageantry of the sunset-tides, and the wistful yearnings of the dawn aspiring to the day,—these might seem the only incidents of this lonely and exalted life. So august is this mountain scheme that it fills all the visible world with its massive multitudinous presence; still stretching out into the dim blue distances an infinite perspective of peak and range and lateral spur, till one may hardly believe that the fancy does not juggle with the fact.

One day a sound impinged suddenly upon its impressive silence,—faint and far, but even in the echo charged with alien suggestions; not akin to the woods or the waters, to the cry of beast or of bird; subtly at variance with the mountain solitude, imposed upon it, neither of its essence nor its outgrowth. A soul informed the sound, for it was the voice of a man singing aloud in the wilderness,—singing [2]with so ecstatic a fervor, with tones so robust and full, that distant peaks were voiced with fugue-like feignings, rising to sudden outbursts and sinking to silence, as the melody waxed or waned. It swung and swayed in rhythmic cadences across the valley. It might have seemed a spirit in the air, for with the hymning echoes it was hard to say whence it came. But two mountaineers, standing beside the fence of the little cornfield in the clearing, gazed expectantly up the road, that, precarious and rocky, ran along the verge of the slope. For the song grew louder and more distinct, and presently in its midst was heard the beat of

rapid hoofs. A moment more, and the young psalmist came around a curve, galloping recklessly down beneath the fringed boughs of the firs and the pines, still singing aloud; the reins upon his horse’s neck, his rifle held across the pommel of the saddle, his broad hat thrust upon the back of his head, his eyes scarcely turning toward the men that stood by the wayside.

He had evidently not intended to stop, but one of them threw up his arm and hailed him.

“Hy’re, Teck! hold up!”

The rider drew rein. The rapt expression of his countenance abruptly changed. He fixed imperative, worldly eyes upon the speaker. They were deeply set, of a dark blue color, full of a play of expression, and despite the mundane intimations of the moment they held the only suggestions in his face of a spiritual possibility. He had a heavy lower jaw, stern and insistent. A firm, immobile mouth disclosed strong, even teeth. His nose was slightly aquiline, and he had definitely marked black eyebrows. His short dark beard, worn after the manner common in the region, and the usual brown jeans garb, lent his face no similarity to the faces of the others. There was a strong individuality, magnetism, about him, and before his glance the peremptory spirit of his interlocutor was slightly abated. It was only after he had demanded, “What ye want?” that he was asked in turn,—

[3]

“Whar ye been?”

“Been a-huntin’,” said Teck Jepson. He laid one hand upon the barrel of his rifle on the pommel of his saddle, as if to call attention to it.

“Didn’t ye get nuthin’?”

“Naw. I tuk ter studyin’ ’bout’n the Bible, an’ a-sing-in’, an’ I warn’t a-goin’ ter thwart the sperit. I ain’t tuk aim this day.”

There was so obvious a pride in this statement that it imposed upon the others as a valid source of satisfaction.

They all looked meditatively at the spaces of the sunlit valley for a moment. The shadow of a great wing flickered by. A cow-bell jangled from the slope below.

“Waal, I expec’ Ben hyar mought hev his say-so ’bout’n studyin’ on the Bible, jes’ in the time fur pullin’ fodder,” suggested Eli Strobe.

He was the constable of the district, a heavy, thick-set fellow, forty years of age, perhaps, and of medium height. He had a large head and a certain lowering side glance, barely lifting the lids of his slow dark eyes with a sullen, bovine expression. He carried himself in a deliberate pondering manner, and with distinct aggressiveness. He wore his broad black wool hat pulled far over his brow. His boots were drawn to the knee over his blue jeans trousers, and were graced with large spurs. His features were straight and regular, handsome in their way, and his face was characterized by a sort of surly dignity. He stood sturdily in the road, with his hands in his pockets, and looked up from under the brim of his hat at the horseman.

Jepson lifted his head loftily. “I’d ruther be in the wilderness with the sperit than with the gleaners in the richest fields o’ the yearth!”

Despite a sanctimonious twang imitated from the circuit rider, his voice in speaking betokened his gift in song. It was rich and low, and as smooth as velvet.

The constable, at a spiritual disadvantage, recanted with [4]acerbity. “I reckon so! Ennybody else would, too. Ye talk ez ef nobody hedn’t no religion but yerse’f.”

“Laws-a-massy!” exclaimed Jepson’s half-brother, Ben Bowles. “Laws-a-massy! whenst Teck gits ter studyin’ ’bout the Bible-folks, I’d jes’ ez lief he’d wander ez work. He talks ter me till them tales hender me mighty nigh ez much ez him. No fodder sca’cely would hev been pulled hyar ter-day ef he hed stayed.”

The mention of his work reminded him of it anew. As he stood in the turn-row, he began to tear from the stalwart stalks of the Indian corn, tasseled far higher than his head, the long blue-green and glossy blades, rustling at a touch and shining in the sun. He was in his shirt-sleeves, a gaunt, shambling fellow, with yellow beard and hair, and long, tobacco-stained teeth; he had a docile, acquiescent face and a temporizing blue eye. Few men could contrive to agree with both Jepson and Strobe, but to Ben Bowles no miracle of trimming was impossible. The corn was fine; the heavy ears, swathed in their crisp husks and crested with sun-embrowned silk, hung far from the stalks, about which trumpet vines twined, the blossoms flaunting scarlet. There even peered out now and then the tender blue eyes of morning-glories, still open, a-bloom in the dank shadow. The more prosaic growth of pumpkins was about the roots, and sometimes Bowles caught his awkward feet in the vines, and added a stumble to his shamble.

“The sperit hev been with me strong,—mighty strong, ter-day,” said Teck Jepson suddenly. “I hev been studyin’ on Moses, from the time he lef’ the saidges by the ruver bank,” he added, bridling with a sentiment that was strikingly like the pride of earth. Then, as he gazed down at the landscape, his face softened and grew pensive.

The great ranges were slowly empurpled against the pale eastern horizon, delicately blue, for the sun was in the western skies. How splendidly saffron those vast spaces glowed! What purity and richness of tint! Here and [5]there were pearly wing-like sweeps of an incomparable glister; and the clouds, ambitious, must needs climb the zenith, with piled and stately mountainous effects, gleaming white, opaque and dazzling. The focal fires of the great orb were unquenched, and still the yellow divergent rays streamed forth; yet in its heart was suggested that vermilion smouldering of the sunset, and the western hills were waiting.

“’Twar tur’ble hard on Moses,” said Teck Jepson dreamily, “when the Lord shut him out’n Canaan, arter travelin’ through the wilderness. Tur’ble, tur’ble hard!”

There was naught in the scene to suggest to a mind familiar with the facts an Oriental landscape,—naught akin to the hills of Judæa. It was essentially of the New World, essentially of the Great Smoky Mountains. Yet ignorance has its license. It never occurred to Teck Jepson that his Biblical heroes had lived elsewhere. Their history had to him an intimate personal relation, as of the story of an ancestor in the homestead ways and closely familiar. He brooded upon these narrations, instinct with dramatic movement, enriched with poetic color, and localized in his robust imagination, till he could trace Hagar’s wild wanderings in the fastnesses; could show where Jacob slept and piled his altar of stones; could distinguish the bush, of all others on the “bald,” that blazed with fire from heaven, when the angel of the Lord stood within it. Somehow, even in their grotesque variation, they lost no dignity in their transmission to the modern conditions of his fancy. Did the facts lack significance because it was along the gullied red clay

roads of Piomingo Cove that he saw David, the smiling stripling, running and holding high in his hand the bit of cloth cut from Saul’s garments, while the king had slept in a cave at the base of Chilhowee Mountain? And how was the splendid miracle of translation discredited because Jepson believed that the chariot of the Lord had rested in scarlet and purple clouds upon the towering summit of Thunderhead, that Elijah might thence ascend into heaven?

[6]

He mistook the dramatic instinct, that entranced him with these splendid epics, for religion. He sang loud and long in the meetings, with a rich voice and a fervid indorsement of the sentiment of the rude hymns, but he told few experiences; his soul seemed untroubled, unstirred; he neither shouted nor exhorted others, and in the midst of exhortation he often dropped asleep. But if the text were from the Old Testament, rich in narrative, his fine head was alert, his eyes grew eager and intent; he would lean forward, to lose no word, his hand on the back of the bench in front of him, and often his strong hand trembled. He was an earnest advocate of education. “Let the Bible be read!” he would exclaim in a thunderous, coercive voice, strong with the sincerity of his own wish to read. For he was sometimes aware that he carried with him broken impressions of the stories that emblazoned his mind. Then his quick supplementing fancy would unconsciously assert itself anew, the rift would close, and the continuity would stretch forth perfected.

His was the mind receptive, romantic. The endowment to believe the essential verity, undemonstrable though it be, to see that which is not before the material eye, to feel the abstract sentiment, he shared with those for whom tradition has woven its fine, embellished webs, and history has penned its heroic page, and poets have sung and have soared. The gift was in the nature of a sarcasm, bestowed here. He had not even the cradle lore of other men. Niggard circumstance had environed him with all the limitations of ignorance. In these close bounds, the readings of the circuit rider gave him the only collations of connected fact, the only narrative, the only glimpse of a status of people more amply endowed than those about him; and the dramatic instinct vivified the meagre details, caused them to glow before him, and they served for him as the libraries of the world serve for other men.

Encompassed by the democratic sovereignty that hedges [7]about an American voter; knowing no rank, no gradations of caste, other than that of the sheriff, the constable, the justice of the peace,—and latterly the high estate of a circuit judge had been brought to his knowledge,—it was curious how he caught from the spirit of the text the sentiment of awe and reverence for the exalted in the earth, prophets and high-priests, kings and great captains. He exulted in the Scriptural pageantry. His fancy would marshal again and again the fine show of the serried ranks of opposing armies along the mountain side, when David went out in the valley to fight Goliath. The triumph would hardly have been what it was to him without those multiplied martial spectators,—nor, it is safe to say, to David either.

“Yes, sir,” he reiterated. “’Twar tur’ble hard on Moses. I jes’ know how he felt. Thar ain’t nuthin’ in this worl’ so tormentin’ ter the sperit ez ter be in a place ye despise, an’ hanker an’ hone ter git ter another. Whenst I war a witness in the court yander at Glaston agin Jake Baintree ez killed Sam’l Keale, I fairly pined so fur the mountings my chist felt tight, like I couldn’t breathe, an’ my eyeballs plumb started out’n my head. An’ when they ’lowed thar’d hev ter be a new trial, an’ I’d hev ter kem back las’ March agin, I war so outdone an’ aggervated by the foolin’ ’round o’ them lawyers, ez tuk an’ sp’iled the case they hed been at sech trouble ter fix jes’ so, that I jes’ up-ed an’ ’lowed afore the jedge ez I hoped I’d be dead afore that time.”

“The folks laffed at ye, too,” said the constable.

“Let ’em laff,—laffin’ ’s cheap,” retorted Jepson. He was one of those happily constituted mortals who respect their own mental attitude far more than its effect on others.

“Waal, they ’low ez Baintree air a-layin’ fur ye ’bout’n that thar testimony ye gin agin him,” observed Strobe.

Jepson received this suggestion in the silence of contempt.

“I never looked ter see Baintree let off from that court,” said Bowles.

[8]

“Yes,” assented Jepson cheerfully. “The law ’peared ter hev a weak streak in it somehows, an’ the lawyers said they couldn’t prove it on him. An’ I ’lowed ter the State’s lawyer ez they hed better prove it then with a sentence from Jedge Lynch.”

The constable, mindful of his position as an officer of the law, cast a sudden glance upon him of threatening surprise.

“What did the ’torney gineral say ter that?” he demanded pertinently.

“He say ef he hed sech a tongue ez mine he’d tie it ter his palate, ter keep it still,” responded Jepson easily. “But I told him thar warn’t no danger, fur ef ennybody fell out with the sayin’s o’ my tongue, the doin’s o’ my fist war mighty apt ter make ’em fall in agin. Yes, sir,” he proceeded after a pause, “I appealed ter Jedge Lynch.” His form of expression was reminiscent of his recent experiences in the courts. “I never got nothin’ by it, though. Folks is gittin’ so white-livered they be afeard o’ thar shadders.”

“Waal, now,” spoke up the constable, moving back a pace, and feeling at a disadvantage in being constrained to look upward at the horseman, “when the courts hev let a man go, an’ can’t prove nuthin’ on him, I say ’twon’t do fur folks ter set out an’ mebbe hang a man by mistake.”

“Whar’s Sam’l Keale?” Jepson asked the question, and then looked casually across the road and the stream at the great vermilion sun going down behind the long summit line, far, far away, of Walden’s Ridge,—how finely outlined, how delicate in hue, against the flushed horizon. The mountains close around loomed sombre, purple, silent, and mysterious, sharers in none of these ethereal graces of color. On the rocky banks of the stream, here and there, felled trees were lying; one protruded far into the water, and was green with moss and dank with ooze. It stirred suddenly, for some water animal had sprung upon it, then splashed again into the current, as Bowles’s old dog rushed out of [9]the cornfield with a shrill, sharp bark of discovery. His master’s eyes followed him absently, while with a quivering tail and alert ears he patrolled the banks hither and thither, now and again uttering his sharp cry, varied with wheezes of disappointment.

“Whar’s—Sam’l—Keale?” Jepson demanded again, significantly, and once more waited for an answer. Neither of the other men spoke. The wind stirred; an acorn dropped with a sharp thud from a chestnut-oak; a locust was shrilling from a pawpaw tree. “Ef ye’ll tell me ennywhar Sam’l Keale kin be, I’ll gin it up. Now jes’ look-a-hyar,” he argued. “Them two fellers—nobody knowed then what they war arter, but it kem out on the trial—got it inter thar heads ez thar war some silver mines in the mountings. An’ they sets out ter find one.” His lip curled. “So day arter day they leaves thar plows in the furrow, an’ goes a-sarchin’ fur the silver mine. An’ one day nare one o’ ’em kems back. A plumb week goes by. An’ then hyar kems Baintree nigh starved with a-wanderin’ in the woods, an’ with a big tale ’bout Sam’l hevin’ fell down a hole ez ’peared ter be the mouth o’ a cave, an’ he couldn’t hear nuthin’ from him, though Baintree hollered an’ hollered. An’ he war afeard the law’d take arter him, kase they

war a-scufflin’ whenst Sam’l slipped an’ fell. Waal, the folks tuk arter him fur not hevin’ kem straight ter tell,—lef’ the critter thar in the cave ter starve or drown. None o’ that fooled me!”

He broke off abruptly.

Ben Bowles pulled his hay-colored beard with meditative fingers. “Ye b’lieve Sam’l war dead fust, an’ then war flung down inter the cave.”

Jepson knit his brows fiercely. “Percisely.”

“Ye ’low, ef he warn’t, Baintree would hev been powerful quick ter skeet out’n them woods an’ git somebody ter holp him git Sam’l out, ’thout waitin’ a week!”

“Jes’ so!”

[10]

The constable put in suddenly; his loyalty to the law was enlisted, and he felt it his bounden duty to support its decisions with the weight of his personal opinion.

“Baintree ’lowed Sam war dead, or hed sunk spang through the yearth, kase he wouldn’t answer. The boy war afeard ter tell. He wouldn’t even tell a-fust ez they war a-scufflin’ an’ a-playin’. An’ ez the jury ’lowed he warn’t guilty, I feel ez ef he ought ter be let ter go.”

“Whar’s—Sam’l—Keale?” demanded Jepson once more.

Neither answered. The shrilling of the locust persisted sharply. Only the rim of the sun showed above the distant blue mountain; the soft suffusions of light upon the great valley were reddening, and a sense of impending shadows, not yet falling, was upon the air. Night was pluming her wings, to spread them erelong. A point of light suddenly scintillated in the dark flow of the mountain stream, for the poetic evening star—how serene!—was in the sky. What prophetic melancholy had pierced the group of pines hard by? Their fringes were astir, and a monody, all tenderly subdued and subtly mournful, was on the air.

“Baintree kem down yander ter the blacksmith shop las’ Wednesday,” Jepson resumed abruptly. “I war thar ter hev this hyar horse-critter’s nigh fore-foot shod;” he leaned over, glancing down at it, then came suddenly to the perpendicular. “He kem thar ez ef he expected folks ter ’bide by the verdic’ an’ be sati’fied. He kem in the door an’ walked roun’, an’ then he sot down in the winder. An’ then I jes’ riz up. I said ter him, I said aloud, ‘Cain, I see Abel with ye. I view him thar. Ye needn’t winge away. He hev kem ter abide alongside o’ ye. Ye kin hide him in no caves. He air yer share forever!’ An’ then I turned back ter the anvil, whar Clem Sanders war a-forgin’ of the horse-shoe. An’ time he hed bent the bar I looked over my lef’ shoulder, an’ the winder war empty.”

[11]

A long pause ensued. “Waal, sir,” Strobe presently remarked, “folks ’low he hev got religion now, an’ air goin’ ter be baptized.”

Teck turned a face of amazed anger upon him.