The Power and the Glory - Grace MacGowan Cooke
THE POWER AND THE GLORY
By GRACE MACGOWAN COOKE
Author of "Mistress Joy," "Huldah," "Their First Formal Call," etc.
WITH FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR I. KELLER
1910
TO HELEN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE BIRTH OF A WOMAN-CHILD
II. THE BIRTH OF AN AMBITION
III. A PEAK IN DARIEN
IV. OF THE USE OF FEET
V. THE MOCCASIN FLOWER
VI. WEAVERS AND WEFT
VII. ABOVE THE VALLEY
VIII. OF THE USE OF WINGS
IX. A BIT OF METAL
X. THE SANDALS OF JOY
XI. THE NEW BOARDER
XII. THE CONTENTS OF A BANDANNA
XIII. A PATIENT FOR THE HOSPITAL
XIV. WEDDING BELLS
XV. THE FEET OF THE CHILDREN
XVI. BITTER WATERS
XVII. A VICTIM
XVIII. LIGHT
XIX. A PACT
XX. MISSING
XXI. THE SEARCH
XXII. THE ATLAS VERTEBRA
XXIII. A CLUE
XXIV. THE RESCUE
XXV. THE FUTURE
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Yes, I'm a-going to get a chance to work right away," she smiled up at
him. _Frontispiece_
He loomed above them, white and shaking. "You thieves!" he roared. "Give
me my bandanner! Give me Johnnie's silver mine!"
"Lost--gone! My God, Mother--it's three days and three nights!"
The car was already leaping down the hill at a tremendous pace.
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF A WOMAN-CHILD
"Whose cradle's that?" the sick woman's thin querulous tones arrested
the man at the threshold.
"Onie Dillard's," he replied hollowly from the depths of the crib which
he carried upside down upon his head, like some curious kind of
overgrown helmet.
"Now, why in the name o' common sense would ye go and borry a broken
cradle?" came the wail from the bed. "I 'lowed you'd git Billy
Spinner's, an' hit's as good as new."
Uncle Pros set the small article of furniture down gently.
"Don't you worry yo'se'f, Laurelly," he said enthusiastically. Pros
Passmore, uncle of the sick woman and mainstay of the forlorn little
Consadine household, was always full of enthusiasm. "Just a few nails
and a little wrappin' of twine'll make it all right," he informed his
niece. "I stopped a-past and borried the nails and the hammer from Jeff
Dawes; I mighty nigh pounded my thumb off knockin' in nails with a rock
an' a sad-iron last week."
"Looks like nobody ain't got no sense," returned Laurella Consadine
ungratefully. "Even you, Unc' Pros--while you borryin' why cain't ye
borry whole things that don't need mendin'?"
Out of the shadows that hoarded the further end of the room came a woman
with a little bundle in her arm which had evidently created the
necessity for the borrowed cradle.
"Laurelly," the nurse hesitated, "I wouldn't name it to ye whilst ye was
a-sufferin,' but I jest cain't find the baby's clothes nowhars. I've
done washed the little trick and wrapped her in my flannen petticoat. I
do despise to put anything on 'em that anybody else has wore ... hit
don't seem right. But I've been plumb through everything, an' cain't
find none of her coats. Whar did you put 'em?"
"I didn't have no luck borryin' for this one," complained the sick woman
fretfully. "Looks like everybody's got that mean that they wouldn't lend
me a rag ... an' the Lord knows I only ast a _wearin'_ of the clothes
for my chillen. Folks can make shore that I return what I borry--ef the
Lord lets me."
"Ain't they nothin' to put on the baby?" asked Mavity Bence, aghast.
"No. Hit's jest like I been tellin' ye, I went to Tarver's wife--she's
got a plenty. I knowed in reason she'd have baby clothes that she
couldn't expect to wear out on her own chillen. I said as much to her,
when she told me she was liable to need 'em befo' I did. I says, 'Ye
cain't need more'n half of 'em, I reckon, an' half'll do me, an' I'll
return 'em to ye when I'm done with 'em.' She acted jest as
selfish--said she'd like to know how I was goin' to inshore her that it
wouldn't be twins agin same as 'twas before. Some folks is powerful mean
an' suspicious."
All this time the nurse had been standing with the quiet small packet
which was the storm centre of preparation lying like a cocoon or a giant
seed-pod against her bosom.
"She's a mighty likely little gal," said she finally. "Have ye any hopes
o' gittin' anything to put on her?"
The woman in the bed--she was scarcely more than a girl, with shining
dark eyes and a profusion of jetty ringlets about her elfish, pretty
little face--seemed to feel that this speech was in the nature of a
reproach. She hastened to detail her further activities on behalf of
the newcomer.
"Consadine's a poor provider," she said plaintively, alluding to her
absent husband. "Maw said to me when I would have him that he was a poor
provider; and then he's got into this here way of goin' off like. Time
things gets too bad here at home he's got a big scheme up for makin' his
fortune somewhars else, and out he puts. He 'lowed he'd be home with a
plenty before the baby come. But thar--he's the best man that ever was,
when he's here, and I have no wish to miscall him. I reckon he thought I
could borry what I'd need. Biney Meal lent me enough for the little un
that died; but of course some o' the coats was buried with the child;
and what was left, Sis' Elvira borried for her baby. I was layin' off to
go over to the Deep Spring neighbourhood when I could git a lift in that
direction--the folks over yon is mighty accommodative," she concluded,
"but I was took sooner than I expected, and hyer we air without a
stitch, I've done sont Bud an' Honey to Mandy Ann Foncher's mebby
they'll bring in somethin'."
The little cabin shrank back against the steep side of the mountain as
though half terrified at the hollow immensity of the welkin above, or
the almost sheer drop to the valley five hundred feet beneath. A sidling
mountain trail passed the front of its rail fence, and stones
continually rolled from the upper to the lower side of this highway.
The day was darkening rapidly. A low line of red still burned behind the
massive bulk of Big Unaka, and the solemn purple mountains raised their
peaks against it in a jagged line. Within die single-roomed cabin the
rich, broken light from the cavernous fireplace filled the smoke-browned
interior full of shadow and shine in which things leaped oddly into
life, or dropped out of knowledge with a startling effect. The four
corners of the log room were utilized, three of them for beds, made by
thrusting two poles through auger holes bored in the logs of the walls,
setting a leg at the corner where these met and lacing the bottom with
hickory withes. The fourth had some rude planks nailed in it for a
table, and a knot-hole in one of the logs served the primitive purpose
of a salt-cellar. A pack of gaunt hounds quarrelled under the floor, and
the sick woman stirred uneasily on her bed and expressed a wish that her
emissaries would return.
Uncle Pros had taken the cradle to a back door to get the last of the
evening sun upon his task. One would not have thought that he could hear
what the women were saying at this distance, but the old hunter's ears
were sharp.
"Never you mind, Laurelly," he called cheerfully. "Wrop the baby up some
fashion, and I'll hike out and get clothes for her, time I mend
this cradle."
"Ef that ain't just like Unc' Pros!" And the girlish mother laughed out
suddenly. You saw the gypsy beauty of her face. "He ain't content with
borryin' men's truck, but thinks he can turn in an' borry coats 'mongst
the women. Well, I reckon he might have better luck than what I did."
As she spoke a small boy and girl, her dead brother's children, came
clattering in from the purple mysteries of dusk outside, hand clasped in
hand, and stopped close to the bed, staring.
"Mandy Ann, she wouldn't lend us a thing," Bud began in an aggrieved
tone. "I traded for this--chopped wood for it--and hit was all she would
give me." He laid a coarse little garment upon the ragged coverlet.
"That!" cried Laurella Passmore, taking it up with angrily tremulous
fingers. "My child shain't wear no sech. Hit ain't fittin' for my baby
to put on. Oh, I wisht I could git up from here and do about; I'd git
somethin' for her to wear!"
"Son," said Mrs. Bence, approaching the bedside, "air ye afeared to go
over as far as my house right now?"
"I ain't skeered ef Honey'll go with me," returned the boy doubtfully,
as he interrogated the twilit spaces beyond the open cabin door.
"Well, you go ask Pap to look in the green chist and send me the spotted
caliker poke that he'll find under the big bun'le. Don't you let him
give you that thar big bun'le; 'caze that's not a thing but seed corn,
and he'll be mad ef it's tetched. Fell Pap that what's in the spotted
poke ain't nothin' that he wants. Tell him it's--well, tell him to look
at it before he gives it to you."
The two little souls scuttled away into the gathering dark, and the
neighbour woman sat down by the fire to nurse the baby and croon and
await the clothing for which she had sent.
She was not an old woman, but already stiff and misshapen by toil and
the lack of that saving salt of pride, the stimulation of joy, which
keeps us erect and supple. Her broad back was bent; her hands as they
shifted the infant tenderly were knotted and work-worn. Mavity Bence was
a widow, living at home with her father, Gideon Himes; she had one child
left, a daughter; but the clothing for which she had sent was an outfit
made for a son, the posthumous offspring of his father; and the babe had
not lived long enough to wear it.
Outside, Uncle Pros began to sing at his work. He had a fluty old tenor
voice, and he put in turns and quavers that no ear not of the mountains
could possibly follow and fix. First it was a hymn, all abrupt, odd,
minor cadences and monotonous refrain. Then he shifted to a ballad--and
the mountains are full of old ballads of Scotland and England, come down
from the time of the first settlers, and with local names quaintly
substituted for the originals here and there.
"She's gwine to walk in a silken gownd,
An' ha'e plenty o' siller for to spare,"
chanted the old man above the little bed he was repairing.
"Who's that you're a-namin' that's a-goin' to have silk dresses?"
inquired Laurella, as he entered and set the mended cradle down by
the bedside.
"The baby." he returned. "Ef I find my silver mine--or ruther _when_ I
find my silver mine, for you know in reason with the directions Pap's
Grandpap left, and that word from Great Uncle Billy that helped the
Injuns work it, I'm bound to run the thing down one o' these days--when
I find my silver mine this here little gal's a-goin' to have everything
she wants--ain't ye, Pretty?"
And, having made a bed in the cradle from some folded covers, he lifted
the baby with strange deftness and placed it in.
"See thar," he called their attention proudly. "As good as new. And ef I
git time I'm a-goin' to give it a few licks o' paint."
Hands on knees, he bent to study the face of the new-born, that
countenance so ambiguous to our eyes, scarce stamped yet with the common
seal of humanity.
"She's a mighty pretty little gal," he repeated Mavity Bence's words.
"She's got the Passmore favour, as well as the Consadine. Reckon I
better be steppin' over to Vander's and see can I borry their cow. If
it's with you this time like it was with the last one, we'll have to
have a cow. I always thought if we'd had a fresh cow for that other one,
hit would 'a' lived. I know in reason Vander'll lend the cow for a
spell"--Uncle Pros always had unbounded confidence in the good will of
his neighbours toward himself, since his own generosity to them would
have been fathomless--"I know in reason he'll lend hit, 'caze they ain't
got no baby to their house."
He bestowed one more proud, fond look upon the little face in the
borrowed cradle, and walked out with as elated a step as though a queen
had been born to the tribe.
In the doorway he met Bud and Honey, returning with the spotted calico
poke clutched fast between them.
"I won't ask nothin' but a wearin' of em for my child," Laurella
Consadine, born Laurella Passmore, reiterated when the small garments
were laid out on the bed, and the baby was being dressed. "They're
mighty fine, Mavity, an' I'll take good keer of 'em and always bear in
mind that they're only borried."
"No," returned Mavity Bence, with unwonted firmness, as she put the
newcomer into the slip intended for her own son. "No, Laurelly, these
clothes ain't loaned to you. I give 'em to this child. I'm a widder, and
I never look to wed again, becaze Pap he has to have somebody to do for
him, an' he'd just about tear up the ground if I was to name sech a
thing. I'm mighty glad to give 'em to yo' little gal. I only wisht," she
said wistfully, "that hit was a boy. Ef hit was a boy, mebbe you'd give
hit the name that should 'a' went with the clothes. I was a-goin' to
call the baby John after hit's pappy."
Laurella Consadine lay quiescent for a moment, big black eyes studying
the smoky logs that raftered the roof. Then all at once she laughed,
with a flash of white teeth.
"I don't see why Johnnie ain't a mighty fine name for a gal," she said.
"I vow I'm a-goin' to name her Johnnie!"
And so this one of the tribe of borrowing Passmores wore her own
clothing from the first. No borrowed garment touched her. She rejected
the milk from the borrowed cow, fiercely; lustily she demanded--and
eventually received--her own legitimate, unborrowed sustenance.
Perhaps such a beginning had its own influence upon her future.
CHAPTER II
THE BIRTH OF AN AMBITION
All day the girl had walked steadily, her bare feet comforted by the
warm dust, shunning the pebbles, never finding sham stones in the way,
making friends with the path--that would always be Johnnie. From the
little high-hung valley in the remote fastnesses of the Unakas where she
was born, Johnnie Consadine was walking down to Cottonville, the factory
town on the outskirts of Watauga, to find work. Sometimes the road wound
a little upward for a quarter of a mile or so; but the general tendency
was persistently down.
In the gray dawn of Sunday morning she had stepped from the door of that
room where the three beds occupied three corners, and a rude table was
rigged in the fourth. It might almost seem that the same hounds were
quarrelling under the floor that had scrambled there eighteen years
before when she was born. At first the way was entirely familiar to her.
It passed few habitations, and of those the dwellers were not yet
abroad, since it was scarce day. As time went on she got to the little
settlement at the foot of the first mountain, and had to explain to
everybody her destination and ambition. Beyond this, she stopped
occasionally for direction, she met more people; yet she was still in
the heart of the mountains when noon found her, and she crept up a
wayside bank and sat down alone to eat her bite of corn pone.
Guided by the instinct--or the wood-craft--of the mountain born and
bred, she had sought out one of the hermit springs of beautiful
freestone water that hide in these solitudes. When she had slaked her
thirst at its little ice-cold chalice, she raised her head with a low
exclamation of rapture. There, growing and blowing beside the cool
thread of water which trickled from the spring, was a stately pink
moccasin flower. She knelt and gazed at it with folded hands, as one
before a shrine.
What is it in the sweeping dignity of these pointed, oval,
parallel-veined leaves, sheathed one within another, the clean column of
the bloom stalk rising a foot and a half perhaps above, and at its tip
the wonderful pink, dreaming Buddha of the forest, that so commands the
heart? It was not entirely the beauty of the softly glowing orchid that
charmed Johnnie Consadine's eyes; it was the significance of the flower.
Somehow the finding this rare, shy thing decking her path toward labour
and enterprise spoke to her soul of success. For a long time she knelt,
her bright uncovered head dappled by a ray of sunlight which filtered
through the deep, cool green above her, her face bent, her eyes
brooding, as though she prayed. When she had finished her dinner of corn
pone and fried pork, she rose and parted with almost reverent fingers
the pink wonder from its stalk, sought out a coarse, clean handkerchief
from her bundle and, steeping it in the icy water of the spring, lapped
it around her treasure. Not often in her eighteen summers had she found
so fine a specimen. Then she took up her journey, comforted and
strangely elated.
"Looks like it was waiting right there to tell me howdy," she murmured
to herself.
The keynote of Johnnie Consadine's character was aspiration. In her
cabin home the wings of desire were clipped, because she must needs put
her passionate young soul into the longing for food, to quiet the
cravings of a healthy stomach, which generally clamoured from one
blackberry season to the other; the longing for shoes, when her feet
were frostbitten; the yet more urgent wish to feed the little ones she
loved; the pressing demand, when the water-bucket gave out and they had
to pack water in a tin tomato can with a string bail; the dull ache of
mortification when she became old enough to understand their position as
the borrowing Passmores. Yet all human desire is sacred, and of God; to
desire--to want--to aspire--thus shall the individual be saved; and
surely in this is the salvation of the race. And Johnnie felt vaguely
that at last she was going out into a world where she should learn what
to desire and how to desire it.
Now as she tramped she was conning over her present plans. Again she saw
the cabin at home in that pitchy black which precedes the first
leavening of dawn, and herself getting up to start early on the long
walk. Her mother would get up too, and that was foolish. She saw the
slight figure stooping to rake together the embers in the broad
chimney's throat that the coffee-pot might be set on. She remonstrated
with the little mother, saying that she aimed not to disturb
anybody--not even Uncle Pros.
"Uncle Pros!" Laurella echoed from the hearthstone, where she sat on her
heels, like a little girl playing at mud-pies. Johnnie smiled at the
memory of how her mother laughed over the suggestion, with a drawing of
slant brows above big, tragic dark eyes, a look of suffering from the
mirth which adds the crown to joyousness. "Your Uncle Pros he got a
revelation 'long 'bout midnight as to just whar that thar silver mine is
that's been dodgin' him for more'n forty year. He come a-shakin' me by
the shoulder--like I reckon he's done fifty times ef he's done it
once--and telling me that he's off to make all our fortunes inside of a
week. He said if you still would go down to that thar old fool cotton
mill and hire out, to name it to you that Shade Buckheath would stand
some watchin'. Your Uncle Pros has got sense--in streaks. Why in the
world you'll pike out and go to work in a cotton mill is more than I
can cipher."
"To take care of you and the children," the girl had said, standing tall
and straight, deep-bosomed and red-lipped, laughing back at her little
mother. "Somebody's got to take care of you-all, and I just love to
be the one."
Laurella Consadine, commonly called in mountain fashion by her maiden
name of Laurella Passmore, scrambled to her feet and tossed the dark
curls out of her eyes.
"Aw--law--huh!" she returned carelessly. "We'll get along; we always
have. How do you reckon I made out before you was born, you great big
somebody? What's the matter with you? Did you fail to borry a frock for
the dance over at Rainy Gap? Try again, honey--I'll bet S'lomy Buckheath
would lend you one o' her'n."
That was it; borrowing--borrowing--borrowing till they were known as the
borrowing Passmores and became the jest of the neighbourhood.
"No, I couldn't stand it," the girl justified herself. "I had obliged to
get out and go where money could be earned--me, that's big and stout
and able."
And sighingly--yet light-heartedly, for with Laurella Consadine and
Johnnie there was always the quaint suggestion of a little girl with a
doll quite too big for her--the mother let her go. It had been just so
when Johnnie would have her time for every term of the "old field
hollerin' school," where she learned to read and write; even when she
persisted in going to Rainy Gap where some charitably inclined northern
church maintained a little school, and pushed her education to dizzy
heights that to mountain vision appeared "plumb foolish."
That morning she had cautioned her mother to be careful lest they waken
the children, for if the little ones roused and began, as the mountain
phrase has it, "takin' on," she scarcely knew how she should find heart
to leave them. The children--there was the thing that drove. Four small
brothers and sisters there were; with little Deanie, the youngest, to
make the painfully strong plea of recent babyhood. Consadine, who never
could earn money, and used to be from home following one wild scheme or
another most of the time, was gone these two years upon his last
dubious, adventurous journey; there was not even his intermittent
assistance to depend upon. Johnnie was the man of the family, and she
shouldered her burden bravely, declaring to herself that she would yet
have a chance, which the little ones could share.
She had kissed her mother, picked up her bundle and got as far as the
door, when there came a spat of bare feet meeting the floor, a pattering
rush, and Deanie's short arms went around her knees, almost tripping
her up.
"I wasn't 'sleep--I was 'wake the whole time," whispered the baby,
lifting a warm, pursed mouth for a kiss. "Deanie'll be good an' let you
go, Sis' Johnnie. An' then when you get down thar whar it's all so
sightly, you'll send for Deanie, 'cause deed and double you couldn't
live without her, now could ye?" And she looked craftily up into the
face bent above her, bravely choking back the tears that wanted to drown
her long speech.
Johnnie dropped her bundle and caught up the child, crushing the warm,
soft, yielding little form against her breast in a very passion of
tenderness.
"Deed and double I couldn't," she whispered back. "Sister's goin' to
earn money, and Deanie shall have plenty of good things to eat next
winter, and some shoes. She shan't be housed up every time it snows.
Sis's goin' to--"
She broke off abruptly and kissed the small face with vehemence.
"Good-bye," she managed to whisper, as she set the baby down and turned
to her mother. The kindling touch of that farewell warmed her resolution
yet. She was not going down to Cottonville to work in the mill merely;
she was going into the Storehouse of Possibilities, to find and buy a
chance in the world for these poor little souls who could never have it
otherwise.
Before she kissed her mother, took up her bundle and trudged away in the
chill, gray dawn, she declared an intention to come home and pay back
every one to whom they were under obligations. Now her face dimpled as
she remembered the shriek of dismay Laurella sent after her.
"Good land, Johnnie Consadine! If you start in to pay off all the
borryin's of the Passmore family since you was born, you'll ruin
us--that's what you'll do--you'll ruin us."
These things acted themselves over and over in Johnnie's mind as,
throughout the fresh April afternoon, her long, free, rhythmic step, its
morning vigour undiminished, swung the miles behind her; still present
in thought when, away down in Render's Gap, she settled herself on a
rock by the wayside where a little stream crossed the road, to wash her
feet and put on the shoes which she had up to this time carried with
her bundle.
"I reckon I must be near enough town to need 'em," she said regretfully,
as she drew the big, shapeless, cowhide affairs on her slim, brown,
carefully washed and dried feet, and with a leathern thong laced down a
wide, stiff tongue. She had earned the money for these shoes picking
blackberries at ten cents the gallon, and Uncle Pros had bought them at
the store at Bledsoe according to his own ideas. "Get 'em big enough and
there won't be any fussin' about the fit," the old man explained his
theory: and indeed the fit of those shoes on Johnnie's feet was not a
thing to fuss over--it was past considering.
The sun was westering; the Gap began to be in shadow, although the point
at which she sat was well above the valley. The girl was all at once
aware that she was tired and a little timid of what lay before her. She
had written to Shade Buckheath, a neighbour's boy with whom she had gone
to school, now employed as a mechanic or loom-fixer in one of the cotton
mills, and from whom she had received a reply saying that she could get
work in Cottonville if she would come down.
Mavity Bence, who had given Johnnie her first clothes, was a weaver in
the Hardwick mill at Cottonville, Watauga's milling suburb; her father,
Gideon Himes, with whom Shade Buckheath learned his trade, was a skilled
mechanic, and had worked as a loom-fixer for a while. At present he was
keeping a boarding-house for the hands, and it was here Johnnie was to
find lodging. Shade himself was reported to be doing extremely well. He
had promised in his letter that if Johnnie came on a Sunday evening he
would walk up the road a piece and meet her. She now began to hope that
he would come. Then, waiting for him, she forgot him, and set herself to
imagine what work in the cotton mill and life in town would be like.