5. Departure Delayed
'Repairs to the faulty axle of the Concord relic had been rushed by the village smith; so that, on the stroke of three, the stage driver pulled up with a flourish before the post-office and general store. The lean mail-bag tossed him by Asa Simms he stowed beneath the box and reached for the whip, in preparation for a dashing start on his return trip.
"Hold your bosses, Tobe !" The advice came from Rex Currie who stood, magnificently indolent, leaning against a post of the high porch. "I've got an idea you needn't be lonesome on the back-drive."
The little whip showed both surprise and impatience. After the super-effort of himself and the smithy, it seemed a shame to be delayed. But he wound the reins around the whip-stock, flopped his legs over the end of the seat, severed a generous quid from a black square of plug.
"You-uns don't be meaning the same dude I brung out?" he asked, his "chaw" well under way.
Currie nodded.
"The identical dude. Cotton Eye ought to be back any minute now from delivering him an invite to repair at once to a party at Anywheres-Else. Unless I miss a guess, we-all will be favored before long by the sight of him making going-away-from-here signals. Asa and the rest of us won't be disgusted none If you spread thick your remarks to him about what a plumb desperate population lives around the Gap."
"You-all can count on me, I reckon."
Riker's assurance was what had been expected of him. In his general utility vocation, he had tried to assume neutrality between the factions which had long been reaching for each other's throats; but at heart, both from inclination and practice, he was known by the wets to be one of them.
Provided with his orders and his audience of one, he might be relied upon, unhampered by conscientious scruples, to depict the fate of a prying foreigner as desperate Indeed. Since the drys, singing hymns of victory, had swept the State with their official ban against intoxicants In any form, the distillers and distributers of contrabrand had been hard put - that Tobe knew as well as they. Before the "bone," their traffic had been IlHcit only against the Federal law. Now they were criminals in the eyes also of the State, forced to *Vatch both ways to onct," as old Tom Metcalf put it when railing against the signs of the time.
Prohibitlonal progress, however, was not without Its advantages, even to the wets. "Outside liquor," in which the Federal government had lost Interest on payment of the revenue tax, was now a commonwealth "outlaw," expensive when it could be had at all. Inside, or "domestic dew," therefore, was in greater demand than before and, by natural law, its under-cover market price higher. Blockading promised increasingly lucrative returns, could the Industry but survive the double hazard.
That It should survive was exactly what the drys of Dismal Gap, backed by their State and National societies, were determined against. Local bitterness had festered Into a sore. Long since, members of the two sides had ceased to be on speaking terms, except to bandy threats. Any moment might break out a contagion of violence.
To the arguments of Rex Currle and SImms, Tobe bowed perforce. Hadn't certain sisters of the dry battalion unwisely divulged that a revenuer was expected soon? Hadn't the day's arrival gone straight to the house of Plott - the fact made none the less significant by Tobe's recommendation of that "only" hotel? Hadn't his first move on reappearing on Trade Street been to quiz a negro as to where he might buy liquor? Hadn't his answers to Asa SImms been downright unsubstantial? As for the laughing fit which Rex had Interrupted, how else could that be Interpreted than as exultation over anticipated victory?
The case seemed conclusive. Undoubtedly the "dude" was the oflicer expected, even though his cock-sure ways and antiquated subterfuge of a mission in the name of "art" were not exactly complimentary either to his Intelligence or theirs. He deserved the "Invite" to leave for "Anywheres-Else" which Rex Currle, his natural animosity fired by a certain Titian flare, had written so immediately and so well.
From within the store Cotton Eye Lee now shuffled.
"I've done earned that swiggle according to instructificatlons, boss," he announced. "I slips the communicant under the door, knocks good and loud, then ducks under the porch for a hide-out."
"Are you sure they heard you?" rasped Slmms.
"Sure, gen'l. By identification of both eyes, don't I see Mis' Plott herself take in the doo-billy? And don't I come back-way to this here oasis with my
tongue rusty-eating for that there Oh, Lord!
Oh, oh. Lord!"
Up the road and coming toward them, his mismated eyes had sighted the ponderous figure of Colonel "Dry" Dryden, acknowledged leader of the Prohibs and present employer of his next-to-worthless self. One bound gained him the cover of the storeroom, whose back door provided a short-cut to the Dryden place on the hill and the field in which he was supposed to be at work.
The unceremonious departure of their black emissary in nowise disturbed the three before the Simms emporium, but the near approach of their most powerful opponent did.
Rex Currie's habit of leadership it was that met the emergency.
"Old Dry's headed for Plott's, and he'll stop the slick going out," he declared. "He mustn't get that far. The only neutral here assembled is you, Tobe; see you turn him back!"
The wit of the small driver proved large.
"Howdy, colonel! Howdy!" called he. "I just rid in a passenger what was a-looking for you-all. Sent him up yon way, without an idee you'd be coming down this here one. Hope he ain't got lost. Mighty sorry. Colonel."
"I'm obliged to you, suh, just the same," returned Dryden, a pronouncedly Southern personage, from well-shod feet to grizzled goatee. "I was expecting a visitor, but thought he must be delayed. I'll take the trail home; likely I'll find him already there."
Without deigning a glance toward the two benighted wets on the porch, although proved the keener to their presence on that account, the leader of the drys started on the back road.
"Right neat, Tobe. I'm obliged to you, suh," mimicked Currie, adding, after a glance down the street: "And In the last tick of time you were. Look!"
Parker was hurrying toward them, as If afraid he might be too late. Sighting the stage, his pace slowed.
"I'm a-walting for you-uns; climb right up !" The driver's greeting was embellished by a leathery leer. "I sure admire to have company, and swear not to chuck you Into a nary ditch this time."
Well it was that Currie and Simms wore their "poker faces" ; they needed the protection on hearing the "slick's" reply.
"Decent of you to wait, Riker, but I'm not leaving to-day."
"What - you going to leave me to the company of just boss flies?" complained the wily whip.
"Sorry to deprive you - or any one who wants It - of my company; but I've sighted some unfinished business."
Although Parker did not glance at the originator of his phrase, the hillbilly eased himself ofi the stoop and picked up a short length of rope which lay upon the ground, as though moved to some sort of action by embarrassment.
"Ain't you forgetting, Asa," he reminded the emporium's owner, "that blanket you promised to send down to the Corners by Tobe?"
SImms, still on the high stoop, looked his perplexity for a moment; the next his cadaverous face lighted.
"Holy hemlock, I'd forgotten entire !" he; exclaimed with unwonted animation. "Wait a halfsecond longer, Tobe."
He sHthered into the store.
Parker, meantime, had recognized the hillbilly's presence with a friendly nod. "Since Riker is good enough to say my not going Is a loss, may I hope that you consider my staying a gain? We have so much in common, you and I, we ought to get along splendidly."
"In common?"
Currle flashed him a revealing look. His instant thought of the mountain girl - his suspicion that she was being referred to - showed in the color that spread forward from his stiff-set neck.
"Why, yes," Parker explained. "Although so lately Introduced, we have seen that we both appreciate an amusing situation, haven't we? And we both have found unfinished business in Dismal Gap."
"It ain't any dusting of salt to me, stranger, what that business of yours Is or Isn't, so I can't see that It's a comman interest." Currle stepped negligently forward as he spoke, the while winding the rope in a loose coil in the abstracted way of one given to neatness. "Howsomever, leaving me out of it, you had best not count on being pestered to a frazzle with the glad mit hereabouts."
"And you're worried about me?" Parker asked, backing toward the stoop, the fingers of one hand entering his side knicker-pocket in search of the clasp-knife usually carried there. "I must say that's good of you, old fellow, but it is quite unnecessary. I've had some experience being unwelcome, as it happens, even before "
Parker never finished his remark.
At the moment something soft, thick, outspread, dropped over his head from the stoop. With a literally smothered curse for his stupidity, he realized that, although on guard against the rope, he had overlooked as a menace that blanket to be sent to the Corners. Asa Simms must have cat-footed it back from his draft upon the emporium shelves. Parker had become a six-foot center pole for an improvised tent.
Before he could shake off the cloying folds, both Simms and Currie were on him. In a flash the rope wrapped his arms so tight against his sides that the pocket knife in his fingers was useless. Although he struggled like a trapped animal, the twain were too much for his body, if not for his mind. Thought, Instinct, inspiration caused him to expand his chest and abdomen against the tightening of his bonds.
It was characteristic of Cal Parker that he did not waste himself crying for help which was unlikely to be forthcoming; never had he taken the vicissitudes of life that way. And always he held himself receptive of new sensations. He did not, therefore, miscount when four hands seized him, nor miss the fact that the strength of two men was united in one cause to hurl him violently Into the body of the ancient vehicle.
He heard the door slam and a shout from Currie:
"An extra bundle needn't delay you none, Tobe. Dump it at the railroad. On your way!"
The whip cracked, the grays sprang into a gallop, the coach began to race through the Gap's one street. To an outside observer, it would have looked indeed as though Mr. C. A. Parker, so lately from New York, were somewhat hurriedly quitting the Blue Ridge.
But Parker's chest expansion was considerable. On exhaling his precautionary intake of breath, he was able to work his hand upward and locate the catch of the door.
Except for the hoof clatter and rattle of wheels, Tobe Riker, on the box, must have heard the thud of something heavy on the road. As it was, however, not until he reached his destination did he realize that the "bundle" entrusted to his care had delivered itself. His chagrin was increased next day when he learned the immediateness with which Initiative had animated It.
Directly before the Hotel Plott a blanket-covered ball lay in the road. On recovery from the backto-dust impact. It began to unwrap, straightened into he-man length, developed feet and the apparent desire to make them Its base.
By the time Aunt Hootle, having lifted her eyes from her packing at the noise, rushed out on Investigation bent, a knife-blade from within had slashed upward through the blanket. When there appeared a perturbed-looking fedora, still atop the surprisingly unperturbed face of "the poor, brave boy" whom she had been mourning as lost to the cause
"Glory be !" she exclaimed fervently.