Chapter XI: In the Corn

Summer had come.

The soft days of spring had gone by, the days when the feeling of growth impresses every sense. The haze-filled April mornings, warming into the forcing ardor of noon, had stirred into life the activity latent in root and twig. May's glowing sun, shining through the scantily covered branches, made dancing motes of heat wave above the surface of red clay. The aspens fluttered into exquisite greenness. The sourwood put forth the satin of its tender leaves. All over the mountain-sides and through the forest thickets the oak-tips blushed faint pink, a delicate velvet against the stout bristles of the yellow pines.

Birds flew over, bound for the North, each with his instinctive goal; some almost at their journey's end, others with many a long ethereal mile before them. Some of them sojourned for a few days, following the ploughman as he overturned the mellow earth. Others let this high land be the end of their wanderings, and settled here to the duty of love-making and the pleasures of domestic life.

The azalea flamed in yellow and orange and scarlet glory, a note of savage color on spring's soft palette. The delicate clusters of the laurel, and, later, of the rhododendron, crowned the stems of the parent bush, as sometimes a fair girl springs from a rough and ugly father.

The germ grew strong within its warm seed-prison, and sent inquiring leaflets into the upper world; and the adventurers never returned, but sent back demands for food and drink, as colonists to a new land rely upon the mother-country for sustenance and support.

On the steep mountain-sides, and in the coves that dimple the lower slopes; on the flat lands of the plateau, and in the meadows along the French Broad, the slender shafts of the corn-leaves were pushing upward with what success their position fostered. By mid-June the crop in the bottom-land was knee-high, while that nourished by the field over which Sydney had stumbled on the top of Buck Mountain was only half as tall.

Bud Yarebrough and Pink Pressley were hoeing among stalks half-way between these heights on the upland slopes of the Baron's farm, whose cultivable land they had hired for the season. Stripped to their shirts, whose open throats showed each a triangle of sunburned skin, they worked rapidly down the adjoining furrows, one keeping a hoe's length behind the other, that their tools might not interfere. Conversation was more pithy than voluble.

"Damn hot," ejaculated Pink, stopping to hitch up his trousers, and then to spit on his hands before resuming his hoe.

"Mos' dinner time," returned Bud, looking up at the sun, and then over his shoulder towards the spring-betraying group of trees to which Melissa was accustomed to bring his dinner when he was working here. "They's some feller tyin' his horse in front of the cabin. Who is hit?"

Pink leaned on his hoe and squinted across the blazing field to the grove that sheltered von Rittenheim's house.

"Bob Morgan, Ah reckon. Looks like his horse."

"Come to get somethin' fo' Mr. Baron. O-oh, Bob!"

Bob looked around his horse's nose, and held up his hand in token of understanding. He unlocked the cabin and disappeared within, coming out again with a bundle, which he tied on to the saddle, and then led his animal towards the trees at the spring. The two laborers tossed down their hoes and moved to the same haven.

"What time is hit, Bob?"

Morgan looked at his watch.

"Five past twelve, Pink. Working hard?"

"Yep. Tol'able big crop." He sat down at the foot of a tree and opened his dinner-pail.

"Have some?" he asked, pointing the opening at Bob, who was settling into repose with his hat over his face.

"No, I thank you. I must be going home in a few minutes. How are you getting on? Bought any more stock lately?"

Bob lay on his back with one long leg balanced on the other knee like a see-saw on a saw-horse. The rowel of his spur rattled as he jerked his foot up and down at the ankle.

"No." Pink had his mouth full.

"How many head have you got now?"

"Oh, jus' a mule 'n a couple o' cows."

"Sold your horse?"

"'M. Here Bud, take some o' this. Ah jus' natchelly hate to have you-all die o' starvation."

"No, she's comin'. Ah see her now." And Bud ran to meet his wife and to relieve her of the baby.

"Hungry, ain' he?" sneered Pink, as he watched his partner's alacrity, while Bob struggled to his feet to greet Melissa.

"Say, you-all wasn' wantin' to buy a cow, was ye, Bob?" asked Pink.

"Got one to sell?"

"Yes, the muley cow."

"No, I don't guess I want her."

"You seemed so damn curious about my stock, Ah 'lowed ye were purchasin'."

"Oh, no. I just thought you must have an extra lot of cattle to be providing for, or you wouldn't have needed to hire this land and to make an extra big crop of corn."

A dull red showed on Pink's forehead above the tan-mark, and crowded into his pale-blue eyes, destitute of lashes. The two men looked steadily at each other. Then, as Melissa drew near, Pink broke into an ugly laugh.

"Give a dog a bad name, eh? You-all needn' be quite so bigoty now yo' fine friends have been at the same business."

He waved his hand towards the cabin, and Bob, in his turn, flushed as he shook hands with Melissa.

The girl gave scant greeting to Pressley. Her husband's new friendship with him was distasteful to her; it filled her with foreboding when she remembered his threats.

Yet there had been nothing definite of which she could complain to Bud since the day when Miss Carroll had caught Pink trying to kiss her. He had never been to the cabin since his rebuff, but she knew that he and Bud were constantly together, and this partnership in the hiring of the Baron's land was a culmination of their friendly relations.

"Ah don' see how ye c'n stan' him, nohow, Bud," she often said, and Bud as often replied,--

"Ah never did see anythin' like the prejudice o' women! They certainly ain' no doubt about yo' sex, M'lissy."

Pink bore his part in the present conversation with no trace of embarrassment. Indeed, there was an assertiveness in his bearing that reacted upon Melissa to produce extreme shyness. Neither cause nor effect escaped Morgan's shrewd black eyes.

"How's Mr. Baron?" asked Bud, between bites.

"Doing very well. He gets out on the porch every day now."

"Great luck he has," growled Pressley. "Yo' father never paid my fine when Ah was given mah choice between 'a hundred dollars or three months.'"

"My father likes to choose his friends," replied Bob, sternly. Melissa looked distressed.

"What's sauce fo' the goose ought to be sauce fo' the gander," argued the ex-moonshiner.

"It ain' fittin' fo' you-all to say anythin' ag'in' Dr. Morgan, whatever he may _se_-lect to do," asserted Bud, combatively, and Pink hastened to hedge.

"Ah 'low not. He certainly was white to me when Ah broke mah laig. 'N as fo' Mr. Baron, Ah always did like him, 'n this is a new tie between us. Now we're brothers."

He chuckled with a full appreciation of his insolence, for the story of von Rittenheim's downfall and its cause was well known throughout the country.

Melissa went white at the malignity of his tone. She turned to Bob with a question:

"Mrs. Carroll 'n Miss Sydney--are they wore to a frazzle takin' care o' him?"

"Mrs. Carroll's all right. They've had two nurses from Asheville all the time, you know. Miss Sydney's wonderful. There's such a lot to do about a house when there's a serious illness, even for people who aren't doing the actual nursing."

"Ah s'pose so. Wouldn' hit be nice, jus' like a story, 'f they'd fall in love with each other--Mr. Baron 'n Miss Sydney?"

"Now, ain' that jus' like a girl!" ejaculated Bud, gulping the last of his coffee.

Bob sat down and fanned himself with his hat.

"Hot, ain' hit?" observed Pink, dryly. Then he turned to Melissa.

"You-all's fo'gittin' that he might be in prison at this minute. No woman o' his class would marry him now. No woman likes to think her man's guilty o' breakin' the law, eh? You-all wouldn' like yo' husband to be a moonshiner, would ye?"

The man's body leaned towards the girl, and he fixed her with a cruel stare from which she seemed unable to move her eyes. Seated as he was, he looked like a huge snake upreared to strike.

He went on mercilessly. "O' co'se ye wouldn'. Ah expect you'd never hol' up yo' haid ag'in. What woman can when her man's that-a-way?"

"Oh, dry up, Pink," cried Bud. "You-all make me feel like Ah had the constable after me now, 'n Lawd knows hit ain' _me_ that's raced 'em through these woods."

Pink acknowledged the shot with a grunt.

Melissa rose to go, and Bud picked up the baby and handed it to her.

"Hit's her busy day fo' sleepin', ain' hit?" he said, poking a blunt finger into the soft cheek.

"I must go, too," said Bob, "or my mother'll jar me up for being late."

"Good-by," said Bud, genially. "Stop by ag'in some time."

"Miss Sydney's been so busy she ain' rode over here fo' a long time. Will you-all give mah love to her, please?" said Melissa, timidly.

"'N mine," Pink started to add, but a dangerous look in Bob's eye induced him to change it to "'N mah _re_-gards to Mr. Baron," though his grin remained unaltered.