Part 41

There are men to whom no dog can be insensible; men with a secret quality of magnetism or understanding which makes any dog, at their approach, look up. When Simmons passed the great hound did not stir; but when Tom Abercrombie came opposite him, he lifted his muzzle, grizzled with age, and his melancholy, amber-coloured eyes met the man's.

The old man stopped. It was as if he had found, in all this strangeness, a friend. He spoke before he thought--half under his breath.

"Old Whiskers," he said gently. "Old Gray Whiskers."

Simmons turned in a flash, his face suddenly more crimson than ever, his eyes blazing.

"What did you say to that dog?" he yelled.

The old man looked at him steadily but did not reply.

"Now here!" The guard's voice rang out in the grove. "I know you, Abercrombie, and I know your game, you bloody, long-whiskered, knife-totin' throat-cutter. You are tryin' to make friends with that dog!"

He went to a near-by bush, got out his knife, and cut a heavy switch.

"Take this," he commanded. "Oh, you can catch hold of it! Catch it with both hands. Never mind the bracelets. Take it. Hit that dog. Hit him!"

The dreamlike state in which the old man had been wandering dissolved. His eyes narrowed to mere slits behind the beetling brows. The cold steel of the mountaineer, the mountaineer who weighs his words, was in the slow-drawled reply:

"Wal, now, I reckon I won't."

A moment they faced one another, Simmons' eyes murderous. Some fear of an investigation if he struck the old man, something daunting, too, that he saw in the mountaineer's eyes, restrained him.

"Abercrombie," he said, and moistened his lips with his tongue, "I brought out in that car three boxes of shotgun shells--buckshot--extra heavy loaded. Get me?"

Such was the initiation of old Tom Abercrombie as a convict. That afternoon he was entered on the books as a "dangerous" prisoner; that night he lay on an iron cot, staring up at the roof of a solitary tent, which, according to law, had to be provided for him. On his ankles were locked two steel anklets connected by a chain eighteen inches long. This chain, in turn, was locked to the cot.

Shame lay with him as he stared upward--shame and a terrible loneliness and dread of the future. At sunset he had watched a long line of shackled Negroes, followed by guards with shotguns, file into camp. To-morrow he himself would be one of that gang; and not only to-morrow, but for two years. Assault and Battery with Intent to Kill--this was the verdict of the court in Greenville in which he had been tried. And yet he hadn't intended to kill anybody, he had only meant to remonstrate.

Three young fellows, sitting at a table in a cheap ice-cream parlour--it had seemed a crystal palace to the old man and to Molly his wife, fresh from the deepest recesses of the mountains--had made fun of Molly and her sunbonnet.

When they did that, the mirrors that lined the walls, the enamelled-top tables, the sunlit street showing through wide-open doors, had all turned red before his eyes. He had risen from his chair and gone toward this seat of the scornful. "You fellers," he had warned in a low voice, "you fellers don't want to say anything like that again."

They had looked at him in sullen astonishment; then they had sprung to their feet. According to the testimony they gave in court, he had confronted one of them, an open knife hidden up his sleeve. This was not true, and he denied it stoutly on the stand. As a matter of fact, he had not thought of his knife until the three young bruisers, habitués of the place and of the questionable pool-room in the rear, rushed him all together, and a dirty-aproned waiter, coming up from behind, hit him a crack that jarred his skull. Then he had sprung back and drawn his knife.

The wounds he inflicted were not serious, he had simply held his assailants off; but the policeman who ran in, followed by a crowd, found the knife in his hand. The testimony was against him; besides, he did not make a good witness. No man does who holds something back. And what old Tom held back was the remark the young men had made.

On that point his lips were stubbornly sealed. He did not even tell his lawyer. As for Molly, she had not heard. Poor girl, she was a bit deaf, her sunbonnet came down close over her ears, and she had been eating her ice cream, oblivious. He did not want her to know, ever. He did not want the court to hear. What's more, he did not mean that it should hear.

The courts of justice, like the mills of the gods, ought to grind slowly and grind exceeding small--sifting carefully the evidence, examining deeply into the character and motives of accuser and accused. But the gods have eternity at their disposal, and their mills are run by unerring, self-administering laws, while the courts are sometimes harassed with a heavy docket that must be got through with and laws are made and administered by erring mortals. When they are overcrowded, there is inevitably, now and then, a victim.

Hence old Tom Abercrombie, chained to a cot, staring up at the roof of a tent, oppressed with a terrible loneliness; thinking of a long double cabin in a mountain-girded valley, far over the Tennessee line, where he and Molly had lived forty years; of the cornfields in a creek bottom, of children and of grandchildren, of widely scattered neighbours and friends.

Next day he was put to driving four mules hitched to a road scraper. Chains clanking, he had to climb as best he could into the iron seat. The humiliation of striped clothes he was spared; that barbarity had been done away with by law. He wore his black trousers, a blue shirt, and his broad-brimmed hat. Once on the seat no one passing along the road could see his shackles, but as if they were heated red-hot these symbols of shame burned into his flesh.

In the road ahead and in the road behind Negro pickers and shovellers toiled away, watched over by guards with shotguns. He saw the eyes of these guards turn constantly toward him. "You want to watch that old devil," Simmons had warned them. "He's dangerous."

The days that followed were all alike: days of toil that began before sunrise, continued through blazing middays, and ended after sundown. Always, before and behind, the gang picked and shovelled, always the eyes of the guards were turning toward him. Always against the horizon the mountains, flecked at midday with clouds and shadows, beckoned him like a mirage.

Sometimes from the top of a hill, under his broad hat, he studied the lay of the land. In his mind he mapped out the water courses and the stretches of woodland that led with least open country to the mountains. Sometimes at night he dreamed of a double cabin in a cool mountain-girded valley.

"You want to watch him," warned Simmons again and again.

Once Molly came to see him. Simmons himself, at the guard tent, questioned her roughly, then shrugged his shoulders and let her pass. Throughout the interview, though, he sat over there by the guard tent, his eyes always on the two of them; and at his side, but never looking up at him, lay Sheriff, the bloodhound, panting.