15. Varmint Fool!
The blackberry storm seems designed by the weather-gods not to destroy the mountainscape. Just In time it always relents. Early on the fourth day Sol took a squint over the prospect, gave his clouds a final wringing, then fluttered them out to dry. The wind shook up the growing things. The ground drained the drippings. All nature cheered that the huge wash-day was over. In an hour the sun was beaming steadily from a sky whose azure seemed only deepened by the wrung-out clouds flapping below.
From the door of the shack Parker looked down into the valley, pleased as a house-wife might have been at finding everything cleaned up. Straight across, the formerly smudged mountains looked scoured and varnished, as also the blues and grays of the distances, the greens and occasional floral flares of the foreground.
Another thing was clear to him as the day: he had been a week without a drink! Yet where was the virtue of riding "the wagon" If strapped Into it? To enjoy his new-found strength he must prove It. Anticipation brightened his face as he stood in the doorway; a gleam lit his eyes, as If reflected from the anticipatory world without. He would change his mind about letting that inhospitable mountain girl interfere. There must be no more beating about the bush; he would appeal directly, as man to man, to Old Tom Metcalf, according to his original intention. Truly, faint heart never won anything for anybody - either friends or drinks!
A pair of hounds announced his approach, even before he emerged into the considerable clearing that surrounded the double file of oaks and the pretentious - for the region - Metcalf house. He had left Teetotaler at the ford, that he might seem the more defenseless in this morning call.
He was pleased that the hounds returned his greeting in kind. Always had he been said to have ''a way" with dogs. Now, having rushed at him savagely, with bristles upraised, they subsided Into a tail-waving, sniff-approving escort.
From a chair on the porch a man descended the steps and stood staring at him from under handshaded eyes. Even at the distance Parker recognized the giant figure and leonine head of redoubtable Tom.
Remembrance of the old man's parting advices on their two previous encounters lent interest to this defiance of thern. "See to it that you hunt only fur, fin, and feathers," he had said on the road. "Now you git and stay git!" had been the command closing the incident at the cabin. The echoed threat of them in Parker's mind gave his greeting suavity.
"Good morning, Mr. Metcalf. I know it's etiquette for a newcomer to wait until the old settlers call on him, but I've been feeling a bit lonely, so here I am."
"Here you '' For a moment the patriarch
continued to stare, his chin thrown up from a chest haired over with red where the flannel shirt was unbuttoned. Then he finished sincerely: "Here you be, sure enough; and here I be, plumb gol-dinged!"
"In fact," added Parker, "I'd have been over several days ago, except for the weather."
"Git you out, he-brute !"
Tom's command was startling until understood as addressed to the more importunate of the dogs. His roar at once softened into a conversational tone.
"Come along up the stoop, stranger, and set you a chair."
Parker accepted the Invitation with his wonted lazy movements, but his thoughts made up in action. So immediate a concession to "the Parker charm" might be more suspicious than auspicious. "Come along up," had said this lawbreaker who believed him a revenue spy; yet the way he fell In behind would seem to amplify: "I want you ahead of me, so I can watch you."
There was, however, a declaration of squaredealing in the way the mountaineer strode across the porch to the open door, removed the revolver from his hip, hung It upon a nail In the frame - a nail made significant by the company of other nails.
"I'm not after fur or feathers this morning - rd have to fling rocks if I were." Such was Parker's contribution to this sign of truce.
"I seen that," was the reply.
The "out-Norther" took the sway-back chair Indicated, facing the door of what evidently was the living-room. The host straddled a straightbacked one against the wall of logs, thereby helping himself to a comprehensive view of the approaches to his habitation. His feral eyes settled upon the lax-Iounglng younger man.
"QuIte a winding and raining we-all have been suffering/'
"Quite is right." Parker returned this overture with a plunge into the object of his call. "I'd be willing never to meet another blackberry to escape another such storm. There I was, shut up for three days and nights in that windowless shack I've rented, without so much as a drop of liquor to light my thoughts. Honestly, Mr. Metcalf, I'd have given half my year's Income for one small bottle of the worst whisky ever bumbled."
The blockader's expression was a triumph. If judged by histrionic standards, Its amusement deepening into polite reproof.
"I disgust bad liquor myself."
"Good or bad doesn't matter so much when your tongue Is drier than a suction-pump with the feedpipe out of the well." Parker paused to enjoy his simile. "To tell the end of my sad story first, I'm about desperate for some whisky."
"So we-all have hearn - so we've hearn," chuckled Metcalf.
"You have heard? From whom?"
"My nigger, Cotton Eye, Is tolerable talkative. He's told us-uns how the Plotts and Dry Dryden allowed you could happen on some bumblings In the mountains. Wa'n't it Cotton Eye, now, who sent you hoping to Asa SImms? And Sal Shortoff, she gets so boiled up working for the cause that she spills."
"Mrs. Shortoff chose to regard me as a pernicious influence." Secretly somewhat disconcerted by this array of evidence against him, Parker pursued his course of easy frankness. "Possibly it was to divert my search that she sold me Teetotaler."
Tom Metcalf agreed with a grin. "I wouldn't put it past her."
"The good dame, I also suspect, feared I might share my find with her parched worser half. She seems prohibition-bent."
"Sal sure Is. She gives In to Bide about as quick as 'lasses runs." His weathered face straightened, his eyes grew serious as they swept the clearing. "No' Carolina, in this day, stranger, ain't the State for a thirsty man. Time was when I had my dram regular, but Pve learned to do without."
"You consummate old liar!" That was what Parker thought, wondering just how many stonethrows away was the Metcalf distillery. Aloud he tried a new approach.
"From all I hear, there are many In the Carolinas who don't obey the law to the letter. Along the roads you are likely to happen upon twigs of laurel which point the way to native bar-rooms."
"So?"
The mountaineer met his visitor's gaze with a look that held no personal interest. It was politely vacuous. In the next breath he changed the subject.
"I'm right sorry you hit on to-day for calling on us-uns, stranger, being as I'm the only one seeable. Miss Emmy, my sister-in-law, who's run the house since my own good woman passed alone, drove down to Dismal to buy some store stuff. My gal, Verney, is suffering this morning from the all-overs."
"The all-overs?"
"I reckon you-all would call what she's got a case of nerves. Verney don't have them soon, but when she does she ain't fitten to talk to none, especially a furrlner. Sandyred's out with the nigger, planting. Sandy's my man-child. Another day I'd admire to meet him to you. It was powerful common of you-all to make us a call. Likely you'll come again?"
The suggested dismissal of the old man's words and manner Parker chose to disregard.
"To be frank, the object of my visit Is a double one," he said. "The social half of It I'll Improve, thanks to your kind invitation, when I may meet the rest of your household. As for the other half "
He lifted his attention from patting one of the dogs so quickly as to surprise a frown on the face recently masked In dissimulation.
"Mr. Metcalf," he demanded In a voice that snapped, "will you or will you not sell me some whisky?"
With a bang the uptllted forelegs of the patriarch's chair met the floor.
"By cripes, you have got the nerve of --- Be you a varmint fool to come here after --- I'll show you what I meant when I ---"
Each unfinished, these ejaculations spat through his lips.
A sound and sight within the house caught Parker's attention.
From just Inside the door, around that side of the frame where sat his host, he saw a long, stronghanded arm extend. A checked lavender gingham skirt fluttered a trifle. The next moment a face appeared - one surrounded by fire-glinting hair.
His eyes met the forbidding, fawn-green ones of Vernaluska Metcalf.
Any impulse to get to his feet, to greet her, was subdued in time by the vehement shake of her head and her significant finger-to-lips. In the seconds he could afford for consideration he saw her possess herself of the revolver which her parent had hung upon the nail as a sign of hospitality. There was no suggestion of "all-overs" in her rapid movements.
A spell of amazement held Parker. What did she want with the weapon? Would he find it trained upon him from the shadows?
Did she mean, with her own "ornery" hand, to make good the warning that he would not find anything "pleasurable" on Roaring Fork?