CHAPTER IX.
THE LAND OF THE LITTLE BROWN JUG.
CABOOSE 0186, with three box-cars and a locomotive attached, lay in the south-eastern yards at Raleigh late in the evening of the same day. In the observatory sat Mr. Thomas Ardmore, chatting with the conductor, while they waited for the right of way. Mr. Ardmore’s pockets were filled with papers, and he held half a dozen telegrams in his hand. The freight cars behind him were locked and sealed, and a number of men lounging near appeared to be watching them.
The reply of the sheriff of Dilwell County had precipitated the crisis. That official succinctly replied to Ardmore’s message:
Be good and acquire grace.
While this dictum had aroused Miss Dangerfield’s wrath and indignation, it calmed her fellow-conspirator, and for hours Ardmore had poured forth orders by telegraph and telephone. No such messages as his had ever before radiated from Raleigh. The tolls would have bankrupted the commonwealth if Ardmore had not cared for them out of his private purse. His forester, with an armed posse from Ardsley, was already following the streams and beating the brush in search of Appleweight. One car of Ardmore’s special train contained a machine gun and a supply of rifles; another abundant ammunition and commissary supplies, and the third cots and bags. The men who loafed about the train were a detail of strike-breakers from a detective agency, borrowed for the occasion. Cooke, the conductor of the train, had formerly been in the government secret service, and knew the Carolina hill country as he knew the palm of his hand. Ardmore had warned his manager and the housekeeper on his estate to prepare for the arrival of Mrs. Atchison, whose private car had come and gone, carrying Miss Geraldine Dangerfield on to Ardsley. Ardmore had just received a message from his sister at some way station, reporting all well and containing these sentences: “She is rather different, and I do not quite make her out. She has our noble brother-in-law a good deal bewildered.”
Cooke ran forward for a colloquy with the engineer over their orders; the guards climbed into one of the box-cars, and the train moved slowly out of the Raleigh yards to the main line and rattled away toward Kildare, with Mr. Ardmore, pipe in mouth, perched in the caboose cupola.
A caboose, you may not know, is the pleasantest place in the world to ride. Essentially a thing of utility, it is not less the vehicle of joy. Neither the captain of a trading schooner nor the admiral of a canal fleet is more sublimely autocratic than the freight conductor in his watch-tower. The landscape is disclosed to him in leisurely panoramas; the springs beneath are not so lulling as to dull his senses. If he isn’t whipped into the ditch by the humour of the engineer, or run down and telescoped by an enemy from behind, he may ultimately deliver his sombre fleet to its several destinations; but he is the slave of no inexorable time-table, and his excuses are as various as his cargoes.
Not Captain Kidd nor another of the dark brotherhood sailed forth with keener zest for battle than Mr. Ardmore. Indeed, the trailing smoke of the locomotive suggested a black flag, and the thought of it tickled his fancy. Above bent the bluest sky in the world; fields of corn and cotton, the brilliant crimson of German clover, and long stretches of mixed forest held him with enchantment. In a cornfield a girl ploughing with a single steer—a little girl in a sunbonnet, who reached wearily up to the plough handles—paused and waved to him, and he knew the delight of the lonely mariner when a passing ship speaks to him with flags. And when night came, after the long mystical twilight, the train passed now and then great cotton factories that blazed out from their thousand windows like huge steamships.
When they sought a lonely siding to allow a belated passenger train to pass, the conductor brewed coffee and cooked supper, and Ardmore called in the detectives and trainmen. The sense of knowing real people, whose daily occupations were so novel and interesting, touched him afresh with delight. These men said much in few words. The taciturnity of Cooke, the conductor, in particular, struck Ardmore as very fine, and it occurred to him that very likely men who have had the fun of doing things never talk of their performances afterward. One of the detectives chaffed Cooke covertly about some adventure in which they had been jointly associated.
“I never thought they’d get the lead out of you after that business in Missouri. You were a regular mine,” said the detective to Cooke, and Cooke glanced deprecatingly at Ardmore.
“He’s the little joker, all right.”
“You can’t kill him,” remarked the detective. “I’ve seen it tried.”
Before the train started the detectives crawled back into their car, and Cooke drew out some blankets, tossed them on a bench for Ardmore, and threw himself down without ado. Ardmore held to his post in the tower, as lone as the lookout in a crow’s-nest. The night air swept more coolly in as they neared the hills, and the train’s single brakeman came down as though descending from the sky, rubbed the cinders from his eyes, and returned to his vigil armed with a handful of Ardmore’s cigars.
For the greater part of the night they enjoyed a free track, and thumped the rails at a lively clip. Shortly after midnight Ardmore crawled below and went to sleep. At five o’clock Cooke called him.
“We’re on the switch at Kildare. One of your men is here waiting for you.”
Big Paul, the German forester, was called in, and Ardmore made his toilet in a pail of water while listening to the big fellow’s report. Cooke joined in the conversation, and Ardmore was gratified to see that the two men met on common ground in discussing the local geography. The forester described in clear, straightforward English just what he had done. He had distributed his men well through the hills, and they were now posted as pickets on points favourable for observation. They had found along the streams four widely scattered stills, and these were being watched. Paul drew a small map, showing the homes of the most active members of the Appleweight gang, and Ardmore indicated all these points as nearly as possible on the county map he had brought with him.
“Here’s Raccoon Creek, and my own land runs right through there—just about here, isn’t it, Paul? I always remember the creek, because I like the name so much.”
“You are right, Mr. Ardmore. The best timber you have lies along there, and your land crosses the North Carolina boundary into South Carolina about here. There’s Mingo County, South Carolina, you see.”
“Well, that dashes me!” exclaimed Ardmore, striking the table with his fist. “I never knew one state from another, but you must be right.”
“I’m positive of it, Mr. Ardmore. One of my men has been living there on the creek to protect your timber. Some of these outlaws have been cutting off our wood.”
“It seems to me I remember the place. There’s a log house hanging on the creek. You took me by it once, but it never entered my head that the state line was so close.”
“It runs right through the house! And some one, years ago, blazed the trees along there, so it is very easy to tell when you step from one state to another. My man left there recently, refusing to stay any longer. These Appleweight people thought he was a spy, and posted a notice on his door warning him to leave, so I shifted him to the other end of the estate.”
“Did you see the sheriff at Kildare?”
“I haven’t seen him. When I asked for him yesterday I found he had left town and gone to Greensboro to see his sick uncle.”
Ardmore laughed and slapped his knee.
“Who takes care of the dungeon while he’s away?”
“There are no prisoners in the Kildare jail. The sheriff’s afraid to keep any; and he’s like the rest of the people around here. They all live in terror of Appleweight.”
“Appleweight is a powerful character in these parts,” said Cooke, pouring the coffee he had been making, and handing a tin cupful to Ardmore. “He’s tolerable well off, and could make money honestly if he didn’t operate stills, rob country stores, mix up in politics, and steal horses when he and his friends need them.”
“I guess he has never molested us any, has he, Paul?” asked Ardmore, not a little ashamed of his ignorance of his own business.
“A few of our cows stray away sometimes and never come back. And for two years we have lost the corn out of the crib away over here near the deer park.”
“They’ve got the juice out of it before this,” remarked Cooke.
“That would be nice for me, wouldn’t it?” said Ardmore, grinning—“to be arrested for running a still on my place.”
“We don’t want to lose our right to the track, and we must get out of this before the whole community comes to take a look at us,” said Cooke, swinging out of the caboose.
Ardmore talked frankly to the forester, having constant recourse to the map; and Paul sketched roughly a new chart, marking roads and paths so far as he knew them, and indicating clearly where the Ardsley boundaries extended. Then Ardmore took a blue pencil and drew a straight line.
“When we get Appleweight, we want to hurry him from Dilwell County, North Carolina, into Mingo County, South Carolina. We will go to the county town there, and put him in jail. If the sheriff of Mingo is weak-kneed, we will lock Appleweight up anyhow, and telegraph the governor of South Carolina that the joke is on him.”
“We will catch the man,” said Paul gravely, “but we may have to kill him.”
“Dead or alive, he’s got to be caught,” said Ardmore, and the big forester stared at his employer a little oddly; for this lord proprietor had not been known to his employees and tenants as a serious character, but rather as an indolent person who, when he visited his estate in the hills, locked himself up unaccountably in his library, and rarely had the energy to stir up the game in his broad preserves.
“Certainly, sir; dead or alive,” Paul repeated.
Cooke came out of the station and signalled the engineer to go ahead.
“We’ll pull down here about five miles to an old spur where the company used to load wood. There’s a little valley there where we can be hidden all we please, so far as the main line is concerned, and it might not be a bad idea to establish headquarters there. We have the tools for cutting in on the telegraph, and we can be as independent as we please. I told the agent we were carrying company powder for a blasting job down the line, and he suspects nothing.”
Paul left the caboose as the train started, and rode away on horseback to visit his pickets. The train crept warily over the spur into the old woodcutters’ camp, where, as Cooke had forecast, they were quite shut in from the main line by hills and woodland.
“And now, Mr. Ardmore, if you would like to see fire-water spring out of the earth as freely as spring water, come with me for a little stroll. The thirsty of Dilwell County know the way to these places as city topers know the way to a bar. We are now in the land of the little brown jug, and while these boys get breakfast I’ll see if the people in this region have changed their habits.”
It was not yet seven as they struck off into the forest beside the cheerful little brook that came down singing from the hills. Ardmore had rarely before in his life been abroad so early, and he kicked the dew from the grass in the cheerfullest spirit imaginable. Within a few days he had reared a pyramid of noble resolutions. Life at last entertained him. The way of men of action had been as fabulous to him as the dew that now twinkled before him. Griswold knew books, but here at his side strode a man who knew far more amazing things than were written in any book. Cooke had not been in this region for seven years, and yet he never hesitated, but walked steadily on, following the little brook. Presently he bent over the bank and gathered up a brownish substance that floated on the water, lifted a little of it in his palm, and sniffed it.
“That,” said Cooke, holding it to Ardmore’s nose, “is corn mash. That’s what they make their liquor out of. The still is probably away up yonder on that hillside. It seems to me that we smashed one there once when I was in the service; and over there, about a mile beyond that pine tree, where you see the hawk circling, three of us got into a mix-up, and one of our boys was killed.”
He crossed the stream on a log, climbed the bank on the opposite shore, and scanned the near landscape for a few minutes. Then he pointed to an old stump over which vines had grown in wild profusion.
“If you will, walk to that stump, Mr. Ardmore, and feel under the vines on the right-hand side, your fingers will very likely touch something smooth and cool.”
Ardmore obeyed instructions. He thrust his hand into the stump as Cooke directed, thrust again a little deeper, and laughed aloud as he drew out a little brown jug.
Cooke nodded approvingly.
“We’re all right. The revenue men come in here occasionally and smash the stills and arrest a few men, but the little brown jug continues to do business at the same old stand. They don’t even change the hiding-places. And while we stand here, you may be pretty sure that a freckled-faced, tow-headed boy or girl is watching us off yonder, and that the word will pass all through the hills before noon that there are strangers abroad in old Dilwell. If you have a dollar handy, slip it under the stump, so they’ll know we’re not stingy.”
Ardmore was scrutinizing the jug critically.
“They’re all alike,” said Cooke, “but that piece of calico is a new one—just a fancy touch for an extra fine article of liquor.”
“I’ll be shot if I haven’t seen that calico before,” said Ardmore; and he sat down on a boulder and drew out the stopper, while Cooke watched him with interest.
The bit of twine was indubitably the same that he had unwound before in his room at the Guilford House, and the cob parted in his fingers exactly as before. On a piece of brown paper that had been part of a tobacco wrapper was scrawled:
This ain’t yore fight, Mr. Ardmore. Wher’s the guvner of North Carolina?
“That’s a new one on me,” laughed Cooke. “You see, they know everything. Mind-reading isn’t in it with them. They know who we are and what we have come for. What’s the point about the governor?”
“Oh, the governor’s all right,” replied Ardmore carelessly. “He wouldn’t bother his head about a little matter like this. The powers reserved to the states by the constitution give a governor plenty of work without acting as policeman of the jungle. That’s the reason I said to Governor Dangerfield, ‘Governor,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about this Appleweight business. Time is heavy on my hands,’ I said. ‘You stay in Raleigh and uphold the dignity of your office, and I will take care of the trouble in Dilwell.’ And you can’t understand, Cooke, how his face brightened at my words. Being the brave man he is, you would naturally expect him to come down here in person and seize these scoundrels with his own hands. I had the hardest time of my life to get him to stay at home. It almost broke his heart not to come.”
And as they retraced their steps to the caboose, it was Ardmore who led, stepping briskly along, and blithely swinging the jug.