The Raid of the Guerilla | Page 4

On all sides the great Smoky Mountains rise about the cuplike hollow, and their dense gigantic growths of hickory and poplar, maple and gum, were aglow, red and golden, with the largesse of the generous October. The underbrush or the jungles of laurel that covered the steeps rendered outlet through the forests impracticable, and indeed the only road was invisible save for a vague line among the dense pines of a precipitous slope, where on approach it would materialize under one's feet as a wheel track on either side of a line of frosted weeds, which the infrequent passing of wagon-beds had bent and stunted, yet had not sufficed to break.
The blacksmith's shop, the centre of the primitive civilization, had soon an expectant group in its widely flaring doors, for the smith had had enough of the war, and had come back to wistfully, hopelessly haunt his anvil like some uneasy ghost visiting familiar scenes in which he no more bears a part;--a minié-ball had shattered his stanch hammer-arm, and his duties were now merely advisory to a clumsy apprentice. This was a half-witted fellow, a giant in strength, but not to be trusted with firearms. In these days of makeweights his utility had been discovered, and now with the smith's hammer in his hand he joined the group, his bulging eyes all a-stare and his loose lips hanging apart. The old justice of the peace, whose office was a sinecure, since the war had run the law out of the Cove, came with a punctilious step, though with a sense of futility and abated dignity, and at every successive note of the distant trumpet these wights experienced a tense bracing of the nerves to await helplessly the inevitable and, alas! the inexorable.
"They say that he is a tumble, tumble man," the blacksmith averred, ever and anon rubbing the stump of his amputated hammer-arm, in which, though bundled in its jeans' sleeve, he had the illusion of the sensation of its hand and fingers. He suddenly shaded his brow with his broad palm to eye that significant line which marked the road among the pines on the eastern slope, beyond the Indian corn that stood tall and rank of growth in the rich bottom-lands.
Ethelinda's heart sank. All unprescient of the day's impending event, she had come to the forge with the sley of her loom to be mended, and she now stood holding the long shaft in her mechanical clasp, while she listened spell-bound to the agitated talk of the group. The boughs of a great yellow hickory waved above her head; near by was the trough, and here a horse, brought to be shod, was utilizing the interval by a draught; he had ceased to draw in the clear, cold spring water, but still stood with his muzzle close to the surface, his lips dripping, gazing with un-imagined thoughts at the reflection of his big equine eyes, the blue sky inverted, the dappling yellow leaves, more golden even than the sunshine, and the glimmering flight of birds, with a stellular light upon their wings.
"A turrible man?--w-w-well," stuttered the idiot, who had of late assumed all the port of coherence; he snatched and held a part in the colloquy, so did the dignity of labor annul the realization of his infirmity, "then I'd be obleeged ter him ef--ef--ef he'd stay out'n Tanglefoot Cove."
"So would I." The miller laughed uneasily. But for the corrugations of time, one might not have known if it were flour or age that had so whitened his long beard, which hung quivering down over the breast of his jeans coat, of an indeterminate hue under its frosting from the hopper. "He hev tuk up a tumble spite at Tanglefoot Cove."
The blacksmith nodded. "They say that he 'lowed ez traitors orter be treated like traitors. But I be a-goin' ter tell him that the Confederacy hev got one arm off'n me more'n its entitled to, an' I'm willin' ter call it quits at that."
"'Tain't goin' ter do him no good ter raid the Cove," an ancient farmer averred; "an' it's agin' the rebel rule, ennyhows, ter devastate the kentry they live off'n--it's like sawin' off the bough ye air sittin' on." His eyes dwelt with a fearful affection on the laden fields; his old stoop-shouldered back had bent yet more under the toil that had brought his crop to this perfection, with the aid of the children whose labor was scarcely worth the strenuosity requisite to control their callow wiles.
"Shucks! He's a guerilla--he is!" retorted the blacksmith. "Accountable ter nobody! Hyar ter-day an' thar ter-morrer. Rides light. Two leetle Parrott guns is the most weight he carries."
The idiot's eyes began to widen with slow and baffled speculation. "Whut--w-whut ails him ter take arter Tangle-foot? W-w--" his great