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The Last Stetson
by
Outside the sun was warm, the flood was calling from the dam, and the boy’s petulance was gone at once. For a moment he stood on the rude platform watching the tide; then he let one bare foot into the water, and, with a shiver of delight, dropped from the boards. In a moment his clothes were on the ground behind a laurel thicket, and his slim white body was flashing like a faun through the reeds and bushes up stream. A hundred yards away the creek made a great loop about a wet thicket of pine and rhododendron, and he turned across the bushy neck. Creeping through the gnarled bodies of rhododendron, he dropped suddenly behind the pine, and lay flat in the black earth. Ten yards through the dusk before him was the half-bent figure of a man letting an old army haversack slip from one shoulder; and Isom watched him hide it with a rifle under a bush, and go noiselessly on towards the road. It was Crump, Eli Crump, who had been a spy for the Lewallens in the old feud and who was spying now for old Steve Brayton. It was the second time Isom had seen him lurking about, and the boy’s impulse was to hurry back to the mill. But it was still peace, and without his gun Crump was not dangerous; so Isom rose and ran on, and, splashing into the angry little stream, shot away like a roll of birch bark through the tawny crest of a big wave. He had done the feat a hundred times; he knew every rock and eddy in flood-time, and he floated through them and slipped like an eel into the mill-pond. Old Gabe was waiting for him.
“Whut ye mean, boy,” he said, sharply, “reskin’ the fever an’ ager this way? No wonder folks thinks ye air half crazy. Git inter them clothes now ‘n’ come in hyeh. You’ll ketch yer death o’ cold swimmin’ this way atter a fresh.”
The boy was shivering when he took his seat at the funnel, but he did not mind that; some day he meant to swim over that dam. Steve still lay motionless in the corner near him, and Isom lifted the slouched hat and began tickling his lips with a straw. Steve was beyond the point of tickling, and Isom dropped the hat back and turned to tell the miller what he had seen in the thicket. The dim interior darkened just then, and Crump stood in the door. Old Gabe stared hard at him without a word of welcome, but Crump shuffled to a chair unasked, and sat like a toad astride it, with his knees close up under his arms, and his wizened face in his hands.
Meeting Isom’s angry glance, he shifted his own uneasily.
“Seed the new preacher comm’ ‘long today?” he asked. Drawing one dirty finger across his forehead, “Got a long scar ‘cross hyeh.”
The miller shook his head.
“Well, he’s a-comm’. I’ve been waitin’ fer him up the road, but I reckon I got to git ‘cross the river purty soon now.”
Crump had been living over in Breathitt since the old feud. He had been “convicted” over there by Sherd Raines, a preacher from the Jellico Hills, and he had grown pious. Indeed, he had been trailing after Raines from place to place, and he was following the circuit-rider now to the scene of his own deviltry–Hazlan.
“Reckon you folks don’t know I got the cirkit-rider to come over hyeh, do ye?” he went on. “Ef he can’t preach! Well, I’d tell a man! He kin jus’ draw the heart out’n a holler log! He ‘convicted’ me fust night, over thar in Breathitt. He come up thar, ye know, to stop the feud, he said; ‘n’ thar was laughin’ from one eendo’ Breathitt to t’other; but thar was the whoppinest crowd thar I ever see when he did come. The meetin’-house wasn’t big enough to hold ’em, so he goes out on the aidge o’ town, n’ climbs on to a stump. He hed a woman with him from the settlemints–she’s a-waitin’ at Hazlan fer him now-‘n’ she had a cur’us little box, ‘n’ he put her ‘n’ the box on a big rock, ‘n’ started in a callin’ ’em his bretherin’ ‘n’ sisteren, ‘n’ folks seed mighty soon thet he meant it, too. He’s always mighty easylike, tell he gits to the blood-penalty.”