PAGE 7
The Riddle Of The Rocks
by
In the other hand he held a yellowed old paper. Now and then he bent his earnest dark eyes upon the grant, made many a year ago by the State of Tennessee to his grandfather; for there had been no subsequent conveyances.
The blacksmith had come begirt with his leather apron, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and with his hammer in his hand, an inopportune customer having jeopardized his chance of sharing in the sensation of the day. The other neighbors all wore their coats closely buttoned. Blinks carried his violin hung upon his back; the sharp timbre of the wind, cutting through the leafless boughs of the stunted woods, had a kindred fibrous resonance. Clouds hung low far beneath them; here and there, as they looked, the trees on the slopes showed above and again below the masses of clinging vapors. Sometimes close at hand a peak would reveal itself, asserting the solemn vicinage of the place, then draw its veil slowly about it, and stand invisible and in austere silence. The surveyor, a stalwart figure, his closely buttoned coat giving him a military aspect, looked disconsolately downward.
“I hoped I’d die before this,” he remarked. “I’m equal to getting over anything in nature that’s flat or oblique, but the vertical beats me.”
He bent to take sight for a moment, the group silently watching him. Suddenly he came to the perpendicular, and strode off down the rugged slope over gullies and bowlders, through rills and briery tangles, his eyes distended and eager as if he were led into the sylvan depths by the lure of a vision. The chain-bearers followed, continually bending and rising, the recurrent genuflections resembling the fervors of some religious rite. The chain rustled sibilantly among the dead leaves, and was ever and anon drawn out to its extremest length. Then the dull clank of the links was silent.
“Stick!” called out the young mountaineer in the rear.
“Stuck!” responded his comrade ahead.
And once more the writhing and jingling among the withered leaves. The surveyor strode on, turning his face neither to the right nor to the left, with his Jacob’s-staff held upright before him. The other men trooped along scatteringly, dodging under the low boughs of the stunted trees. They pressed hastily together when the great square rocks–Moses’ tables of the Law–came into view, lying where it was said the man of God flung them upon the sere slope below, both splintered and fissured, and one broken in twain. The surveyor was bearing straight down upon them. The men running on either side could not determine whether the line would fall within the spot or just beyond. They broke into wild exclamations.
“Ye may hammer me out ez flat ez a skene,” cried the blacksmith, “ef I don’t b’lieve ez Purdee hev got ’em.”
“Naw, sir, naw!” cried another fervent amateur; “thar’s the north. I jes now viewed Grinnell’s dad’s deed; the line undertakes ter run with Pur-dee’s line; he hev got seven hunderd poles ter the north; ef they air a-goin’ ter the north, them tables o’ the Law air Grinnell’s.”
A wild chorus ensued.
“Naw!” “Yes!” “Thar they go!” “A-bear-in’ off that-a-way!” “Beats my time!” as they stumbled and scuttled alongside the acolytes of the Compass, who bowed down and rose up at every length of the chain. Suddenly a cry from the chain-bearers.
“Out!”
Stillness ensued.
The surveyor stopped to register the “out.” It was a moment of thrilling suspense; the rocks lay only a few chains further; Grinnell, into whose confidence doubt had begun to be instilled, said to himself, all a-tremble, that he would hardly have staked his veracity, his standing with the brethren, if he had realized that it was so close a matter as this. He had long known that his father owned the greater part of the unproductive wilderness lying between the two ravines; the land was almost worthless by reason of the steep slants which rendered it utterly untillable. He was sure that by the terms of his deed, which his father had from its vendor, Squire Bates, his line included the Moses’ tables on which Purdee had built so fallacious a repute of holiness. He looked once more at the paper–“thence from Crystal Spring with Purdee’s line north seven hundred poles to a stake in the middle of the river.”