Chapter XXVI: Roaring Lafe

We reached the city of Asheville in the early morning and, upon Somers’ direction, entered a taxicab and had ourselves driven to a hotel.

“We’ll breakfast there,” he decided, “and find out a few things. Then I’ll get a saddle horse and start, and you two will wait for me here.”

“Not much!” said I.

“Nix!” declared Peter. “You can’t lose us; why, man, where’s that gorgeous idea of being a consumptive, unless we’re along?”

Somers shrugged. “Have it your own way, but it’s taking a long chance, fellows. This thing is serious; I hardly believed, myself, that they’d go so far, until that chap shot at me last night. It was Ralph Satterfield, all right, and no doubt he thought we were on our way to Raleigh to see the collector. He’ll have hurried over here cross-country before this, in Conover’s car, no doubt. If we should meet up with him in the hills we’re as good as dead men.”

I nodded soberly. “And if we give that fellow, Vanbrugh, a free hand, my nephew is as good as a dead man, too. No, Somers, I’m going along. Peter can stay here if he likes.”

But Peter did not consider this suggestion worthy even to be scorned. “After breakfast, what, chief?” he asked.

“We hunt up a revenue agent.”

Wondering if our leader would report the activities of Satterfield and Rutledge after all, we went to see the revenue agent. When we were shown into the quiet, businesslike office of the department of internal revenue, Somers merely asked for information as to one Lafe Rutledge. “I’m told he killed a revenue agent some years ago,” he explained. “Was he tried for that?”

The clerk eyed us dubiously. “I can’t give out any statement,” he told us. “You can see the chief if you like. What are you, newspaper men?”

Somers handed him a card, and presently we were shown into an inner office. Facing us from behind a flat-topped desk sat the same quiet, gray-haired man who had sat behind us on the train.

“What do you want to know about the man Rutledge?” he asked, looking at Somers’ card. Then: “Hel-lo! You’re the chap Satterfield was potting at last night!”

“So you knew the man’s name all the time?” asked Somers, a bit taken aback.

The other nodded. “This office is deeply interested in Mr. Ralph Satterfield,” he said grimly, “also in the gentleman after whom you are inquiring this morning. Suppose we have a showdown, doctor? I’m not the local chief; I’m on special duty here, but I can tell you all this department knows about Roaring Lafe. What’s your interest in him?”

Our leader sat down. “Perhaps you know who I am, too?”

“Oh, yes; Doctor Floyd Somers. You came from New York to be the best man at Doctor Parker’s wedding; and this, no doubt, is the doctor’s uncle, Mr. Uhlman--and Peter McGregor?”

We bowed, wondering.

“We looked you up, doctor,” explained the revenue agent, “because you were pretty thick with Satterfield for a while. What was the idea?”

Somers leaned forward. “You know about Doctor Gaskell’s murder, and the arrest of my friend Parker?” he asked.

“Oh, yes! In fact, this investigation was begun upon information furnished the collector by Gaskell.”

“Well, then!” Somers told him everything frankly, including our suspicions of Rutledge.

The government man listened with grave interest. “H’m,” said he, when the tale was done. “Our local men seem to have overlooked a lot. We didn’t go behind the verdict of the coroner’s court and the grand jury; took it for granted Parker killed Gaskell because of some personal quarrel. Coarse work, very! Some one will get a stiff call for this! Of course Rutledge did it. I should have thought of that myself. Well, after all, that is merely incidental; it doesn’t affect the main work of this office, which is to break up the illicit manufacture and sale of alcoholic liquors. And now, gentlemen, what can I do in return?”

“Tell us about Rutledge. Is he in hiding? Is there any criminal charge against him? Did he really murder one of your men?”

The agent nodded soberly. “There’s not a doubt of it in my mind, but we’ve no legal proof. No, gentlemen, there’s no criminal charge out against Roaring Lafe--as yet. And he’s not in hiding; he’s living openly in his own house, on Devil’s Branch, back in the hills.”

Somers rose. “I thought this was the safest place to make inquiries,” he explained. “Thank you, sir.”

“Hold on a minute! This office is indebted to you for your information, though I may say we knew most of these things before, except your suspicions about Gaskell’s murder; can’t we help you some way? What are your plans?”

The physician grinned. “Why, just to find this Roaring Lafe and have a chat. I’ll tell him Satterfield has admitted that he saw Gaskell shot, and that Rutledge did it--and see what happens. Then I’ll try to induce him to come along to jail with us, if I can.”

“You’ll get yourselves killed, the three of you!”

Somers shrugged. “It’s quite possible, but it is my business in life to extract information from folks who don’t want to give it. After one has practiced enough at getting statements from lunatics who haven’t spoken a word for years, it ought not to be so hard to badger an ignorant old man into confessing murder. I’m game to try, at least.”

“H’m! I think you’re a fool, but go ahead, if you insist. Remember this, though: That you never saw a lunatic as dangerous as Lafe Rutledge.”

With that pleasing assurance in our ears we left the revenue office and hired saddle horses for our trip into the hills. It was noon before we had topped the long slope, which leads up past the “Castle,” and left the concrete road to strike back along zigzag red clay roads, which led us into the hinterland. We paused for one look back toward civilization.

“Well,” said I, staring down at the ordered streets, centering in Pack Square, with its tall granite obelisk, “we may not all of us come back this way.”

“Cheerful old soul!” replied Peter, shifting in his saddle. “This nag has a beastly sharp backbone; I can feel it right through the leather. You might have stopped for lunch, at least, Somers.”

“Have another sandwich,” suggested our leader callously; for he had vetoed a further stay in the city. “Eat as you ride. We want to get somewhere before dark, and we’ve twenty miles to go.”

We struck back into the hills. Our patient horses scrambled up precipitous slopes, panting, sliding in the rough red clay; we slid down other slopes as steep, where the zigzag paths, that ran back and forth, seemed sharper than the pitch of a roof, and the hillside itself was almost straight up and down. The roads grew rougher and stonier and narrower, until they were mere bridle paths, mere trails, which wound and separated and forked and joined bewilderingly.

Mile after mile we rode, growing horribly saddle sore in the riding. The country about us was wild, primeval; tall pines masked the hillsides, interspersed with spruce and live oak and great, dense growths of that rhododendron which the mountain folk call “laurel.” Here and there, huddled upon the steep slopes, a tiny, unpainted shack overhung the winding road, its cornfield miraculously clinging to the side of a precipice. Dozens of lop-eared hound dogs regarded our passing with mournful gravity, or made headlong dashes, boiling out in baying mobs from beneath forlorn shacks to snap at our horses’ fetlocks. Sometimes a slatternly woman in a calico dress, roused to languid curiosity by their racket, came to an open door and looked after us with indifferent, lackluster eyes. Of men we saw nothing, save once.

Then I glanced up, warned by the pricking of my horse’s ears, to catch a glimpse of a fierce, bearded face, which glowered down at us from the rhododendrons above the trail. The sun, just dropping below a peak, glinted dully from a long rifle barrel, as it moved slightly to bear upon us.

“Cough, Somers! Cough!” I whispered.

Our leader, quick to grasp my hint, coughed nobly, until he swayed in the saddle, handkerchief to his lips.

I spurred forward to support him. “Easy, boys,” said I, loudly enough to be heard from the hillside I hoped. “The mountain air is hard on those lungs, but we’ll find a good place for your house to-morrow, I hope. Remember, the doctor said these hills were the only place you could live.”

We rode on; I, for one, with my heart in my throat. My back muscles quivered and flinched. But no bullet pierced them; no gunshot cut through the silence of the hills. After a mile or two I explained.

Somers shrugged. “They don’t seem to welcome strangers,” he admitted. “It’s a cheery country.” His eyes followed the sharp-toothed, jagged hills, which ringed us in; the abrupt, bleak mountains of North Carolina, whose ridges are too sharp-edged for concealment, were all about us, and the blue sky showed between the trunks of the single, straggling row of slender trees, which found difficult life there. “The hills look about as friendly as their people. Still, I don’t believe they’ll shoot us without stopping to ask questions first.”

With this dubious encouragement we rode on through the long shadows of sunset, which comes so early there; for the sun dropped behind the encircling hills in midafternoon, they were so high.

The rough trails wound on, forking and twisting, and we rode slower and slower, while our leader puzzled over the map Anne Christie had drawn. Dusk came on, and then darkness, and still we rode, Somers scowling uncertainly. At last we made out a point of light in the distance.

Our leader pulled up. “We’re lost,” he admitted. “I haven’t an idea which way to turn, even if we could see the trails, which we can’t. I move we stop at that house and ask our way.”

So we blundered on through the darkness, and that lone spark of light grew and became the oblong of an unglazed window, toward which our tired steeds trotted, unguided. A yelping, baying avalanche of dogs poured down the slope, to bark and snap at our horses’ legs, and to jump viciously up for a grip upon our own. We halted.

“Hello, the house!” called Somers, reluctant to dismount because of the dogs.

Abruptly the light above us went out. We heard a door close somewhere. Then the clamor of the hounds lessened, and presently it ceased. They lowered their tails, began to sneak away, as I could see through the dusk. And a harsh voice was raised, so close to us that I jumped involuntarily, and my horse plunged.

“What’s yore business here, strangers?”

Somers coughed promptly. “We’re honest travelers,” I explained. “My nephew here has consumption; his doctor has sent him into the mountains to live, and we’re hunting a place. Can you tell us how to reach Devil’s Branch?”

“Devil’s Branch?” The man’s voice held a queer, interrogative note. “Huh! Strike a light, stranger; le’me look at you-all. Hit’s a right onhealthy place for sick folks, the Devil’s Branch. Uh-_huh_!”

I despair of reproducing in print his twanging drawl, his quaint idiom, his pronunciations, so different from the speech of the lowlands, less than fifty miles away.

Somers lit a match obediently, and its flickering light shone on his lean, sallow face, exaggerating the hollows of his cheeks, throwing his bold, hooked nose into high relief.

“Huh?” asked the mountaineer. “’Member I got a bead on you-all agin’ th’ sky line! Are puny lookin’, hain’t yuh?” Then with renewed suspicion: “What you-all lookin’ for on Devil’s Branch?”

“A place to build a cabin,” I told him.

“Down, Tige!” he said, as one of the hounds began to yap again. “Hit’s a right cur’us place fer furriners. Don’t look right t’ me, nohow. Huh? Hain’t my lookout, no ways; hit’s Lafe’s bus’ness. You-all jus’ keep a-goin’ up th’ Branch yander an’ pass two li’l’ runs; at th’ next run don’t go no furderer, but turn up hit an’ foller ’long.”

“How far?”

“Hit’s right smart of a piece--mebbe two set-downs an’ a long look. Yassuh, hit’s all o’ that.”

“And how’ll we know when we get there?”

The mountaineer chuckled. “Ho, you-all’ll _know_. Ho, yas! Hain’t no wonderment ’bout that!”

I asked another question, but there was no reply. The man had vanished as silently as he had come; his long gun barrel no longer showed faintly, menacing us. I was relieved. We rode on, our tired horses stumbling and laboring among the loose pebbles, following directions as best we might in that Stygian blackness.

We passed by the two runs and turned up the third, which seemed to lead steeply up through a narrow valley, almost a cañon. On either side long, sharp ridges stood blackly out against the sky.

The way grew rougher, steeper; the horses stumbled over fallen logs, brambles tore at our clothing, unseen branches whipped back and cut smartly across our faces. At last we stopped again, unable to advance another step through this tangled maze.

Somers dismounted. “Looks like we sleep out, unk,” he remarked, forced cheerfulness in his tired tones. “We’re stuck. I wish I could lay my hands on Roaring Lafe Rutledge!”

A deep voice answered him from the bushes. We all started violently, and I think I cried out.

“You kin, stranger!”