Part 2

A species of uncomfortable defiance, a studied contempt for appearance, possessed him: he was as good any day as Buckley Simmons, the clothes on whose back had probably been stripped from the desperate need of some lean mountain inhabitant trading at the parental Simmons' counter. The carefully cherished sense of injury grew within him; he suspected innuendoes, allusions to his garb, in the half-heard conversation behind him; he spoke to his horses in hard, sharp tones, and, without reason, swept the whip across their ears.

III

Meanwhile, they drew steadily over the plain; the mountains before them gradually lost their aspect of mere silhouette; depths were discernible; the blue dissolved to green, to towering slopes dense with foliage. Directly before them a dark shadow steadily grew darker, until it was resolved into a cleft through the range. They drew nearer and nearer to the pierced barrier, the road mounted perceptibly, the trees thickened by the wayside. A covey of dun partridge fluttered out of the underbrush.

The sun was high in a burning grey vault, and flooded the plain with colorless, bright light. The stage paused before entering the opening in the rocky wall; the stranger in the rear seat turned for a comprehensive, last survey. Simmering in a calorific envelope the distant roofs and stacks of Stenton were visible, isolated in the white heat of the pitiless day. Above the city hung a smudge, a thumbprint of oily black smoke, carrying the suggestion of an intolerable concentration, a focal point of the fiery discomfort. In the foreground a buzzard wheeled, inevitable, depressing.

With a sharp flourish of his whip Gordon urged the stage into the cold humidity of the gorge. Stenton and the plain were lost as it passed between close, dripping rocks, rank verdure, masses of gigantic, paleolithic fern.

The dank, green smell hung in their nostrils after they had left the ravine for a fertile tableland. They trotted through a village strung along the road, a village of deeply-scrolled eaves under the thick foliage of maples, of an incredible number of churches--"Reformed," "Established," qualified Methodist, uncompromising Baptist. They were all built of wood, and in varying states of repair that bore mute witness to the persuasive eloquence of their several pastors.

Beyond, the way rose once more, sunny and dusty and monotonous. The priest was absorbed, muttering unintelligibly over a small, flexible volume. The conversation between Lettice Hollidew and Buckley fell into increasing periods of silence. The stranger lit a fresh cigar, the smoke from which hung out back in such clouds that the power of the stage might well have been mistaken for steam.

The road grew steeper still, and, fastening the reins about the whipstock, Gordon swung out over the wheel and walked. He was a spare man, sinewy and upright, and past the golden age of youth. He lounged over the road in a careless manner that concealed his agile strength, his tireless endurance. This indolent carriage and his seemingly slight build had, on more than one occasion, been disastrously misleading to importunate or beery strangers. He could, and did, fight whenever chance offered, with a cold passion, a destructive abandon, that had won him, throughout the turbulent confines of Greenstream, a flattering measure of peace.

In this manner his father, just such another, had fought before him, and his grandfather before that. Nothing further back was known in Greenstream, It was well known that the first George Gordon Makimmon--the Mac had been speedily debauched by the slurring, local speech--had made his way to Virginia from Scotland, upon the final collapse of a Lost Cause. The instinct of the highlander had led him deep into the rugged ranges, where he had lived to see the town and county of Greenstream crystallize about his log walls and stony patch.

There, finally breaking down the resistance of a heroic constitution, he had succeeded in drinking himself to death. His son had grown up imbued with local tradition and ideas, and was settling seriously to a repetition of the elder's fate, when the Civil War offered him a wide, recognized field for the family belligerent spirit. He was improving this chance to the utmost with Morley's Raiders when a slug ended his activities in the second year of the war.

It was characteristic of the Makimmons that they should each have left their family in precarious circumstances. They were not, they would contemptuously assert, farmers or merchants. When the timber was cut from the valley, the underbrush burned, and the superb cloth of grass started that had formed the foundation of a number of comfortable fortunes, the Makimmons, scornful of the effort, had remained outside the profit.

Such income as they enjoyed had been obtained from renting their acres to transient and indifferent farmers. In the crises of life and death, or under the desire for immediate and more liquor, they sold necessary slices. This continued until nothing remained for the present Gordon Makimmon but the original dwelling--now grotesquely misshapen from the addition of casual sheds and extensions--and a small number of acres on the outskirts of town.

There he lived with Clare, his sister. Their mother, the widow of that Makimmon whose disputatious temper had been dignified by the epitaph of "heroic sacrifice," had died of a complicity of patent medicines the winter before. An older brother had totally disappeared from the cognizance of Greenstream during Gordon's boyhood; and a married sister, completing the tale, lived at the opposite end of the county, held close by poverty and her own large brood.

Summer and winter Gordon Makimmon drove the stage between Greenstream and Stenton. At dawn he left Greenstream, arriving in Stenton at the end of day; the following morning he re-departed for Greenstream. This mechanical, monotonous routine satisfied his need without placing too great a strain on his energy; he enjoyed rolling over the summer roads or in the crisp clear sunlight of winter; he liked the casual converse of the chance passengers, the inevitable deference to his local knowledge, the birdlike chatter and flattery of the young women. He liked, so easily, to play oracle and wiseman; he liked the admiration called forth by a certain theatrical prowess with the reins and whip.

On the occasions when he was too drunk to drive--not over often--a substitute was quietly found until he recovered and little was said. Gordon Makimmon was invaluable in a public charge, a trust--he had never lost a penny of the funds he continually carried for deposit in the Stenton banks; no insult had been successfully offered to any daughter of Greenstream accompanying him without other care in the stage.

They rose steadily, crossing the roof of a ridge, and descended abruptly beyond. Green prospects opened before them--a broad valley was disclosed, with a broad, shallow stream dividing its meadows; scattered farmhouses, orderly, prosperous, commanded their shorn acres. A mailbag was detached and left at a crossroad in charge of two little girls, primly important, smothered in identical, starched pink sunbonnets. The Greenstream stage splashed through the shallow, shining ford; the ascent on the far side of the valley imperceptibly began.

The sun was almost at the zenith; the shadow of the stage fell short and sharp on the dry, loamy road; a brown film covered the horses and vehicle; it sifted through the apparel of the passengers and coated their lips. The rise to the roof of the succeeding range seemed interminable; the road looped fields blue with buckwheat, groves of towering, majestic chestnut, a rocky slope, where, by a crevice, a swollen and sluggish rattlesnake dropped from sight.

At last, in the valley beyond, the half-way house, dinner and a change of horses were reached. The forest swept down in an unbroken tide to the porch of the isolated roadside tavern; a swift stream filled the wooden structure with the ceaseless murmur of water. In the dusty, gold gloom of a spacious stable Gordon unhitched his team. Outside, in a wooden trough, he splashed his hands and face, then entered the dining-room.

A long table was occupied by an industrious company that broke the absorbed silence only by explosive requests for particularized dishes. Above the table hovered the wife of the proprietor, constantly waving a fly brush--streamers of colored paper fastened to a slender stick--above the heads of her husband and guests.

Gordon Makimmon ate largely and rapidly, ably seconded by the strange passenger and Buckley Simmons. The priest, Merlier, ate sparingly, in an absent, perfunctory manner. Lettice Hollidew, at the opposite end of the table, displayed the generous but dainty appetite of girlhood. The coat to her suit, with a piece of lace pinned about the collar, and a new, flat leather bag with a silver initial, hung from the back of her chair.

They again listlessly took their places in the stage. Buckley Simmons emulated the stranger in lighting a mahogany-colored cigar with an ornamental band which Buckley moved toward his lips before the swiftly approaching conflagration. Gordon drove with his mind pleasantly vacant, lulled by the monotonous miles of road flickering through his vision, the shifting forms of distant peaks, virid vistas, nearby trees and bushes, all saturated in the slumberous, yellow, summer heat.

Gradually the aspect of their surroundings changed, the forms of the mountains grew bolder, streams raced whitely over broken, rocky beds; the ranks of the forest closed up, only a rare trail broke the road. The orderly farmhouses, the tilled fields, disappeared; a rare cabin, roughly constructed of unbarked logs, dominated a parched patch, cut from the heart-breaking tangle of the wild, a thread of smoke creeping from a precarious chimney above the far, unbroken canopy of living green. Children with matted hair, beady-eyed like animals, in bag-like slips, filled the doorways; adults, gaunt-jawed and apathetic, straightened momentarily up from their toil with the stubborn earth.

At the sharpest ascent yet encountered Gordon again left the stage. Buckley Simmons recalled a short cut through the wood, and noisily entreated Lettice Hollidew to accompany him.

"It's awfully pretty," he urged, "and easy; no rocks to cut your shoes. I'll go ahead with a stick to look out for snakes."

She shuddered charmingly at the final item, and vowed she would not go a step. But he persisted, and in the end persuaded her. The stranger continued unmoved in his place; Merlier shifted not a pound's weight, but sat with a cold, indifferent face turned upon the straining horses.

Gordon walked ahead, whistling under his breath, and, with a single skilful twist, he rolled a cigarette from a muslin bag of tobacco labeled Green Goose.

The short cut into which Buckley and Lettice Hollidew disappeared refound the road, Gordon knew, over a mile above; and he was surprised, shortly, to see the girl's white waist moving rapidly into the open. She was alone, breathing in excited gasps, which she struggled to subdue. Her face that five minutes before had been so creamily, placidly composed was now hotly red; her eyes shone with angry, unshed tears.

Gordon's lips formed a silent exclamation ... Buckley evidently had made an error in judgment. Lettice stepped out into the road, and, plainly unwilling to encounter the questioning eyes in the stage, walked rigidly beside Gordon. Behind the obvious confusion, the hurt surprise of her countenance, an unexpected, dormant quality had been stirred into being. The crimson flood in her cheeks had stained more than her clear skin--it had colored her gracile and candid girlhood so that it would never again be pellucid; into it had been spilled some of the indelible dye of woman.