 | XLIII.
JACK THE CROW. Lucy Arlyn |  |
43. XLIII.
JACK THE CROW.
THE first splendors of the east were kindling over
the mountain when Aaron Burble went up in
the dewy shadow, with two fugitives and the day
before him.
It was deemed of the highest importance that Mr. Murk
and Mad should be produced at the inquest; and the constable,
who had observed their movements on the crag the
previous afternoon, and shrewdly guessed their purpose, had
formed a plan for their capture. Accordingly, while two
deputies were sent to lie in ambush at the ice-bed, and watch
the rocks, he proceeded alone to the summit.
Steaming and blowing up the long, steep path from Biddikin's
house, in the fresh morning prime, went the burly constable,
regardless of the glory flushing the tree-tops above
him, of the lisping rills drizzling in gleam and shade down the
glistening rock-sides, of the delicate mosses and tender young
leaves of the saplings; breathing the gracious mountain air in
a most ox-like, unpoetical fashion; intent, flesh and spirit, on
solid men, who, if they receive any unconscious influx of
beauty and divine life from God's overflowing urn, straightway
convert it into muscle and fat, and go contentedly
grunting.
He reached the summit, and stood upon the rocks, the bald
and wrinkled rocks, upturned to heaven like the brows of sad
old Saturn scowling at lost Olympus.
“The idea of spending a man's life digging for treasure in
such a place as this!” he said, wiping his sweaty face, with
a satirical chuckle, as he peeped down into the dismal empty
shaft. “Lord, what fools some folks be!”
And how wise, O Aaron! are some of the rest of us, in
our own conceit! As if, justly considered, you, now, were
spending your days any more profitably than the fanatics you
jeer at. Is enthusiasm so much more despicable than dull
animality? Are you, solid, worthy man, boring no useless
holes in the stony crust of worldliness, which contains all the
treasure you have any conception of? and may not you, also,
awake some judgment-day morning to find that your persistent
and toilsome digging has been all illusion? Come, let
us stop laughing at fools till we have got over our folly.
The rope is wound upon the windlass, the tub lies upset
on the stones; and Aaron concludes that the fugitives cannot
be in the shaft, which one can neither get into nor out of,
as it looks, without a helping hand at the spokes. So he turns
his back upon the summit, and advances towards the cliff, — to
On that brink he rests. Nothing is visible below
but the still, shadowy precipice, the dizzy slant of mountain
wall, the bushy thickets, the cataracts of stones, untouched
by the morning sun; the terrible desolation unrelieved by the
presence of any living thing.
Aaron shrugs his thick shoulders at the view. Suppose
the fugitives to be anywhere in that rocky wilderness which
his eye can sweep, how are they ever to be detected? He
remembers Mad's brag at the bear-hunt, — how he could hide
among those rocks where no officer could find him out, — and
concludes that the rascal was not far wrong. However, an
effort must be made; and after waiting half an hour to see
if any game will stir, and perceiving only a single crow cawing
far down under the crags, he resolves to beat the bushes
towards his ambushed men.
There was an angle of the cliff, which, like a stupendous
jagged nose, bent down into a dense hemlock tangle that
grew as a whisker on the face of the precipice. This was the
spot where the philanthropist concluded not to risk his valuable
limbs: but this way Aaron will descend, in the hope of starting
his game; and he climbs over the cliff.
In the hush and refulgence of the early day, behold a fly
on the mountain's nose! They in the village may, with unassisted
vision, discern it crawling slowly; and from valley
and from peak, within a compass of a dozen miles, any hunter
with his glass may examine the curious creature. A speck,
a man!
Viewed from far, it is astonishing; but to us, bringing the
object near as we please with the telescope of the imagination,
it is also a little ludicrous. Broad stern foremost, a spectacle
to the blue universe; the legs blindly feeling their way down
the crag, making short steps between the sublime and the
ridiculous; the hands grasping at any crevice or shrub; the
abdominal buttons scratching the rocks; stopping to sneeze,
at that appalling altitude, — thus gropes the burly constable.
He dips into shadow, and at length drops into the thickets.
There his corpulence has to be squeezed through excruciatingly
tight places, under and between the spiked hemlocks. He
scratches himself; he prepares the way for one or several of
Rhoda's excellent patches on his nether garments; he loses
his hat, and gets caught à l'Absalom; till at last, hot and
blown, he reaches a cataract of stones, which spreads downward
to larger rocks below.
All this time he has proceeded with the eye of vigilance.
And he now carefully observes the conduct of that only living
thing besides himself discernible under the cliff; to wit, the
crow. It comes flapping down close to his head, as crows
are not wont to do; cawing carnivorously, as if with a view
to the many merry breakfasts he might enjoy if fat Aaron
would but have the kindness to get a tumble, and remain
sticking there on the crag, in some spot convenient for picking
stray bones.
There is a chance of the bird's reasonable desire being
gratified; for Aaron has hardly set his foot on the stones,
to slide, to crush, to grind, to pour and rattle down, sweeping
him swiftly towards shipwreck. He manages, however, to
anchor himself by a sapling, and get out of the thundering
current, with only a few bruises on his beam-ends.
If Mad had been anywhere couched among the rocks below
on which the stony torrent broke, he must have thought
the everlasting smash was come. Over those rocks Aaron
was soon clambering. Steep the pile, and dangerous. Now
and then a heavy fragment became loosened, and went bounding
down, crashing and splitting, and raising a smoke and
smell disagreeably suggestive of pulverization, — a smoke and
smell as of Tartarus itself, into which Aaron at times seemed
about to be precipitated headlong. Difficilis descensus
Averni.
Often finding himself unexpectedly in a sitting posture, he
took occasion to gather breath, wipe away sweat, and reflect
upon the wonders of geology. Also to watch the movements
of the crow; for Aaron had taken it into his head
that the bird's extraordinary conduct had a meaning, and that,
well considered, something interesting might come of it.
Usually, after flapping and cawing around him saucily for a
minute or two, it flew away and disappeared, and always in one
direction. That way Aaron was now following, as fast and
as straight as the difficulties of the place would permit. At
last, only a screen of blueberry-bushes separated him from the
field of enormous brown blocks piled about the ice-bed. The
bushes he passed, and sat down in the edge of them.
“So far, so good, Master Jack,” quoth the constable.
“Blast your eyes!” quoth Jack, perching on a point of
rock.
Then all was still: only a pewee piped its long-drawn,
plaintive notes among the poplars below, — a sound singularly
sweet and solitary in that desolate spot. Even Aaron could
not be insensible to it. But seated there among the mountainous
ruins, with the dizzy crags soaring above him, and the
morning wasting its glory on the awful wilderness around, that
one bird's slender plaint gave him a sting of pensive loneliness
which his bosom never forgot; so that, years afterwards, he
could never hear a pewee in the woods but his soul was carried
back to that morning and that place, to a vision of rocks,
and a sentiment of desolation. For in rudest breasts there is
a secret sense of poetry and feeling; and not seldom, when
the grand and salient points of nature and life have failed to
penetrate it, some little stream of tenderness will steal in
from a flower's tint, a woman's heart, or the smile and voice
of a child.
It is questionable if Jack, too, did not feel the influence of
that song, far more solitary than his own wild cawing among
the crags. For some minutes he stood quite still, his glossy
feathers presenting a fine contrast to the brown lichens that
incrusted the rocks; then he flapped his wings, and, circling
in the air about Aaron's head, settled again upon a rock farther
off.
“Laugh, Jack! Ha, ha! Mad's come home!” And he
knowing manner.
Again and again he repeated this manœuvre; circling each
time, Aaron noticed, around a certain massive block, easily
identified, if not by its peculiar shape, then by the initials and
date carved upon it by some tourist years ago:—
Characters scraggy and huge, legible afar off.
Aaron made a signal; and presently might have been seen
two men issuing from the ambush below. They scrambled
up over the rocks to his side.
“Any discoveries?” he whispered.
They had made none: had he? Aaron laughed, and pointed
at the rock, — “S. R. H.”
“That means, Somewhere Round Here. Look at that,
now!”
Just then, Jack dropped down beside the rock, and suspended
himself on hovering wings, vivaciously chattering.
“Somebody there,” said Aaron. “That's Biddikin's tame
crow.” And, as he spoke, a movement of the bird, darting
back with a scream as if struck at from below, appeared to
confirm the conjecture. “We'll see what he has got there,
anyhow.”
To cut off the fugitives, in case they should be there and
attempt to escape, the constable sent his men round beyond
the rock, one on each side, while he carefully advanced in
front. Arrived near enough to command a view of the spot
over which Jack had hovered, he sat down again, and waited.
This seemed to excite Jack, who came once more, and cawed
and flapped, until out from among the rocks glided a thing
like a stick or a snake's head, threatening him; when he
flew away a short distance and alighted, shaking out his feathers,
rubbing his beak, and sullenly croaking. Aaron saw the
stick, and signalized his companions confidently.
There was an angular passage down between the loosely
tumbled masses, large enough to admit the body of a man;
but, when the officers arrived, there was nothing to indicate
that any one had ever entered it. To what cavernous recesses
it led could not be known. The deputies did not believe that
the fugitives could be there; and when Aaron, getting down
on his face, looked in, and saw only a narrow, dismal cavity,
he began to fear, that, after all, he was mistaken. The stick
might have been a snake.
“Mad, my boy,” said he, “we want you. Come out!”
The hollow ring of the rocks, the silence that followed, and
the darkness of the den, were discouraging. Aaron got up,
and one of the others, a more slender man, put his head into
the passage. Suddenly he drew back, put up his hand, and
whispered excitedly under his tumbled hair, —
“I see a leg!”
“'Sh!” said Aaron, silencing him. Then putting his
face once more at the opening, and speaking to be heard
within, — “I tell you, boys, we can fire into the hole; and,
if there's anybody there, we shall know it.”
The click of a pistol-lock followed; and Burble was ready
to fire, when a loud roaring in the den prevented him.
“Who's there?” he asked.
“It's me; and don't you shoot!” cried Mad from the
depths of the den.
“Come out, then!”
“Never, alive!”
“Then you'll come out dead, and mighty quick; for I've
orders to take you, dead or alive!”
At that the pluck of Madison altogether failed him; and
he crept out, trembling and white, under the muzzle of Aaron's
pistol.
“I'm sorry for you, Mad; and it seems almost too bad,
don't it? I never could have found you, I confess. Jack's
the best constable of the lot!”
“Jack,” said Mad, pallid with fear and rage, “come
here!”
“Laugh, Jack!” said the crow, perching on his arm.
“Ha, ha!”
Then Mad took him, and cursed him, giving his neck a
sudden wrench, and dashed him upon the rock. Jack kicked
a little, and was dead.
| XLIII.
JACK THE CROW. Lucy Arlyn | |