The Wiving of Lance Cleaverage

"Lance Cleaverage," returned Drumright ponderously, "I respect yo' father, for he's a good man. I respect yo' sister – she's one too; for their sake I come here to perform this marriage, greatly agin my grain."

He was taking a long breath, having barely got under way, when Lance stopped him with a curt,

"Well, – are you goin' to do it – or are you not?"

People gazed with open mouths and protruding eyes. Where were the lightnings of Heaven, set apart for the destruction of the impious? Drumright himself was momentarily staggered.

"Er, yes – I am," he said finally, wagging his head in an obstinate, bovine shake. "After I've said my say, I aim to marry ye."

The little points of light that always danced deep down in Lance Cleaverage's eyes, flamed up like clear lamps at this statement.

"No, you'll not," he said promptly. "You'll marry us now – or not at all. If I wanted any of your talk, I'd come to your church and get it. I don't want any."

All this time his arm had been round Callista, the hand closed on her slim waist gently, but with a grip of steel. Had she wished to stir from his side, she could scarcely have done so. Now he turned toward the door and moved quietly away from the astonished preacher, taking her with him.

"Whar – whar you goin'?" faltered Drumright, dumbfounded.

"Down to Sourwood Gap to be wedded," the bridegroom flung back in his face. "Squire Ashe is up there from Hepzibah – he'll marry us without haulin' us over the coals first." And he made his way through the roomful of mute, dazed, unprotesting people. At the door he paused, and, with the air of a man alone with his beloved in desert spaces, bent and murmured something in the ear of his bride, then ran lightly down the steps and out into the dark to where the horses were tethered. He returned quickly, leading his two black ponies.

He found that in the few moments of his absence the company had awakened to the enormity of what was going on. There were a half-dozen people round Callista, most of them talking. Little Liza, who evidently believed that the finger of the Lord was in it, and that her brother Flenton was at last going to get the girl of his choice, clung to Callista's hand and wept. Flenton himself stood squarely in the bride's path, speaking low and eagerly. At the upper end of the room Octavia Gentry was almost in hysterics as she labored with the preacher, trying to get him to say that he would marry the pair at once if they would come back. Old Ajax had retired to his corner by the big fireplace, where he stood smiling furtively, and slowly rubbing a lean, shaven jaw, as he glanced from his daughter-in-law to his granddaughter in leisurely enjoyment. After all, there was much he liked well in Callista's chosen.

Roxana Griever had flown to supplement Octavia's entreaties with the preacher. Kimbro made his way toward the door, evidently with some half-hearted intention of remonstrating with his son. Sylvane had slipped out to help Lance with the horses – he guessed that his brother never meant to ride away from the Gentry place alone.

"He ain't fitten for you, Callisty," Hands was whispering over and over. "He ain't fitten for you. A man that will do you this-a-way on yo' wedding day, what sort o' husband is he goin' to make? Here's me, honey, that's loved you all your life, an' been a member o' the church in good standin' sence I was twelve years old. Callisty, I'd be plumb proud to lay down for you to walk over. You take me, and we'll have a weddin' here sure enough."

The words were breathed low into the bride's ear; yet attitude and air were eloquent, and Hands's position and intentions were so notorious, that the proposition might as well have been shouted aloud.

"Lance – you Lance! Callista, honey!" implored the mother's voice distressfully above the moving heads of the crowd. "You chillen wait till I can get thar. Preacher says he'll wed you now. Come on back in here."

"Yes, and when you git that feller back in here a-standin' before Preacher Drumright to be wedded, you'll toll a wild buck up to a tainted spring," chuckled old Ajax Gentry.

Lance only smiled. The lover, all aglow, rejected with contempt this maimed thing they would thrust upon him for a marriage. He was leading Callista's horse to the porch edge that she might mount, when he glanced up and found how strongly the pressure was being put upon his girl. The sight arrested his hurrying steps, and turned him instantly into the semblance of an indifferent bystander.

"Honey, they say a good brother makes a good husband," Little Liza was booming on in what she fondly believed was a tone audible only to Callista. "I tell you Flenton is the best brother any gals ever had."

Cleaverage stood gazing at them with eyes indecipherable, then – turned his back.

"And look at Lance Cleaverage," exhorted Little Liza, "a drinkin', coon-huntin', banjo playin' feller that don't darken the doors of a church – his own sister cain't never name him without tellin' how wicked he is. Let him go, honey – you let him go, an' take Flent."

Lance, standing with his back to them, holding his horses, had begun to whistle. At first the sound was scarcely to be heard above the babel of voices in the lighted room – but it came clearly to Callista's ears. Flenton's hand reached hers; Ellen joined her entreaties to those of Little Liza. Callista, while not a church member, had always aligned herself with the ultra-religious element; she had been the companion and peer of those eminently fitted and ever ready to sit in judgment on the unworthy. Now she heard all these joining to condemn Lance.

The tune outside went seeking softly among the turns and roulades with which Lance always embellished a melody. It was the song he had sung under her window. Her heart remembered the words.

"How many years, how many miles,

Far from the door where my darling smiles?

How many miles, how many years.?"

His musing, eyes were on the far line of mountains, velvety black against the luminous blackness of the sky; his gaze rested thoughtfully on a great star that hung shining in the dusk over the horizon's edge. He seemed deaf to the clatter and squabble, blind to the movement in the room behind him. Softly he whistled, like a man wandering pensive beside a lonely sea, or in some remote, solitary forest, a man untouched by the more immediate and human things of life. The two horses after snorting and pulling back at first sight of the unaccustomed lights and the noisy voices, put down their noses toward the long, lush dooryard grass.

"He ain't lookin' at you. He ain't a-carin'," Flenton whispered to her.

For the first time Callista glanced directly to where her bridegroom stood. His back was to her – yes, his back was to her. And though the little whistle went questing on with its "How many miles – how many years?" even as her eye rested on him he made a leisurely movement toward one of the horses, like a man who might be about to mount. Swift as a shadow she slipped through the hands of those around her and down the steps.

"Lance," she breathed. "Lance." Then she was in his arms. He had lifted her to the saddle.

"Good land!" wailed Octavia Gentry, "if you've got to go, Sis, they's no use ruinin' yo' frock. Here's your ridin' skirt," and she flourished the long calico garment and struggled to get down to the mounted pair.

Lance was on the other horse now. He paid no attention to any of them, but let his smiling gaze rove for the last time over the lighted windows, the noisy people, the long tables.

"What time will you-all be back?" called the still secretly chuckling old Ajax from the doorway, as he saw them depart.

"Never," answered Lance's clear hail.

"Oh, Lance – ain't you a-goin' to come back and have the weddin'?" began Octavia.

At this the bridegroom turned in his saddle, reining in thoughtfully. He would not accept this mutilated ceremony, yet the wedding of Lance Cleaverage should not be shorn in the eyes of his neighbors. Slowly he wheeled his horse and faced them all once more.

"Callista and me ain't coming back here," he assured them, without heat, yet with decision. "But I bid you-all to an infare at my house tomorrow night."

Then once more he wheeled his pony, caught at Callista's bridle, and sweeping into the big road, started the two forward at a gallop. His arm was round Callista's waist. Her head drooped in the relief of a decision arrived at, and a final abandonment to her real feeling that was almost swoon-like, on the conqueror's shoulder. The horses sprang forward as one.

"Callista – sweetheart," he whispered with his lips against her hair, "we don't want nothin' of them folks back there, do we? We don't want nothin' of anybody in the world. Just you and me – you and me."

CHAPTER VII.

LANCE'S LAUREL

THE inheritance of Lance Cleaverage came to him from his maternal grandfather. Jesse Lance had felt it bitterly when his handsome high-spirited youngest daughter ran away with Kimbro Cleaverage, teacher of a little mountain school, a gentle, unworldly soul who would never get on in life. His small namesake was four years old when Grandfather Lance, himself a hawkfaced, up-headed man, undisputed master of his own household, keen on the hunting trail, and ready as ever for a fight or a frolic, came past and stopped at the Cleaverage farm on the way from his home in the Far Cove neighborhood down to the Settlement to buy mules, and, incidentally, to arrange about his will. He was not advanced in years, and he was in excellent health; but there were a number of married sons and daughters to portion, he had a considerable amount of property, and his wife was ailing. It had been suggested that both should make their wills; so the documents, duly written out, signed and attested, were being carried down to Jesse Lance's lawyer in Hepzibah.

He had seen almost nothing of his one-time favorite, Melissa, since the marriage twelve years before with Cleaverage that so disappointed him; and he had not now expected to remain the night in her house. But the little Lance, a small splinter of manhood, at once caught his grandfather's eye. The child stirred Jesse Lance's curiosity perhaps – or it may have been some deeper feeling. The first collision between these two occurred as the visitor, having dismounted, approached the Cleaverage gate. He had his favorite hound with him, and four-year-old Lance, leading forth old Speaker, his chosen comrade, observed the hair rise on the neck of grandfather's follower, and listened with delight to the rumble of growls the dogs exchanged.

"Ye better look out. If Speaker jumps on yo' dog he'll thest about eat him up," the child warned.

The tall man swept his grandson with a dominating gaze that was used to see the people about Jesse Lance obey. But things that scared other children were apt to evoke little Lance's scornful laughter or stir up fight in him.

"You call off yo' hound," the newcomer said imperiously. "I don't let my dog fight with every cur he meets."

The small boy wheeled – hands in trouser pockets – and gazed with disappointed eyes to where the two canines were making friends.

"I wish they would jump on each other; I thest wish't they would," he muttered. "I know Speaker could whip."

Grandfather Lance looked with interest at the child. Such a boy had he been. This was the spirit he had bequeathed to Lance's mother, and which she had wasted when she married a schoolteacher.

Melissa Cleaverage, come down in the world now, paid timid court to her father without much success; but in the middle of the afternoon, her four-year-old son settled the question of the visitor remaining for the night. Jesse Lance had been across the gulch to look at some wild land which belonged to him, up on the head waters of the creek called Lance's Laurel, a haggard, noble domain, its lawless acres still tossing an unbroken sea of green tree-tops towards the sky. As he returned to the Cleaverage place, he traversed a little woods-path without noticing the small jeans-clad boy who dragged a number of linked objects across the way.

"You gran'pap!" came the shrill challenge after him. "You quit a-breakin' up my train."

Jesse glanced toward the ground and saw a great oak chip dangling by a string against his boot. He turned an impassive countenance, and thrust with his foot to free it from its entanglement.

"Watch out – you'll break it!" cried the child, running up. Then, as a second jerk shook and rattled the dangling bit of wood, "Ain't you got no sense?" he roared. "That's the injine to my train that you done stepped on and broke all up, and it cain't go a lick with you, big, lazy loafer, standin' right in the middle of it!"

For a moment the fierce baby eyes looked up into eyes as fierce above them. Such a glance should have sent any youngster weeping to its mother's skirts; but the tiny man on the woods-path stood his ground, ruffling like a game cock.

"Uh-huh!" jeered the grandfather, "and who might you be, young feller?"

"I'm cap'n of this train," Lance flung back at him, scarlet of face, his form rigid, his feet planted wide on the mold of the path.

Grim amusement showed itself in the elder countenance. Yet Jesse Lance was not used to permitting himself to be defied. Not since Melissa had run rough-shod over him and held his heart in her little grubby hands, had another been allowed such liberties.

"Oh, ye air, air ye? Well, that's mighty big talk for little breeches," he taunted, to see whether the spirit that looked out at him from his grandson's eyes went deep, or was mere surface bravado.

He got his answer. With a roar the baby charged him, gripped the big man around the knees and swung.

"Git off'n my injine!" he bellowed, contorting his small body to hammer with his toes the offending legs he clung to. "I told you once civil, and you didn't go. I'm cap'n of this train, and I can throw rowdies off when they won't go."

The lines of the man's face puckered curiously as he looked down at the small assailant. Without another word he freed his foot from the chip-and-string "train," moving circumspectly and with due regard to flimsy couplings. Without another word he stepped slowly on, looking across his shoulder once, to note that Lance instantly joined his train into shape and, turning his back on his big adversary, promptly forgot all about him. Where the woods-path struck the big road, the grandfather stood a long moment and studied his grandson; then he made his way to the house where eleven year-old Roxy sat sorting wild greens on the porch edge.

"How old is that chap back thar?" he inquired of her brusquely.

"Brother Lance? W'y, he ain't but fo' year old," Roxana returned sanctimoniously. "Gran'pap, you mustn't hold it agin' him that he's so mean – he's but fo' year old. An' Poppy won't never whip him like he ort. If Poppy would jest give him a good dosin' of hickory tea, I 'low he'd come of his meanness mighty quick."

Jesse Lance merely grunted in reply to these pious observations, and in his mind there framed itself a codicil to be added to that will. Melissa – Melissa who married Kimbro Cleaverage – had been left out of both testaments so far; but she was his favorite child, and it had been in her father's mind to bequeath to her the wild land up in the Gap. Yet of what use would such a piece of timber be to a woman? And it would be of less account to a man like Kimbro Cleaverage. They would but sell it for the meagre price someone might offer their necessities now. No, the dauntless captain of the train back there on the path was the one to own the Gap hundred. Such a man as he promised to become, would subdue that bit of savage nature, and live with and upon it. The lawyer in Hepzibah should fix the will that way.

Susan Lance died in her husband's absence; and the pair of mules Jesse had bought in the Settlement ran away with him on his journey home, pitching themselves, the wagon and driver, all over a cliff and breaking his neck. So it was that the codicil to the will left "to my namesake Lance Cleaverage, the Gap hundred on Lance's Laurel," not then of as much value as it had now become. High on the side of the slope it lay, as befitted the heritage of a free hunter. The timber on it was straight, tall and clean, mostly good hardwood. Here was the head of Lance's Laurel, a bold spring of pure freestone water bursting out from under a bluff – a naked mass of sandstone which fronted the sky near his boundary-line – in sufficient volume to form with its own waters the upper creek. A mile down, this stream joined itself to Burnt Cabin Laurel, and the two formed Big Laurel. This water supply, unusually fine even in that well-watered country, added greatly to the value of the tract as a homestead. Coal had been found on the other side of the ridge, and Lance, who believed in his star, thought it reasonable to expect that coal would be discovered on his own land.

Meantime, though he had cleared none of it for crops – not even the necessary truck-patch – he made a little opening on a fine, sightly rise, with a more lofty eminence behind it, and set to work building his cabin. Scorning the boards from the portable sawmill which would have offered him a flimsy shanty at best, hot in the brief, vivid summer and cold in winter, he marked the best timber for the purpose, and planned a big, two-penned log house, with an open porch between. Lance, his father and Sylvane, spent more than ten days getting out the trees. It took forty boles to build a single pen ten logs high; and as Lance had decided to have the rooms measure fourteen feet inside, each must be cut to fifteen foot length. Then, since he was fastidious in the matter of a straight wall, Lance himself measured and lined each one and scored it to line, his father coming behind him with a broad-axe and hewing it flat on the two sides, leaving the log perhaps about five inches through, whatever its height might be, and thus securing a flat wall of even thickness. For the kitchen at the back, it was thought good enough to snake the logs up in the round, with the bark all on, and merely skelp them roughly as they were put up one by one.

It took only a day to raise the walls of the cabin on Lance's Laurel, for the owner was tremendously popular, and there was help enough offered in friendly country fashion that day to have raised another pen, had the logs been ready. Roxy Griever and little Polly came across the gulch with dinner for the men; but the best things the laughing jovial party had, Lance cooked for them on an open camp-fire.

The roof was of hand-rived clapboards which Lance and Sylvane got out; but all the flooring was of tongued and grooved boards, brought from the Hepzibah planing mill, narrow, smooth, well-fitted, well-laid.

There were not in all the Turkey Track neighborhoods such door-and window-frames, nor doors of such quality, all hauled up from the planing mill.

When it came to the chimney, Lance was the master hand, a mason by trade, and sent for far and near to build chimneys or doctor one which refused to draw. He had chosen the stones from the creek-bed, water-washed, clean, offering traceries of white here and there on their steely, blue-gray surfaces. He debated long over the question of a rounded arch with keystone for the front of his fireplace, as is the manner of all the older chimneys in the mountains; but finally he and Sylvane found one day a single straight arch rock so long that it could be laid across the jambs, and this he shaped a bit and hauled up for the purpose. The day he set in the chimney-throat the iron bar from which to hang the kettles, Sylvane lay watching him.

"Now, that's what Sis' Roxy's been a-wantin' ever sence I can remember," the younger brother commented, as Lance manipulated the mortar and set stone upon stone with nice skill.

"Uh-huh," assented the proprieter of Lance's Laurel lightly. "She wants it too bad. If she'd just want it easier, maybe she'd get it, one of these days."

He laughed drolly down at the boy lying on the grass, and both remembered the long dreary tirades by which poor Roxy had tried to get her brother to so amend the home hearth that cooking should be rendered less laborious for her.

And it was to this home that Lance Cleaverage brought his bride. Here it was that he hoped to build that true abiding place which such spirits as Lance seek, and crave, and seldom find. The hearthstone he had himself laid, the skilfully built chimney, with its dream of Callista sitting on one side of the hearth and himself on the other – these were gropings after the answers such as he always asked of life.

"This ain't what Pap calls a sojourning place – this here's going to be a real home, Callista," he said eagerly, as the two young creatures went about it examining their new habitation the next morning. "It'll be cool in the summer, and good and warm in the winter. That chimney'll draw – just look at the fire. I never have built a chimney that smoked."

"Did you build the chimney, Lance?" Callista asked him, leaning on his arm.

"I did that," he told her. "They're always after me to build other folks' chimneys and lay other people's hearthstones, and I ain't so very keen to do it – and it don't pay much – up here. But my own – one for you and me to sit by – "

He broke off and stared down at her, his eyes suddenly full of dreams. Oh, the long winter evenings; they two together beside the leaping hearth-fire. They would be as one. Surely into this citadel he had builded for his life, the enemy – the olden lonesomeness – could never come.

They had their bit of breakfast, and Lance was about to go down to the Settlement to purchase the wherewithal for the impromptu infare. It was hard to leave her. He went out and fed the black horses and came back to say good-bye once more. His team was his hope of a subsistence, seeing that there was no cleared land to farm. He and they together could earn a living for two or three months yet. After that, there would be small opportunity throughout the winter for teaming. Through the summer he had been hauling tan-bark on the contract for old man Derf. Nearly all of this money he had spent upon the house; and he felt he had now to draw upon what remained – though it was not yet quite due – for the expenses of the infare. Callista was down at the hearth as he entered, the tiny blaze in its center warming the whiteness of her throat and chin where she bent to hang a pot on the bar his skill and forethought had placed there for her. Something mighty and primal and terribly sweet shook the soul of Lance Cleaverage as he looked at her kneeling there. She was his – his mate. He would never be alone again. He ran to her and dropped his arm about her. She turned up to him that flushing, tender, responsive countenance which was new to both of them.

"Hadn't I better buy you a pair of slippers?" he asked her, just for the pleasure of having her answer.

"I reckon I don't need 'em, Lance," she said soberly, getting to her feet and moving with him toward the door. "If I could dance – or if I ever did dance – I might have need of such."

"Dance!" echoed her husband with quick tenderness, looking down at her as they paused on the doorstone. "If you was to dance, Callista, there wouldn't any of the other gals want to stand up on the floor beside you. I'm goin' to get the slippers."

He rode away on his black horse, her fond eyes following him; and the sight of her standing in the door waving her hand was his last vision of home.

At the gate, far down the slope, he stopped for some imaginary investigation of his accoutrements, but really to have an excuse to turn and wave to Callista, cupping his hands and calling back, "I'm going to bring you the finest pair of slippers I can buy."

For in his pocket was one of her shoes, and in his mind the firm intention of getting so light and flexible a pair of slippers that his girl should be coaxed into learning to dance. Callista not dance – it was unthinkable! Of course she would dance. Vaguely his mind formed the picture of her swaying to the rhythm of music. His eyes half closed, he let black Satan choose his own gait, as his arms felt somehow the light pressure of her form within them, and he was dancing with Callista. On – on – on through the years with Callista. She should not grow old and faded and workworn, nor he hardened, commonplace, indifferent. There should be love and tenderness – beauty and music and movement – in their lives. And she should dance for him – with him – Callista, who had never yet danced with anyone.