# Godfather to Satan's Kitchen

“Bear Creek” Buckmaster tried to live up to the bad reputation the Tennessee mountain folk gave him. But there are stumbling blocks even on the downward path. —from the Contents page
by Hapsburg Liebe
Author of "The Lavender Letter," "Howling Jim's Pal," etc.
IT WAS rather thickly populated for a mountain community, this broad valley that lies between the Big Bald and the bigger Ironhead, and it had been known for decades as “Hell’s Kitchen” because of the small but bitter wars that had been waged within its rims. The teachers of the newly established Presbyterian mission school sought to call it Maplewood Valley, but the masculine half of the hill-folk laughed at them and hinted at softening of the brain. Then the teachers offered to compromise by calling it “Satan’s Kitchen,” and the people met them half-way. So Satan’s Kitchen it became, and Satan’s Kitchen it is yet.
The Buckmasters didn’t live in the Satan’s Kitchen valley. If they had, the picturesque original name of the place wouldn’t have suited worth a cent; it would have been altogether too mild. Few in mountainous Eastern Tennessee but have heard the name Buckmaster without thinking at the same time of rifles and pistols, highway robberies, killings and hangmen’s ropes. A thousand mothers, no doubt, have made bogy men of those Buckmasters and there by frightened their unruly children into more or less abject submission. The Bear Creek Buckmasters bucked the United States Government, and they had to lose. They went down with their boots on, true to their false principles; all the same, they lost.
Save one, that is, and this one was Lon. Lon’s mother had given him some of the gentler traits. She was a lowland woman who married a dashing Buckmaster, to regret it soon afterward. The angel in Lon and the devil in Lon were forever disputing the possession of him; sometimes the devil lost but more frequently the devil won. Had it not been for Little Billy Bly and ’Liz’beth Elderidge——
They called him “Bear Creek” in the Army of the Philippines, just as they had done at home. The sins of a man’s fathers are apt to find him out, you know, even on the other side of the world. He went to the Army to be rid of his environment; he wanted to be better than he had any chance to be in the Bear Creek country. But, as I have just indicated, his family history trailed along on his heels, and the angel in him went down in utter defeat for three years. His comrades were exceedingly friendly toward him because they were afraid of him, and this made him but more bitter. All through his term of enlistment he was a lone man, a man apart, with the devil in him whooping challenges to high heaven from the very upper ramparts of his soul. He reached home to find people wondering—and not wholly in secret—why there was a Bear Creek Buckmaster still unhung, and he became a greater outcast than ever.
Then he changed his name and went to work with a logging outfit on Little Pigeon River. A few months and they discovered his identity; he was suspected of having held up and robbed a pay-roll messenger, and he was discharged forthwith. He went to other camps with exactly the same result—he was a Bear Creek Buckmaster, and he could not escape for long the sins of his fathers. That he was the best logger and the hardest and cleanest fighter in any of those camps availed him nothing. He had to go when they found him out. Always, always, the moths ate the ermine.
THE frosts of Autumn paint the mountains with their widest brushes in October; the great hills then suggest the coming to life of some overzealous Brobdingnagian landscape artist’s canvas, so vivid are they in their riots of colors. It was in October, that melancholy but beautiful month, that Lon Buckmaster went to the logging-camp on Tumbling Fork to ask for a job. He had tried all the other outfits. This was his last chance and he was desperate about it. If they wouldn’t have him here—well, he’d laid his plans ahead of that.
Buckmaster arrived at the Tumbling Fork headquarters on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The rollicking timberjacks had just left off their horseplay in the clearing to gather in the company’s commissary, where the superintendent himself was dispensing, for a consideration of course, glasses of clear new corn whisky that had never been near to the disgrace of a revenue stamp—the law’s long arm had not yet felt its way very strongly into the wilderness about Tumbling Fork, which was on the other side of Ironhead Mountain from Satan’s Kitchen.
A silence fell over the roysterers as the outcast stepped into the commissary doorway. Every eye was hard upon that tall and lean, hickory-muscled young man in the steel-calked boots, clay-colored corduroys, blue shirt and broad felt hat of the logging country.
Then somebody whispered uneasily—“It’s Bear Creek Buckmaster!”
Bear Creek Buckmaster broke the silence which followed that whisper. He hadn’t used his tongue much while in the Army and he still spoke largely in his native dialect. But he never drawled anything now.
“Listen here, super,” he said. “Listen to me. I want to talk to ye. As ye already know, mebbe, I’m Lon Buckmaster. But I ain’t never done nobody no harm like they say I have. I want a job here. I’ll do ye lots o’ work. I’ll do ye more work ’an any body else in this outfit. I only want a chanst to show ye. Super, will ye gi’ me a chanst?”
It was a long speech for him to make. The superintendent of the Tumbling Fork logging operations looked toward a sawed-off shotgun that lay on a shelf behind the counter and swallowed a glass of whisky.
“I couldn’t do it, Lon,” he answered. “I’d lose my own job ef I did. You know how it is. But don’t blame me! I’m sorry fo’ ye, Lon, honest. It’s a shame, shore. But I cain’t help it any.”
A leaden, still minute went by. The tickings of the little nickel-plated commissary clock sounded to Buckmaster like the hammering of a boilermaker. Buckmaster went ashen under his sunburn. The devil in him twisted his lips in a curious, careless smile. His last chance was gone.
“The only thing left,” he said measuredly, deliberately, “is fo’ me to live up to the repitation all o’ you good peple has saddled on me, whether I wanted it or not. All o’ you good, whisky-guzzlin’, lyin’, swearin’, gamblin’, back-stabbin’ folks says I’m a robber and a killer and a thief and a desperaydo. I ain’t a goin’ to disapp’int ye no longer. Look out, super—duck, there—I was borned into this world with a gun in both hands and a Cain-mark on my forrad—duck there, super!”
There was a bang and a bang and a bang-bang! The tinkle of broken glass, the acrid scent of powder smoke. Before the echo of the last shot had died away Bear Creek Buckmaster stood alone in the commissary. Then he laughed to himself, reloaded the four empty chambers of his new Colt, took up a jug of the superintendent’s stampless new whisky, dashed it through a show-case and went out. As he walked by the office he shot a lamp off the desk. As he walked by the boarding-house he sent two bullets crashing through four corner windows of that big, rough building. He didn’t see the hair of a man’s head as he passed.
A mile down Tumbling Fork Lon Buckmaster dropped to a stone and began to draw bitter honey, as it were, from one of the most poisonous weeds in the garden of life—self-pity. It was the first time in his twenty-four years that he had done it. All his wrongs stalked in review before his mind’s eye, among them even wrongs of his childhood.
They wouldn’t let him be upright, a man as other men and free to pursue human happiness according to the dictates of his heart and his conscience. He was forced into outlawry, and he was going to make good! He hoped very much that he could travel his red road without having to kill anybody. But if he had to kill, kill he would. He bent his head to his hands, gazed absently toward the toes of his steel-calked logging-boots and thought once more of the only real friend he had had in all the world—the little lowland woman.
It made him sob in spite of himself and he cursed roundly that which to him seemed unmanly weakness.
A shrill, youthful voice interrupted his brooding.
“Mister, what’s the matter?”
It came with the suddenness of a thunder-burst, but it scarcely startled the outcast. He turned his head slowly and saw a ten-year-old boy standing there beside him. The boy had on clothing that had been patched so much that it resembled an old-fashioned crazy-quilt. Half his thatch of flaxen hair rose grass-like out of a big hole in the crown of his battered straw hat. Both of his big toes were bound up in dirty rags. He was sunburnt brown and as freckled as a turkey’s egg.
“What’s it to you, ye rat?” snapped the devil in Lon Buckmaster.
“It ain’t nothin’ to me,” the rat answered soberly. “Only I was sort o’ sorry fo’ ye. I’ve had a heap o’ trouble myself, mister.”
Buckmaster grinned sourly.
“Why don’t ye be happy whilst ye can, son? Ye don’t know the fust beginnin’ o’ trouble.”
“I don’t!” The boy stiffened. He had some spirit, that boy. “Well, how’s this. My mammy, she died two year ago. It might’ nigh killed me and pap. Pap, he never got over it; nor me, neither. Last week pap died too. He’s free. But me, I got to go on and on wi’ the load. We didn’t have no kin and we didn’t have no money. Afore pap went out he told me this here: ‘Son,’ he says, ‘ef ye can git to the mission school in Satan’s Kitchen,’ he says, ‘fo’ God’s sake go. Them Presbyterians,’ he says, ‘they’ll take good keer o’ ye. They thinks more o’ their own kind o’ folks,’ says pap, ‘than they thinks o’ them coffee-colored heathens in other countries.’
“And so I’m on my way to Satan’s Kitchen. I been kicked and I’ve starved. It’s been a hundred mile and I been lost a hundred times; I’m lost now. And I’m still starved. The only thing I’ve had to eat fo’ two days was a moldy dodger o’ cawnbread what I stole from a pore old mangey hound dawg. I was awful sorry fo’ that hound dawg and I handed him half o’ the dodger back. Now, mister, what ha’ ye got to say? Ef that ain’t trouble, what is? Can ye tell me?”
Buckmaster reached for the lad’s hand and he got it. He gripped it painfully hard. But the lad didn’t even wince.
“Shore, son, ye’ve had trouble. What’s ye name?”
“Little Billy Bly.”
“Purty name, son. Well, listen here. I know the way to Satan’s Kitchen and I’ll take ye over. It’s about a half a day’s walk. But fust we must have somethin’ to eat. Light in and foller this here creek a mile up and ye’ll come to a logging’-camp; ax fo’ the sup’rintendent and tell him I said to gi’ ye all the cawned beef and crackers ye can carry and charge the same to my account—Bear Creek Lon Buckmaster’s account. Eh?”
If the name had any effect upon Little Billy Bly he showed no sign of it, a thing for which Buckmaster was grateful.
“Done gone,” said the boy over his shoulder.
He came back shortly and he had in the hooks of his two arms all the corned beef and crackers he could conveniently carry. The two made a meal and then set out across Ironhead Mountain. They spent the night in an empty tobacco-barn and finished the last leg of the journey about the middle of the following morning.
THE mission “settlement” was in the lower end of the valley on a crystal-clear creek. The few buildings were of logs and they had not been erected without an eye to the picturesque and pretty, especially in the matters of roofs and porches. There were trees standing all around and the paths were lying full of newly fallen leaves. Little Billy Bly’s brown feet ran joyously through those leaves; the feel of them was soothing to his stubbed and sore big toes.
It was the first time the white sheep of the Bear Creek Buckmasters had been so near to the mission settlement; hitherto he had viewed it only from a distance; yet he went straight to the schoolhouse. Backwardness was not one of his faults. He opened the door and walked in, Little Billy following eagerly. His heavy boots clattered noisily on the rough floor and he became at once the object of scores of expectant eyes, among them those of the quiet-mannered, middle-aged woman who had charge of that room.
When he and the barefoot boy stood before the desk, Buckmaster took off his hat.
“Good mornin’,” he smiled. “This here—” jerking his chin toward the lad at his side—“is a orphant named Little Billy Bly, who ain’t got no pap nor no mother. His pap wanted him to come here. He’s plum’ up to the mustard, Little Billy is; he’s all wool and a yard wide; I’ll gyarantee that. Can ye take him in and feed and take keer of him and edgicate him?”
“We’ll do everything we’re able to do for him,” Mrs. Hardin said pleasantly. She rose. “My husband is the principal; he teaches the older pupils in the next room. Perhaps I’d better take the boy to him——”
“Shore,” said Buckmaster. “Go along with her, Billy, son. She’s all right. They’re all all right. Do whatever they say fo’ ye to do, ef it’s to set the house afire, and be a reel good boy.”
“You stay, too,” begged Little Billy.
He had grown fond of Buckmaster.
“Oh, no, son!” Buckmaster laughed. He was delighted; here, at last, was a human being who liked him genuinely and trusted him. “Go on, little pardner. Now rickollect: ye must be a awful good boy.”
“Will ye come to see me sometimes?”
“Yeuh. As shore as green apples. Run along with her, son.”
Billy Bly followed Mrs. Hardin out of that room and into the next. While he waited Buckmaster turned his gaze interestedly down the rows of poorly clad boys and girls of the primary classes, all of whom eyed him solemnly and more or less admiringly now. They ran, mostly, from six years of age up to ten—and then Lon Buckmaster saw that among them there was a full-grown young woman. And she was pretty. She was prettier, it seemed to him, than anybody else he had ever seen, though she wore the cheapest of calico and the coarsest of shoes and stockings. He always remembered that; at first sight she seemed quite the comeliest girl he had ever seen—and he had been to the antipodes and back as a soldier.
Acting upon an impulse, he walked down the aisle and stopped beside her. He knew that she was there, in that room with all those small children, to satisfy her desire for education, and he admired her immensely for it. It was humiliating to her; he knew that, too.
“I meet folks sometimes that I never do fo’git,” he half whispered, his manner sober and honest. “I ain’t never a goin’ to fo’git you fo’ this what ye’re a doin’ now. My hat is shore off fo’ you. Ef ye don’t mind, what might be yore name, miss?”
The girl almost smiled her appreciation of him.
“Pap calls me Liz,” she told him in her soft and musical hill talk, “and mother calls me Lizzie; but my real name is ’Liz’beth. ’Liz’beth Elderidge. I—I’m here to l’arn how to read and write. Mother said I ought to know that, ef I don’t never know nothin’ else. Might—might I ax what yore name is?”
His eyes hardened a little. He hated to tell her, for it was plain to him that she did not look down upon him now. But finally he did tell her.
“My name’s Alonzo, but they calls me Lon. I’m a Bear Creek Buckmaster, ’Liz’beth. I reckon, mebbe, ye’ve heerd tell o’ them Bear Creek Buckmasters; hain’t ye?”
She nodded. She seemed disappointed somewhat, he noted. He bent over her with this in a low voice:
“I’ve done the best I could wi’ what I had, ’Liz’beth. It’s allus been a hard, up-hill road fo’ me. Mebbe ye cain’t unnerstand. But I’d give six fingers, one ear and a whole foot to know ye believe me.”
He straightened and looked around. Professor Hardin and Little Billy Bly stood at the desk. Hardin was preacher, teacher, and man all over. He shook hands with Buckmaster and proceeded forthwith to tell him a good deal about the work and the hopes and something of the needs of the Satan’s Kitchen mission.
Then the Bear Creek Buckmaster left the settlement. He went deep into the hazy October woods, sat himself down on a stone and spent a solid hour in hard thinking, after which he rose and headed for the Little Pigeon River logging country, miles and miles away.
A WEEK afterward two of the Little Pigeon River logging country’s pay-roll messengers were held up and robbed by a hickory-strong young man with a steely voice, a big blue bandanna over his face and a big blue Colt in his hand. And a week after that Professor Hardin of the Satan’s Kitchen mission awoke to find two thousand dollars in cash lying on his cheap pine dresser, which stood by an open window of his bedroom. A scrawled and unsigned note stated that the money was to be used for the school and the chapel and for Little Billy Bly in particular. The bare hint of a threat, too, was in that scrawled and unsigned note. The money was to be well spent and not a single whisper as to where it had come from was to be whispered.
The Bear-Creek Buckmaster was living up to the reputation that his wild fathers had made for him and the “good, whisky-guzzling, lying, swearing, gambling, back-stabbing people” had saddled tightly upon him—whether he wanted it or not. A reward was promptly posted for his capture and officers began to scour the mountains for him. His bandanna mask had been a bandanna wasted; they had known, of course, that it was he.
But the officers didn’t find Lon Buckmaster; not then, anyway. He knew the big hills and their hidden fastnesses, and the officers did not.
A month later, when the chase had been for the time given up, Lon Buckmaster drifted into the Satan’s Kitchen neighborhood again. He told himself that he was merely keeping his promise to visit Little Billy Bly; but deep down in the heart of him he knew that he wanted to see—just to see—the girl named ’Liz’beth Elderidge as much as he wanted to visit Little Billy Bly. Not for many hours at a stretch had ’Liz’beth Elderidge been entirely out of his mind. The memory of her was distinctly haunting.
On the afternoon of his arrival in the broad valley it was snowing, and because of that he lost his bearings and almost walked into the creek a quarter of a mile above the mission settlement. A well-beaten path ran beside the stream. While he stood there in the woods trail and tried to decide which way he should turn, a bundled-up little figure emerged from the white smother, halted close before him and laughed gleefully.
“Bear Creek!” cried the bundled-up little figure.
“Ef it ain’t Billy Bly!” exclaimed Lon Buckmaster. “This here is shore some luck. Shake hands wi’ me, son. I’m plum’ tickled to see ye’ a-lookin’ so good. But where are ye a-goin’ to in all o’ this snow?”
They shook hands in a thoroughly grownup fashion.
“Home,” grinned Little Billy. “I live wi’ Tom Elderidge’s fambly now, ’Liz’beth’s folks. Her pap, he took me in. They’re awful good to me, mostly; the ’lasses jar ain’t never shet to me there. ’Fessor Hardin, he says I’m awful smart in my books, Bear Creek. I can spell cat and dawg and boy a’ready. C-a-t, cat; d-o-g, dawg; b-o-y, boy. See?”
“Ye can, fo’ sartain!” laughed Buckmas ter. “I’m glad o’ that, son. It was nice in them Elderidges to take ye in, wasn’t it?”
“Yeuh,” gravely. “But ye mustn’t never say ‘sartain,’ Bear Creek. It ain’t proper, ’Fessor Hardin says. Ye must say ‘certain,’ Bear Creek. They didn’t have much room at the mission; but the ’fessor, he said I could ha’ stayed there ef I hadn’t ha’ faound no place else. The Elderidges is crowded too, but I like it. I ain’t never lonesome there. Ye see, Bear Creek, they’ve got lots o’ young uns and hound dawgs. Me and ’Liz’beth, we’ve got us two little beds in the cabin loft and we studies our books up there at night—when it ain’t too cold and when Tom can afford to let us burn a lamp. Say, ’Liz’beth is shore some gyurl! Says her pra’rs every night. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep; pray the Lord my soul to keep. ’F I sh’d die afore I wake, pray the Lord my soul to take. Bless pap and mother and the young uns and Little Billy and me and everybody else; and help Lon Buckmaster out o’ the hole he’s in, fo’ Christ’s sake—Aymen!’ Jest reels it off thataway, Bear Creek.”
“Does she say that in her pra’rs, little pardner?” soberly inquired the white sheep of the Bear Creek Buckmasters. “Are ye plum’ sartain?”
“Certain, not ‘sartain,’” Billy Bly corrected gently. “Yeuh, I’m plum’ sartain—I mean certain! Hope to die right here in my tracks ef she don’t. Say, they’ve got a new organ in the mission chapel and every dang soul—‘dang soul,’ that’s what Tom said—every dang soul in the valley goes to meetin’ on Sundays to hear it. Mis’ Hardin’ and the ’fessor, they sings to it. See these here new clo’es I’ve got on? The ’fessor, he bought ’em fo’ me. Hain’t they purty? Tom said they was as purty as a speckled pup wi’ a ring around its neck. Satan’s Kitchen is on a boom, Tom says. Tom’s a-gittin’ ’ligious. He tried to have fambly pra’rs last night—he’d went down to the mission and borried a Bible—but the young uns and the dang hound dawgs made so much fuss he couldn’t do it; so he jumps up and breshes the dirt off o’ his knees and says to his wife, he says:
“‘——, Mary,’ he says, ‘what’s the use? Blow out the lamp,’ he says, ‘and save a little ile!’
“And so me and ’Liz’beth had to go to our beds in the loft without any light, and ’Liz’beth snubbed some over it—I reckon it must ha’ been her pap’s bossy talk.”
“Where’s ’Liz’beth now, son?”
“She’s took to studyin’ a hour after school’s out, every day,” Little Billy answered. “She’ll be along purty soon. I’m a-hurryin’ home, ’cause Tom promised to make me and the young uns a sled to ride down-hill on in the snow. It ain’t so awful cold; is it, Bear Creek?”
“Not much cold,” Buckmaster answered thoughtfully. “Mebbe ye’d better run on and try out the sled, son. Eh?”
There was a reason for this suggestion. He wanted to see ’Liz’beth alone. He knew he had no right, it was true, but that did not keep him from wishing to see ’Liz’beth alone. The boy left him and he stood there in the snowy mountain path and waited. And while he waited his mind was busy—Little Billy had on new clothing and the mission chapel had a new organ; Satan’s Kitchen was on a boom! Professor Hardin, no doubt, had spent well the two thousand dollars that he, Buckmaster, had taken from the two pay-roll messengers on Little Pigeon. It was gratifying.
After the better part of an hour ’Liz’beth came. She wore an imitation Paisley shawl over a dress of blue calico and the shawl was white with sparkling snowflakes; her eyes were bright and her cheeks were pink from the snappy air and perfect health. She knew him the moment she saw him, the ghostly smother notwithstanding, and she walked straight up to him, unafraid, and put out her hand.
He took it very reverently.
“I’m glad to see ye oncet more, ’Liz’beth,” he told her.
“I’m glad to see you, too, Lon,” she said.
“Ye don’t think I’m as low-down mean as everybody says I am?”
“No—I don’t!” with a tiny dash of girlish vehemence.
Buckmaster smiled.
“One o’ the God-blessedest things they is about wimmen,” he declared, “is that they’re might’ nigh allus strong fo’ the under dawg. I thank ye fo’ that, ’Liz’beth, shore. Ef ye could only unnerstand! They ain’t nothin’ on earth as good as to have friends. Everything else is pore truck without friends. And I know jest what it is to be without ’em, ’Liz’beth.”
“I think I do unnerstand,” said Tom Elderidge’s daughter. “I’ve heerd a lot about ye, Lon, and I’ve sifted it. I—I’ve axed a lot about ye, lately. Even pap, he says ye ain’t half as bad as folks tells. Ye tried to be straight and they wouldn’t have it that way. They put them pay-roll rob'ries at yore door ’cause ye happened to be a Bear Creek Buckmaster, Lon, and fo’ no other reason.”
“The fust ones—anyhow,” muttered Buckmaster.
He was a little muddled.
“Yes,” nodded ’Liz’beth. She didn’t notice that he was a little muddled. “I’ve been a-thinkin’, Lon. Mebbe somebody has been a-trailin’ ye around, a-robbin’ pay messengers and a-usin’ you fo’ a scapegoat!”
“Mebbe,” Buckmaster replied absently. He was thinking of something else. “Listen, ’Liz’beth,” he blurted, “I heerd about—about you a-rememberin’ me thataway, in the loft at night. I won’t never fo’git that, and ef I’m ever pulled out o’ the hole I’m in I’m a-goin’ to ax ye to marry me the next minute!”
’Liz’beth blushed, but she didn’t turn her eyes from his strong, sober face.
“You ain’t never seed me but twicet, Lon Buckmaster. You don’t like me that much.”
“I don’t?” The outlaw smiled. “Never seed ye but twicet, eh? Why, bless yore heart, ’Liz’beth, oncet was enough!”
Then his countenance became serious, even troubled. He began to back off into the snowy laurels. In another minute he had disappeared and ’Liz’beth Elderidge stood alone there in the white-carpeted trail. His voice came from somewhere out in the forest:
“I didn’t have a right to tell ye that, ’Liz’beth. I hope ye’ll fo’give me, ef ye can.”
“They’s nothin’ to fo’give, Lon,” she called back. Once had been enough for her, too. “I believe in ye, Lon. Mebbe I oughtn’t to, but I do, jest the same. And ef ever ye ax me—that what ye said ye’d ax me—I’ll tell ye, ‘yes’ ef I die fo’ it!”
She wondered, as she went on, whether he had heard.
He had heard, and he hadn’t known what to say. But one thing he did know; the skies were rosy above the dark cloud. And he was grateful for that.
As he threaded his way through the white-draped woods an idea of ’Liz’beth’s recurred to him—“Mebbe somebody has been usin’ you fo’ a scapegoat.”
“Ef that’s really the way of it,” he said to himself, “and I ketch that man, it’ll go hard with him. But I reckon it ain’t like that.”
He had figured as the star actor in two hold-ups, of course; but he hadn’t even known of the others, those that had started him upon his career of outlawry, until he he had been accused of them.
A WEEK passed. The snow melted and more snow came; once again the great hills were wrapped in Winter’s cold, pale shroud. Bear Creek Buckmaster spent the most of those bleak and desolate days in a floorless and wind-swept tobacco-barn; he ate whatever he could find to eat and always he was trying to think of a possible way out of the hole he was in. Had it not been for ’Liz’beth he would have gone to some new country of the West or Northwest to begin life all over. He couldn’t leave his mountains; not now, after her telling him that she would marry him when he asked her. He decided that he would hold up no more pay-roll messengers.
The snow melted again, rain came and was followed by sleet and the mercury went down like a rocket all over eastern Tennessee. Buckmaster’s temporary quarters became decidedly uncomfortable and he started for a deserted old cabin on the eastern slope of the Big Bald, a cabin that had a fireplace; nobody would live there be cause it was so far from the beaten paths and because a man, a moonshiner, had been killed in the doorway.
By noon on a Saturday he had reached the crest of the Big Bald’s highest eastern spur, and he halted to look over the broad stretch of rugged country lying below him. Suddenly his keen eyes made out the figure of a man on horseback on a winding trail a mile down the slope. The horse was a light gray, by which Buckmaster concluded—correctly—that the rider was a cattle-buyer from the lowland, an elderly fellow named Rubens. Then his eyes caught something else and he uttered a little exclamation that was half oath.
Down there a small and wiry man in loggers’ clothing was sneaking afoot toward a shallow ravine which Rubens would doubtless ride into within five minutes, and his motive for thus crossing the cattle-buyer’s trail was plainly no honest one.
Buckmaster drew his revolver and stole rapidly down the mountainside toward the wiry little man. But he reached the ravine too late. The hold-up was over; a shot had been fired and Rubens was galloping wildly for the lowland when Buckmaster arrived. The robber stood half hidden in the scrub beside the bridle-path. He was staring at a rather fat wallet that he held in one hand. His revolver he had thrust into one of the pockets of his clay-colored corduroy coat; Buckmaster could see four inches of the barrel sticking out.
Buckmaster crept closer to the robber, straightened and called—
“Drap it!”
The highwayman let the wallet fall to the frozen leaves, raised both arms and turned a pale, thin face to him who was the white sheep of his people.
“I’ll be blamed fo’ this,” said the Buckmaster with a sidewise mental glance at his resolve to figure in no more hold-ups. “And so I’m a goin’ to be paid fo’ it. Keep ye paws as nigh to the blue sky as ye can and walk off down the trail, pardner. Hear me? Walk! I’m a-takin’ no chances now.”
The little man kept his hands up and walked. His footsteps were unsteady, like those of one who is more or less intoxicated. The other paid no especial attention to this at the time of it, but he had cause to remember it before another day had come.
Lon Buckmaster slipped to the mission settlement in Satan’s Kitchen that night. He soundlessly lifted the lower sash of Professor Hardin’s bedroom window and left eleven hundred dollars in bank-notes, together with a scrawled and unsigned message, on the cheap pine dresser; then he hied himself away through the bitter cold and to the old cabin on the eastern slope of the Big Bald.
It was past midnight when he reached the mildewed log-house, which stood in a deep gash of a cove filled with hemlock trees. He strode up to the weatherbeaten door—and found it fastened on the inside.
Buckmaster had made no noise. It had long been a habit of his to make no noise. He went to the one paneless window and peered cautiously through. The embers of a fire, he saw, glowed softly in the blackened stone fireplace. On the molded stone hearth lay the motionless figure of a man.
It was at least five miles to another shelter that was as good as that old cabin and Buckmaster was weary; besides, the wind that was sweeping the hills was like the edge of a razor. Then, too, Buckmaster was curious to find out who it was that had beaten him to that snug little haven of refuge. He slipped the blade of his knife carefully between the door and its casing, as carefully lifted the latch, eased the door open and tiptoed in. With his revolver at a ready he stooped over the still form on the hearth.
“The fire’s purty near out, pardner,” he said, “and ye’re apt to freeze. Ye ought to made it o’ bigger stuff.”
There was no reply. Neither was there the slightest movement on the part of the unknown. In the soft glow of the dying coals Buckmaster spied an armload of brushwood lying close by; he snatched up a handful and threw it into the fireplace. A flicker of flame rose, then another and an other, and there was light. Buckmaster stooped over the inert figure again. It was the little man who had held up Rubens, the cattle-buyer. Lon Buckmaster bit down on an exclamation of surprize and bent lower.
As the flames in the fireplace grew brighter he saw that the face of the stranger was almost waxen-white. The little fellow was in a bad way, surely. Buckmaster shook him and his eyes snapped open feverishly; in them there was the fear that makes rank cowards of men.
“Who’re you?” he half gasped.
He struggled to sit up and failed.
“Me? I’m Lon Buckmaster o’ Bear Creek. Who’re you, pardner, and what’s the matter wi’ ye?”
“Buckmaster!” The fear in the smaller man’s eyes became even greater. “Buckmaster!”
“Yeuh. Bear Creek Lon Buckmaster. What’s the matter wi’ ye?”
The unknown turned slightly and with evident pain. His blue shirt was already unbuttoned; he drew it open over his thin chest and revealed a purple-edged bullet-hole not far. from his heart.
“Through and through,” he mumbled. “Rubens—he got me.”
“Rubens! I thought it was you shot at Rubens.”
“No. It was him. He shot as he galloped off. I’m a-goin’—to cash in, Buckmaster. Ef I could only square it wi’ you, mebbe I—mebbe I could git some mercy fo’ the other things I’ve done.”
“I see,” Lon Buckmaster growled. Once more, certain of ’Liz’beth Elderidge’s words came back to him. After all, she had been right about it, and this was the man who had used him as a scapegoat. “But how,” he demanded, anger burning hotly within him, “do ye think ye’re a goin’ to square it wi’ me?”
“I’m a-dyin’, Buckmaster.”
“Shore. Anybody could see that.”
“And hate to go out thisaway.”
“Yeuh. Most o’ people would. Ye shore ain’t got no golden harp a-comin’ to you, pardner.”
“No. I reckon—my golden harp’ll be a pitchfork, mebbe. I——”
“Wi’ sharp barbs on it,” Buckmaster cut in mercilessly. “And ye’ll have horns on ye head and a tail which has a spike on the end. Also, yore tongue will be split like a snake’s.”
The little man moaned.
“It ain’t no time,” he insisted, “fo’ jokin’, Buckmaster.”
“No,” Buckmaster agreed quickly, “it ain’t.”
A moment of silence. Then:
“I’ve got might’ nigh all o’ the money I took in yore name, Buckmaster,” came the weakening voice of the unknown. “Ef ye’ll fo’give me—ye can have every cent of it.”
The Bear Creek Buckmaster thought again of the Satan’s Kitchen mission. It could use that money; it needed that money. Besides, when it came down to a hard pinch he could never refuse any dying man a favor. The angel in him had struggled to the ascendency, having once more vanquished the devil.
“I’ll do it,” he said, and he reached for the other’s clammy hand. “It’s all right. I fo’give ye, pardner. It’s all right.”
“Much obleeged to ye. Look under this here hearth—they’s a heap. Still, I hate to go. Could ye pray fo’ me a little, do ye reckon?”
“Pray! Me?” Buckmaster slowly shook his head. “I ain’t never prayed none. Leastwise, not sence I was a bitsy kid. Mebbe it wouldn’t do no good, nohow, me a-prayin’ fo’ you. Mebbe ye’d better pray fo’ ye’self, pardner. I sp’ect it’d go a lot higher.”
“Mebbe it would. Tell me what to say, Buckmaster. You know the—the sarcumstances.”
The white sheep had softened all through, He had forgotten entirely his wrongs at the hands of that unknown man; he was deeply sorry for him now. As for prayers, there was but one that he knew and that was the one that ’Liz’beth Elderidge had been saying, with additions, at bedtime.
“All right,” he agreed, and it was with difficulty that he kept his voice steady. “Say after me, pardner—
“Now I lay me down to sleep.”
“Now I lay me—d-down to sleep.”
“Pray the Lord——”
They went through with it very solemnly. The little fellow interrupted himself almost on the last syllable of his “Aymen.”
“Buckmaster!” he cried, his sick eyes shining.
“Yeuh?” gently.
“Why didn’t we think of it afore? Take me to witnesses and I’ll clear ye!”
The Bear Creeker’s strong face showed interest immediately. Why, indeed, hadn’t they thought of it before? He didn’t know why, but they hadn’t. But that wouldn’t clear him of everything. Still, it would help; it would show people that their conclusions had been wrong in the beginning.
He shook his head.
“It’s awful cold, pardner. You couldn’t never stand it. The clostest witnesses would be at the Satan’s Kitchen mission.”
“But I can stand it! Buckmaster, please help me to do—this one good thing afore I go. The’s blankets—two blankets—over there in a cawner. Wrap ’em around me. I’m not heavy; ye could tote me easy. Ef I die without clearin’ ye, Buckmaster—I won’t die right. I’ve lived a low-down life, but I want to die right!”
Buckmaster lifted a stone from the hearth, took out a canvas bag nearly full of money and thrust it inside his blue shirt. A few minutes later he strode into the cold and dark and wind-swept mountain wilderness with a gray bundle in his arms.
HE DOESN’T remember a great deal of the journey now, though the years have been few since that night. It was a sort of nightmare to him. Twice he fell—he has hardly forgotten that—and each time he saved the limp form in the gray bundle from further injury. And he hoped that life and consciousness would stay with the little man until they reached Professor Hardin’s home at the mission.
About the middle of that bright and sparkling Sunday morning Buckmaster half dragged himself and his burden to the top of a low spur that almost overhung the settlement and halted there, panting for breath. He was weak now; his wonderful strength was nearly spent; the average man never could have done what he had already done in the six hours just gone. His tired eyes roamed over the icicle-eaved houses of the mission, finally coming to rest on the chapel, the front of which was surmounted by a weather-worn wooden cross.
Under that cross by the doorstep were two men in officer-blue, and with them was Rubens, the lowland cattle-buyer. Buckmaster’s inborn fear of the law gripped him now harder than ever. If he went on down there he would be arrested.
“Pardner!” he muttered. “Pardner!”
A muffled voice answered from the gray bundle. The highwayman was still alive.
“How do ye feel, pardner?”
“’Bout the same. I—I’m awful cold, Buckmaster.”
“The’s two officers down at the mission, pardner. I see ’em.”
“Go on,” urged the muffled voice. “I’ll clear ye.”
Of a part of it! But the other part? Buckmaster shut his teeth tightly. The other part would send him to prison for no less than twenty years.
He would put the wounded man down there, call to the officers and ask them to come and get him, and make good his escape. The money he would take with him; the mission, needed it and the mission should have it. Just when he was about to act on this plan, Tom Elderidge and his wife, ’Liz’beth and Little Billy Bly and six Elderidge children, followed by four hounds, came filing singly up the path that led from the creek trail to the chapel. Buckmaster watched ’Liz’beth closely; she was in coarse shoes and stockings, blue calico and the imitation Paisley shawl. He could see her features plainly, and to him she seemed sad. Then the chapel’s new organ made itself heard, and a song in many willing voices burst like a benediction on die crisp mountain air:
“There were ninety and nine that safely lay In the shelter of the fold, But one went out on the hills——”
Bear Creek Lon Buckmaster, outlaw, found himself suddenly living over days of his childhood. The little lowland woman, his mother, she had sung that old, old song. The piteous, tragic irony of it was altogether lost on him, the white sheep—the little low land woman had sung that song. No more was he his own master. Dazedly, like a man in a trance, he gathered the gray bundle closer against his breast and staggered with it down to the chapel’s door, where he crumpled, unconscious, from exhaustion.
“Look to him,” he muttered as he sank to the steps. “Maybe he’ll live——”
WHEN Buckmaster came around he was snug and warm and comfortable. He opened his eyes to see a piece of furniture that was familiar to him; it was a cheap pine dresser which stood beside a half-open window. He was in Professor Hardin’s bed and the professor himself stood over him.
“Good mornin’ to ye, pe’fessor!” he said.
“Only it’s afternoon,” Hardin smiled. “Feel all right now?”
“Keen as a mink. How’s the bitsy robber?”
“Dead,” Hardin said gravely. “It’s a wonder he lived so long. But he saved you, Buckmaster. He swore before us all that he held up even those men that you held up! The Officers got all the money. You’re all right now.”
Buckmaster’s eyes narrowed. He was trying to think and it was a job.
“But that money I brung to you——”
“I kept it. I put it in with the ‘bitsy’ robber’s money without the officers’ being any the wiser. You see, I figured that you’d be caught, and I was holding that money as evidence in your favor; I was afraid to send it back to its owners, not knowing what you’d do if I did. If you were sent to prison I meant to circulate a petition among the Presbyterians of this State, to be sent ultimately to the governor, asking him to pardon you. It would have worked, too, Buckmaster, so long as you had no blood on your hands.”
Buckmaster was silent for two minutes. So stolen funds hadn’t bought the new organ, hadn’t clothed Little Billy Bly.
“The bitsy robber, he swore a lie on his deathbed to come clean wi’ me, to save me. That was fine of him, pe’fessor, shore. After all, the’s been somethin’ in my life wo’th livin’ to have. But the future——”
“It will be just what you make it, Buckmaster. You’ve cleared your part of your name—you and the ‘bitsy’ robber—and the people are going to give you a chance now. You may be certain of that.”
There was a half timid rap at the door and Hardin answered it. Little Billy Bly and ’Liz’beth Elderidge walked in, and ’Liz’beth carried a bowl of hot broth in her hands. Hardin bowed himself out.
“Howdy,” said Buckmaster, smiling.
“Howdy,” said ’Liz’beth, also smiling.
“Howdy,” said Little Billy, and he smiled.
“Mis’ Hardin,” ’Liz’beth began, “she thought ye ought to have somethin’ light to eat. We fixed it fo’ ye and I’ve brung it.”
She put the steaming bowl on a near-by table and went to the bedside. Little Billy Bly went to the bedside too, and they looked down upon the Bear Creek Buckmaster with an air of something like ownership. Suddenly ’Liz’beth blushed.
“Lon,” she murmured, “ye’re out o’ the hole at last.”
“I am. Will ye marry me, ’Liz’beth?”
“I will. And thank God fo’ ye all o’ the days He lets me live. Little Billy here, Lon; what about Little Billy? I love him to death, Lon!”
“He’s ourn,” Buckmaster declared. “Ourn, ’Liz’beth. Eh, Billy-boy?”
“Yeuh,” gladly agreed Little Billy Bly.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1957, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 66 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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