36. Dreams Made Real
From the other side of Roaring Fork there splashed to help him Old Tom and Sandyred, with Vernaluska in the lead. The team and springwagon, standing on the bank, told of their safe return and immediate departure in search of him.
The girl was almost inarticulate in her relief, even after all had reached the comparative safety of a hemlock-sheltered knoll across the main stream.
"When Miss Emmy told us-all where you had
gone, with this storm coming on Afterward,
when Sol and your horse tore past us on the
road Well, Parkerman, empty saddles ain't
cheering sights ! I was afraid that you - that our judge of the hills "
A deafening rumble silenced her.
Strong, triumphant, rang Old Tom's voice. "It's done come at last - at last!"
"Into the wagon, all of you," shouted Sandyred.
"We'd best make a dash for the clearing."
The old man refused to comply. The others must go, but without him.
"The end - I've waited all my life for this here end!" he exulted above crash and crumble.
Parker drew the mountain girl aside. Above hi? weariness, greater than the pain from his overtaxed shoulder, more impelling than the mood of the elements, was his desire to be alone with her. In the noise of mere cataclysmic eruptions, mere destruction of forests and streams - loud above any struggle of life or death, was the whisper in his heart that must reach her ears.
"Verne," he said quietly, "I love you."
He had thought her pale before. Now, with the wide brim of her flower hat lifted by the wind that was beginning to move the hemlocks, he saw all color leave her lips and cheeks. She tore her eyes away from his, but not before he had seen that they were startled, resentful.
The demand which had held him by the roadside that carnival morn caught up with to-day.
"Do you love me, Verne?" he asked, then waited a moment in vain.
Although she had seized the hat brim and was holding it over her upper face, it failed to hide the fact that her lips were stiffly set.
"Because if you do love me" - he leaned toward her, that she might be sure to hear, but did not touch her - "if you do, I want you to tell me so. You do not trust me - I want you to conquer your distrust. Can't you tell me - can't you trust me, no matter what you think? You have entrusted all your material secrets to me, and I have not proved unworthy of you and yours, have I? This would mean so much to me, Verne. If you could trust me with this greater secret - could tell me what I want to know, you would make me very happy for all my life."
She turned back to him, whether moved by his voice or the wilder winds. All the resentful lines had smoothed from her face. She had yielded, he could see, to the fearless generosity that had made her supreme among women to him. Although her lips parted, she did not speak. Yet her face told that she had forgotten the storm. She lifted her arms to his neck and her face to his, not to invite, but to give their first kiss. She just gave him the kiss of her heart from modest lips that never had kissed for dear love's sake before.
So did Cal Parker's fondest dream come true.
This had been his hope of what she might one day do. He never forgot the moment. Amid nature's uproar, he stood absolutely still, realizing it. By not so much as a movement toward her of his hand did he spoil the divine voluntariness of it - that moment in which his world was won.
Only when she shrank away from him with a low, hurt cry did he understand that she doubted his appreciation; only then did he clutch her to him as if never to let her go, did he murmur the relief that was almost too poignant to endure.
"Verne. . . . My Springtime. . . . All my life."
About then it was that the bullying storm gods, as if aggravated to tears that two mortals should rise superior to fear, began to pelt the tortured, quaking earth with torrents of rain.
A cry from Sandyred rang startlingly. "Don't go yet, dad - it ain't safe yet !"
But Old Tom Metcalf paid no heed. Down from the sheltered knoll, across the creek and up the opposite mountainside he started, as regardless of the lashing waters and bad going underfoot as of the deluge from above. In his wake, after an order to the negro to mind the team, hurried his son. Sandy, In turn, was followed by the lovers.
With the shrapnel of hail, the cannonading of the mountain ceased; the landslides gradually slowed, then stopped altogether. When the boulders on the way had followed their vanguard Into Roaring Fork, the down-rush was at an end. The comparative quiet, the relief from atmospheric pressure, the refreshment of the rain awoke a sense of exhilaration.
Urgently as the three young people called for a halt of the doughty explorer ahead, hard after as they pressed, they were unable to overtake him. The climb was made more difficult in that all trace of the branch - their former trackless path - was gone. Doubtless It was itself struggling here and yon, under the dead weight of the volcano's spume, to force a way to the mother stream below. Vanished was the rhododendron thicket, the forest of hemlocks, the chevaiix-de-frise of laurel spikes. Completely covered was the site of the still-house which Parker had demolished in the emergency.
But the patriarch did not pause to note these miracles. Up and up he clambered, past the location of his quondam Industry, to what once had been a shelving ledge, now upturned - as it were. Inside out. The cabin, whose window frames had been readjusted by a previous disturbance, still stood, although tilted at a rakish angle. Heaps of debris lay all about it, and just above an open wound was slashed across the mountain's face.
Was it that mysterious lard-pail treasure-trove which the old man sought, Parker wondered?
A cry escaped Vernaluska when she saw her parent hurl himself headlong into the cut. Running, held from stumbling by the two men, she reached the edge, to find him on his knees upon the easy slope within. He was clawing through the shattered rock, was chortling and exclaiming in a demented way.
"Hell's banjer! Richer than I'd ever hoped! No more stilling for Tom, sure enough ! Blue flames - mine - all mine !"
"Tommie - hi, Tom!" cried the girl, scrambling after him, her voice apprehensive lest the volcano had disturbed his reason, as well as the mountainscape.
But the smile with which he rose anH turned upon her had calmness In It and reassurance as well as the elation of a life-quest fulfilled.
"You-all don't need to worry over your pappy no more, my girl-child - you nor Sandyred," he said, taking off his battered hat and brushing back his leonine shock of tawny hair. "The Bald, I always calculated, would justify balmy Tom some day. Now she's done gone and done it. Look you-all at this - and this - and this!"
He handed a bit of rock to each. Parker examined his with amazement, rubbed It against his coat, took out the small brooch from his cravat with which to compare it.
"An amethyst of the finer grade," he exclaimed, "bluish-violet, rich in manganese, large - just waiting for the polisher to make it a precious gem!"
"Do you mean, Tom - can you mean that amethysts are the flames you've been searching for all these years? Why didn't you tell us-all?" The questions rushed from Vernaluska.
The rain began to slacken and, drenched though they were, the three listened entranced to Old Tom's account of the long search for the secret hid in the mountain's heart.
A dispute over the first gem found upon a bar of Roaring Fork it was that had led to a lasting enmity between the elder Metcalf and Dode Currie. Old Tom had picked it up, and Rex's father had claimed it because the bar of its lodgment had been on his side of the creek. Afterward the elder Currie had spent much time searching the Bald for the "mother lode," and had refused all offers Metcalf could make by way of purchase. He had died, however, without reward for his scratching.
"I kept on sifting the creek bars," continued Old Tom, ''and found one time and again. At last I came upon a beauty and toted It to a jeweler in Asheville. He got so plumb excited in his offer for it that he obliged me with an Idea of what a lode of them might be worth. From him I got a notion of going down into Sapphire County and studying formations there, where gems have been mined for years. But nature didn't give me no helping hand - that not being an amethyst country. After that come times when I nigh lost hope, just as I give up ever buying the Bald offen Rex."
"Queer it should be a mine of amethysts that I have helped the family to recover," Parker commented, "I who need them in my cup more than ever ancient did!"
"But that beauty you found, dad?" reminded Sandyred.
"I never sold it, but give it to Verney. My notion was to preserve her again ever hitching with a drinking man. Then she give it over, so she told me, to preserve one of them ag'in' himself."
The patriarch's eyes twinkled as he noticed Parker replacing the talisman. Exultation threatened his coherency as he bent again over the vein of crystalline quartz uncovered by the split.
"Gad a'mlghty, just to think I Scant wonder I couldn't never dig up any of you beauties when you lay abed in solid rock. Once I owned the Bald for good, I was minding to blast out this whole ledge, but I didn't dast leave any one know - not even my boy or gal. Sandy ain't got his tongue under halter, and Verney - well, I couldn't be certain sure, up to late days, that she wa'n't going to graft her secrets onto Rex. If he'd even got an idea - the low-down aspiring hound - he'd never a'sold over the mountain to me, nor Parker, nor none."
His look turned anxious.
"Say, out-Norther, you-all ben't going back on selling us Crumbly Bald now that you know, be you? You wouldn't never have susplcloned the facts but for me."
As Parker assured them that with him a bargain held, the sounds of hard riding came from below, of shouting, of a distinct laugh which all recognized. He broke off to name the disturbance.
"The revenue posse!"