1. Red
The driver had announced their approach to Dismal Gap. The front axle had broken, the ancient stage had tipped, the horses had tried to bolt.
Calvin Parker, with baggage and other miscellany, felt the hurl of his rapid descent Into a new life. There was a ditch; there was much mud, oozy mud; there was somebody tugging at his collar. He had a feeling of resentment; then sank into oblivion.
Later, he became convinced that he still was alive. The situation was too utterly mundane to hope otherwise. He seemed to be lying on a bank beside the road. That officious somebody must have dragged him there. Had It been the driver?
Vaguely he began to remember certain ministrations to his face and manipulation of his ears which raised a doubt.
An Initiatory muscular test aroused in him the ambition to sit up. This fulfilled, he glanced around. So vociferously engaged was the jehu of the hills in untangling his pair of splotch-freckled grays from the snarled harness, so regardless was he of how his quondam passenger fared that it scarcely could have been he.
Parker enlarged the scope of his vision.
Nearby stood a small white mule, gazing at him with ears waggling and an expression of amusement on his elongated face. The mule was all white except his legs - they were red to a point above the knees. This detail made Parker recall what he already had noticed, that the oozy mud of the ditch, of that fast drying in the noonday heat on his clothes, of that sticking to the straight-depending forelock of his hair, was red, an insistent, metallic red.
The mule irritated Parker. Why should he stand there grinning when his own four legs were stained with the mud? And who was he to grin, anyhow, bridled in servitude, cinched tight around the belly from the saddle on his back?
Clutching the horn of the saddle was a brown hand, with long, strong fingers. The hand it was that caused Parker to hft his gaze and see, just behind and above the mule, another amused face gazing down at him - the face of a tall girl in a short-skirted garment of coarse material that looked to be homespun.
Irritated by a new perception, Parker clapped a gloved hand over his eyes. The hair of the girl, showing beneath the sweep of her felt hat, was also red.
Red! Was everything still to be red?
"I-you- we "
He muttered the assorted pronouns by way of trying his voice, his gloved hand still comforting his eyelids.
"Right smart of a spill, wasn't It?"
At her voice, nicely modulated, he removed his hand and looked at her again. She had come around the mule, was approaching him. And, as she came, he felt comforted.
On consideration, her hair shouldn't be called red. No hair growing from human scalp was really red, as other things were accounted red. The fellow who had started the fad of calling It so must have been color-blind, for the same shades. If reproduced In fabric or squeezed from a tube, would be goldenbrown, burnt umber, sienna, mahogany, copper - what not. This girl's hair was marvelous, but not red. And the grin on her face, too, had toned down.
The long line of born-and-bred Parkers back of him began to urge that, If possible, he achieve his feet. He took a brief satisfaction In his success, then added a step or two to meet her.
"You pulled me out of the mud?" he asked In a sagging voice.
She looked put to it to maintain her toned-down expression, but answered as If excusing a liberty.
''Man, you were hurting for It - you were plumb bogged!"
After peeling off his right glove, he substantiated that uneasy memory of ministrations to his countenance.
"It was you, then, that washed my face?"
"Hope I didn't bother you none. When we-uns scour, we scour severe."
"And my ears - you dug them out?"
"You can hear, can't you?"
Those other Parkers nudged this last of them to thank her, but she either did not expect It or did not want it. She had turned the white mule, was about to mount.
At the moment the stage driver, who seemed to have conquered the refractoriness of both team and harness - at any rate, had hitched the horses to a wheel - came toward the lesser, or human element in the accidental equation.
" 'Lo, Verney! How be you-all to-day?" His greeting preceded him.
"Tolerable, Tobe Rlker."
There was snap In her reply and the fact that she did not spare him so much as a glance.
"And you-all's folks, how be they?" he persisted.
"Tolerable."
Her foot found the stirrup. An upward swing, which disclosed a stretch of leg, white-cotton-clad and of excellent outline, placed her In the saddle. With a nod in the direction of the stranger whom she had unbogged, but never a lift of the eyelids toward the little whip, she scraped the ribs of her mount with both heels.
"Hi there - you ain't no call to get riled!" Undismayed, Tobe RIker went padding toward her. "Tm a-wanting to ask after your pappy. Still trying to light his mortal path with them hellish blue flames of his'n, is he now?"
Displeasure brightened the tan of the girl's cheeks as, for the first time, she looked squarely at him. Her voice nipped the air in reply.
"If he finds them, I reckon you'd be the likeliest stick hereabouts to feed them with. At any rate" - she consulted the sun-clock with an upward glance - "I've no spare time for your dry crackles to-day; I've got a meetin' to keep."
She flipped the reins, again reminded the hybrid in the region of his ribs, laughed mockingly, and was off. Up the road twinkled the beast's red shanks, glinted the sun on her hair.
"Her reg'lar meetin' for two, I 'spect!" Thus the driver, with marked vindictiveness. "I hope she's late. It sure would disgust Rex Currie some to hear the reason why!"
"And who may our good Samaritan be?" Parker inquired, by way of recalling him from the state of rage or enthrallment in which he stood, gazing and muttering.
"Who is - who? Rex Currie? That's something you-all are due to find out, stranger, if you try setting up to Verney Metcalf. Eh? Look yer, if it's onto her you be splicing that Scripture name, you're offen the road bad as yon stage-coach. That girl ain't no comfort to nobody, as I can see. Leastwise, she acts mighty ornery."
"You seemed to make her angry." Parker spoke disagreeably; he felt disagreeable. "I wanted to thank her for dragging me out of the ditch; was about to do so when you broke in and drove her off."
" 'Twa'n't such a trick she done you. I was aiming to yank you out myself, once I got that glib team back on the road."
Parker, glancing down at his clothes, then into the sea of mud from which the driver had intended to extricate him, after due attention to the harness and the splotch-flecked grays, was able to restrain any expression of gratitude.
But Tobe Riker noticed no lack. "Can't see how she has any part to be putting on with me, nohow," he was grumbling. "I reckon It's just that she imitates her dad. Oh, not in looks so much as "
"I didn't catch the young lady's name," Parker interrupted.
"Metcalf. There's a whole cantankerous family of them."
"I mean her first name."
"Verney we-all call her from the first half of the heathen handle they struck onto her, offen a mountain In these parts. Vernaluska Metcalf - that's the whole of what she's suffering under. Scant wonder she favors a wasp mor'n she does a humanbeing woman."
Apparently cheered by having found excuse for her who had stung his pride, the driver withdrew his gaze from up the road and surveyed his more immediate plight.
"Sorry I spilled you, stranger, but I'll help you tote your duds into town. It won't discommode me none, for I got to enlist a hand to help set up the coach. It ain't such a powerful distance, at that."
Omitting to incriminate himself as overwhelmed by this mercy, Parker selected the lighter of his bags and started along the comparatively dry path which paralleled the oozy road. He heard Tobe Riker, more heavily laden, pad-padding behind him.
By the next conversational overture he appreciated that the native had deciphered the inscription painted on the rear end of the suit-case he carried.
"C. A. P. is a right peart set of initials," chuckled the whip. "Be you a cap set for the women-critters, now? Or do them letters stand for night-cap?"
On Intercepting the frown curved over-shoulder at him, Tobe curbed his facetiousness, if not his curiosity
"New York, eh? You be a furriner, right enough. How came you-all from such an out-of-the-way place as New York to Dismal Gap?"
A bend in the road brought the two into the only street of the village. Parker set down his burden with frank relief and gazed about. His eyes, keen to colors, noticed the pink of the landscape's peach blossoms, its white of plum, its spring-green of tree and shrub; they lifted from the red and ocher earth at his feet to the cerulean panoply overhead; they marked the buildings which flanked either side of the street, not so much for their frame structure or possible purpose as for the uniform tone they had been stained, quite as if some tradesman of the town had bought up a wholesale lot of vermilion paint and sold it at a tempting price.
His wandering glance returned to the little whip.
"Isn't there some mistake?" he asked in the weary way he had, as if he really didn't care whether answered or not.
"There's mistakes a-plenty hereabouts. What partic'lar one has taken your eye?"
"Are you sure this is the Gap?"
"Sure? Don't I fetch up here with the U. S. M. three times per week - leastways, don't I, barring accidents? This here's Dismal, right enough."
Parker stared at him for a moment, then stooped to his bag with a suppressed sort of groan.
"Dismal? Is all the world color-mad - or only I?"
"What say?"
The tall young man from "furrln" parts did not reply, but led the way down the vermilion street, past three rough-planked stores, brazen in their false fronts and florid signs, past several dwellings cowering from their comparative insignificance.
The driver, who, from the rear, had been vociferating their itinerary, called a halt before the most pretentious of these, a story-and-a-half frame, with a hospitable-looking porch.
"Now you-uns just climb onto the stoop and take a good, lively whack at the door," he advised. "Aunt Hootie Plott will take powerful good care of you, and I'll drop down your trunk when I bring in the stage."
With Inward misgivings Parker saw and heard.
"Aunt Hootie? Is this the hotel?"
"Best In the Gap." Tobe paused to spit with vigor and at great distance before he added: "Fact is, it's the only and full of home-comforts. If you fall foul of a toothache, say. Aunt Hootie's husband will dentist you. Made his own nerve-pullers, did the doc, and they certain-sure can yank."
"Let's hope that I don't fall foul," observed Parker, his right cheek crinkling in a smile.
The little whip's face was leathern, both of texture and hue. Not once had its surface given to emotion on the journey. Now, however, looking up into that winning Calvin Parker smile, a look of concern, almost of pity, spilled from his eyes to his mouth.
"Say, stranger, you-all be kind of keerful, will you? It's Tobe Riker telling you - you be keerful!"
His emphasis unexplained, he turned and flatfooted It off to enlist that helping hand needed to restore equilibrium and mobility to his official charge.
Parker's smile had quickly retired. He stood frowning after his squat adviser. Why should he be careful in Dismal Gap - he who knew the darkest shadows as well as the brightest lights of Broadway and Its tributary streets, the wickedest alleys of Paris, the roughest camps of the old West? He moistened his lips. Especially In view of his mission, why should he be careful?
A thought came of the girl Vernaluska. That must be it. Obviously the stage-driver was hard hit and out of favor. Preoccupation with his team had not prevented his seeing her drag another out of the ditch. Tobe was jealous, as proved by his spleen over her appointment with that high-sounding suitor - was King Currle the name? He merely had reIterated his warning that the homespun girl was not for "furrin" suit.
The situation was amusing, cheaply dramatic from a moving-picture point of view. It would have appealed to Sylvia Brainard's sense of humor.
Here was he who had come to seek solitude and surcease of strife, pitched from the top seat of a stage, dragged from a mud bath by a "cantankerous" mountain belle, advised of unknown dangers by a resentful country swain.
But Sylvia was there and he was here - sent here, he must remember, by Sylvia.
The door of the hotel distinguished as "only" was promptly opened, but not by one who possibly could have claimed the title of "aunt." A man, fat of figure and jovial-jowled, listened to his application.
"I am Dr. Plott, and powerful glad of the honor," was the landlord's response, accompanied by a bow as deep as his well-fed condition would permit. "She went out a spell ago, but come you right in."
No registration was required, and but scant ceremony to arrange for an Indefinite tenancy of the "best" room, which, according to the verbose toothjumper, would be "tidied up" the minute "she" returned from the errand of mercy which had taken her from her "home and domicile."
In justice to Calvin Parker, any description of his appearance has been postponed to the moment when he emerged from the vermilion-painted hotel. His clothes had come to be the best part of him, and the condition of those just doffed would have put him at a disadvantage.
Now, he must have been conspicuous in any society mountain resort for the tailoring of his Norfolk and the "latest" check of his knickerbockers. In lieu of the muddled cap of a few moments since, he wore Fifth Avenue's newest in velour headgear. His shoes and puttees, the kerchief In his breast-pocket, the lock of hair that would defy lifelong discipline to point downward toward his left eye - everything about him was Immaculate.
As for what there was left of himself, he would have stood fully six feet had he straightened for measurement; his frame was large, if lank, his freshshaven face pale as its brunette nature would allow, his hair and eyes dark.
Despite the promptness and care of his change, his movements were listless, as though he had no definite objective. On the top step of the porch he paused for further consideration of the April tints of the landscape.
In vain did he seek some shade of that color which he felt he had reason to expect in the Blue Ridge country. A shudder went through him as again he was struck by the significance in Dismal Gap's red motif. The single street was a wide streak of it; building foundations were splashed with it; upon the hillsides bare patches showed the soil fervid with it. Was it a sign? Was there danger in it for him?
Colors had been the nearest to religion in his Ill-spent life and red was the color he was fleeing. He had come to the mountains hoping to see blue. And red - red was everywhere !
He swallowed to moisten his throat; he licked both parched lips; then at once his tongue returned to comfort the dry roof of his mouth. With a sudden access of energy, as if moved by a call, he descended the steps and started up the street.