Teeftallow/Chapter 29

ABNER TEEFTALLOW turned back toward the dark business street of Iron town hopeless of ever seeing Nessie Sutton again. When the train had borne her away it was as if she had entered the tomb. He moved slowly back up the hill, robbed of any further purpose in Irontown, or indeed in life itself.

When he reached the garage, habit caused him to gravitate toward the faintly lighted place, but in his mood a thought of its obscene life caused him to veer slowly away. He did not want to speak to any one, he did not want to see any one; he wanted merely to get away from Irontown, which was redolent of Nessie's presence, like some dirty box still fragrant of flowers that are gone.

A thought crossed his mind that now was the time when he ought to go drink himself into stupefaction, but alcohol was not habitual to him and this thought was a mere intellectual moment and lacked all executive force. Then he considered the notion of going to a crap game, or to a bawdy house and spending the night, but all of these distractions were uniformly repulsive. Finally he decided to go back to the railroad camp and his work. He could walk the sixteen miles in four or five hours. He would get into camp sufficiently tired to sleep. The next day he could work himself to weariness again, and so on and on; each day a laborious avoidance of the thought of Nessie Sutton.

As the teamster passed the garage a voice hailed him from the dark building. Abner almost replied, but knew that he would be called back and talked to, so he continued on his way in silence.

The voice lifted in menace.

​"That's you, Ab Teeftaller, I know you!"

As Abner still did not reply the unseen person snarled out, "Go to hell, then!" and Abner heard the same person insist to someone in an undertone, "Yes, it is Ab Teeftaller. He's jest a damn coward, skeered to face the music. . . ."

When Abner reached the woods at the edge of the village the darkness became so intense that he could keep in the road only by looking up and walking under the path of stars cut out by the inky masses of the trees along both sides of the thoroughfare.

In the woods the night was very cold and still. At the tops of the elevations in his road he entered slightly warmer strata of air. These warmer areas were sometimes perfumed with wild cucumbers or mown clover, which gave him a sense of mounting into some fragrant ethereal pool whence he fancied himself shaking off the earth and rising and rising, perhaps to rejoin Nessie in some purple chamber of the night.

He walked on and on with that vague balm welling up out of his lover's pain, with the poetry of the girl hovering over him sweet with grief.

Far to the south he could hear the rumour of a fox chase which swelled or faded with the configuration of the distant hills. At last the chase was lost to his ears, and he began speculating on how different this night might have been had he gone to Irontown on the preceding day, or if he only had gone in with the train that afternoon. Right at this moment they might have been walking together in the sweetness of this night, with their arms locked about each other's waist, with the perfume of her pale amber hair in his face and her lips and embraces free to him. It seemed fantastic that a few minutes' delay, a hesitation should have erased all this joy utterly and finally. If he only had ridden on into the village on the train, if he had saved even the few minutes he spent talking at the hotel . . . a kind of anguish gripped him at the heaven he had so barely missed. He flung up his hands in the darkness, "Oh, good Lord, why didn't I hurry! What made me git off the train!" An intolerable ​loneliness seized him. He stared up at the distant lights, and a bright star caught and held his eyes. He thought Nessie, gazing out of her car window on the northbound train, might also be looking at this shining star. He hoped she was, and that she grieved for him as he was grieving for her.

A motor car thrumming somewhere in the darkness behind him aroused Abner from his reverie. The machine drew closer, and presently a beam of light flickered past the teamster, making the road ahead of him visible in sharp blacks and whites. Without glancing around Abner got to one side to allow the motor to pass, when to his surprise there came a rasping of the brakes and the car came to a halt behind him. The teamster looked around into the dazzling headlight just as a voice called out sharply, "Hey, there, Ab Teeftaller, stop there, will ye?"

The menacing tone, the unusualness of a motor stopping behind a man on foot, sent a tang of apprehension and anger through the youth. He flung back over his shoulder the usual hill snarl, "Go to hell," and continued his plodding.

The next moment a shotgun roared behind him and the load splashed into the roadbed a few yards in front of him. In the ringing silence that followed another voice ordered, "Now, damn ye, stop, or do you want us to stop ye?"

Abner whirled and stared into the blinding light at this unexpected challenge. He instantly decided that he had to do with drunken men and called out angrily, "Look here, you damn fools, shootin' aroun' a man like that; don't you do that no more!"

"Then you come on back here," replied a voice, coldly sober. "We've got a little business with you to-night."

This phrase, "little business," in that hard sober tone could mean only one thing, that Abner had committed some wrong which was to be settled by force. The teamster thought swiftly over his recent doings for some insult or grievance he had offered any one, but found nothing at all. As far as he knew not one of his acts merited censure from ​any person. He turned and walked slowly back into the light.

"I guess you fellers have made a mistake," he said in a different tone. "I'm Ab Teeftaller. I run a dirt scoop at the railroad camp. I don't guess I'm the man you're lookin' for."

"We know who ye air all right an' what ye done," returned the flat voice. "Jest come on an' git in this automobile with us."

"Well, by God," said Abner, pausing, "if you know what I done, I want to know it too; so spit her out. What you fellers got agin me?"

A third voice answered, "Damn you, we're goin' to take you back to Arntown an' marry ye to that Sutton gal!"

Such a surprise flooded Abner that he felt weak.

"What in the hell!" he ejaculated blankly; then a terrifying possibility smote him. "You-all ain't a passel o' her relations, air ye?"

"That's all right what we air," returned the voice. "You ruint that gal, an' now you got to marry her."

As Abner stared at this amazing mission, all his ardour to have Nessie for a wife vanished and he recalled with gratitude that she had gone away on the train. He moistened his dry mouth.

"Why—er—gentlemen," he stammered in a frightened voice, "they ain't no use takin' me back to Arntown. I jest been down there on purpose to marry her, an' she left on the northbound about an hour ago."

"That's a damn lie," returned a snarling voice, "for she didn't buy no ticket. Come on, you kain't lie out of it. You got to marry her an' then both of ye got to git out o' this country."

This was a strange view for Nessie's kinsmen to take. A moment later, when Abner stepped out of the glare of light, he made out, with a still deeper sinking of the heart, that all the men in the motor wore masks. Then they were not Nessie's kinsmen. If they had been, they would not have ​worn masks. It is the undisputed right of the kinsmen of a seduced girl in the hill country to capture the lover, take him anywhere without any legal process whatever, and force him to marry his mistress. Such kinsmen had no need of masks. Abner knew they were whitecaps and had taken unto themselves new and unpredictable powers.

"Climb in!" repeated a voice sharply.

Abner stepped on the running board. There was something unearthly and inhuman in the expressionless masks. The black eyeholes were like monsters seen in a nightmare and suggested danger and horror. A sudden desperate plan went through Abner's head, to climb in and while he was in the seat with the men suddenly to draw his pistol and begin shooting. When he put his hand on the door of the motor to step in, the man nearest him slipped a seagrass loop over his wrists and drew them together with a jerk. The masks on the back seat made room for their captive between them. The car manœuvred around in the narrow road; the headlight swept a circle among the trees and then the motor started back to Irontown.

Abner looked from one to the other of the dimly seen masks in an effort to identify his abductors. The small seagrass rope pinched his wrists. He held up his bound hands and complained to the man who held the ropes. The fellow eased the cords a trifle, but not enough to stop all pain. Abner endured the lessened pain without further protest. This slight charity gave the teamster courage to argue.

"Look here, fellers," he began, "you ortn't to do me this way. I'm the man who begun this whitecap business; I got up the first gang. Now, you ortn't to take me out like this. It ain't right."

A figure who had not spoken heretofore now answered Abner in a sepulchral tone, "Remember, poor mortal, that Judas who betrayed Christ was a disciple."

"Damn it!" cried Abner angrily, "what's Judas got to do with me? I ain't done nothin'."

​"Judas," repeated the deep voice, "also betrayed an innocent."

The teamster felt he was being made sport of, a sort of ghastly sport.

"That ain't no way to answer a man!" he cried.

A mask in the front seat asked sardonically, "Do you think you're fit to live in the same county with decent men, Abner Teeftallow, after what you done?"

The question discomfited the teamster. He wanted to defend himself, to plead that other men had done the same thing, but all he could say was, "You ain't goin' to run me out of the country fer that, air ye?"

"Isn't that enough?" droned the deep voice at his side. "A woman is the noblest handiwork of God, Abner Teeftallow. Her station is above man and next to the angels. Beauty adorns her head, tenderness reigns in her heart, and innocence dwells in her soul. If your vile flesh were fed to the dogs, would that atone for the degradation of one of the handmaids to the Most High?"

The teamster grew more frightened than ever at this rhetoric, for the deep voice was intoning what may be called the Southern oratorical view of women. It was what Southern speechmakers always say of woman in the abstract, and somehow Southern men believe these dithyrambs, although not one of them ever knew an actual woman who approached such a seraphic being. Still, that never shakes the Southern credo. The country stands in the droll position of worshipping woman, but entreating their women rather hardly.

However, since the whitecaps repeated this jargon, such is the force of custom that its rolling measures gained on Abner. His heart sank when he thought of having dragged down one of these heavenly creatures. All that he had done now appeared to him unqualifiedly evil and corrupt where a few minutes before it had seemed sweet and innocent. And the whole dark skin was saddled on him alone. Nessie, as abstract woman, had no share in it at all, although, as one of the concrete women, the whitecaps meant to chase her out ​of the country along with the other baggages without ever taking into account the genuine simplicity and passion of her yielding.

But all this was far, far too involved for any defence from Abner. He sat silent with some dim baffled feeling of the contradiction in the whitecaps, but what could he say?

Presently the motor emerged from the woods and the headlight picked up the house and barn of Squire Meredith, standing like wraiths against the black sky. Then, as the machine droned down the road between these two buildings, Abner saw coming up the hill from Irontown the light of another automobile.

One of the men in the car said in an undertone, "There they are," and Abner suddenly understood that this meeting of the motors had been planned.

The youth's heart began to beat and he leaned forward staring intently as his car whirled down the hill. He saw three other motors parked by the roadside at the spot where Peck Bradley had been lynched. These cars were arranged in a semicircle so that their headlights were focussed on the tree which had seen the bushwhacker's end. This tree stood out against the night in pallid greens and intense shadows. It looked like the spectre of a tree, and Abner could visualize Peck Bradley once more slowly revolving under its limb.

Beyond the motors, in a faint reflected light, Abner could make out a group of figures. Here and there in the group he could see a cigarette tip glow and fade. With a tremor he realized this crowd in the darkness was awaiting some sort of entertainment; they waited as complacently as spectators at a circus for something to pick up their nerves, something that would break the monotony of their hill lives, something that would afford them a thrill and a spectacle.

By this time Abner's wrists were swollen and the ropes were cutting him badly. He moistened his dry lips and asked his captor to loosen them again. But under the influence of the crowd the kindliness that once had moved the ​man deserted him. He simply snarled, "To hell with yore wrists, stay where you are!"

All of the men in Abner's car got out and left their captive tied to one of the stays of the motor top. The teamster sat for a moment watching them go. He knew very well that in a few minutes some indecent or terrible thing would be perpetrated on him. He began trying to free himself. He stopped over in the seat and tried to get his mouth to the knot around his wrists, but the rope had sunk too deep in his swollen flesh. He ran his puffed and throbbing fingers along the steel support and found the bar was held on its post by a spread rivet. He eased himself out on the ground, circling the stay with his arms, bent his mouth to the flared rivet and began trying to bite it together. He fitted his canine teeth against the two flanges and bit carefully and powerfully. The iron ground loudly against his teeth but slowly closed together. He tasted rust. He could hear the whitecaps talking, a number of voices at once. He chewed on the iron again. The voices were saying, "We didn't git her. . . . She must have run off with Belshue—he hired a machine at the garage this evenin'. . . . No, Bagley says she shore didn't go off on the train. . . . They ain't no way to git that damned infidel, Belshue—he's gone. . . . Nothin' left but make an example out o' this'n. . . ."

Abner began a frantic jerking at the key in the post. The last phrase he heard meant the crowd would have no other amusement than what they could get out of him. Just as he had the key nearly out, two men came briskly up to the motor. Abner made a desperate pull; his throbbing fingers slipped. The men took hold of his rope. One of them cut the segment that went around the standard. Then without a word they led him between them into the beating focus on the headlights.

The teamster walked towards the spectral tree preceded by three long inky shadows. About him arose a dreamlike sensation of unreality and horror. He thought again of Peck Bradley and a prickly sensation swept his scalp.

​"Say, men," he wavered in a strained voice, "what air ye goin' to do to me?"

His captors walked on in silence and Abner moved his tongue about his slimy mouth. The masks by his side were inhuman, horrible. He said again, huskily, "I—I wush you'd tell me, s-so I-I'd know what to expeck . . ."

At the tree the masks tied the ends of the rope around the bole with the teamster's back to the light. Then Abner, peering over his shoulder, saw a number of masks, looking black against the headlights, come forward with rope ends, leather straps, and heavy hickory limbs which they had cut in the bushes while they waited.

When Abner saw them coming with these weapons he knew that in a few moments he would be unable to stand, so he knelt beside the bole with his arms held up at a painful angle by the rope. With hill doggedness he determined in his heart that he would not yell. They would probably beat him to death, but he would die silently as his forbears had died silently, a century before, under the tortures of the Indians.

And he did endure it in a sort of rending silence. The teamster received an agonized impression of fire, of tearing flesh, of knife stabs, and of blinding light and a struck gong when a stray stick hit eye or ear. He writhed uncontrollably, swinging by his hands, turning up his belly, his sides, then his back again to the bastinado. He floundered doubled up his legs, kicked, but he did not groan. There was no sound at all save the swish of straps and sticks and leather and the clatter of impacts on his tortured flesh. At last Abner hung limp and motionless and silent beneath their blows.

The teamster did not know when the mob quit or whether they had quit. He was still wrapped in fire, but his hands were free and now filled with lancinating pains. Somebody was kicking him and telling him to stand up; others were saying, "Oh, let him lay," in the disgusted tones of men who have taken some vile satisfaction and who then hold the instrument of their pleasure in disgust.

​But the man kept prodding Abner with his toe. "Now we want you to git out o' this country!" said a voice which sounded far off, a mere thread of a voice amid the booming of the blood in Abner's ears. "If ever you set food in Lane County agin, you'll ketch it right, this won't be a breakfus' spell. We're goin' to make this a decent moral county if we haff to . . ."

The mob turned away and left Abner at the roots of the tree. A few minutes later the cars whisked away and left the teamster in utter blackness. After some time had passed the youth made shift to pull up by the tree. He stood whispering oaths and obscenities. He loosed the tree and tried to walk, but stumbled. He got back on his feet again and staggered forward with pioneer endurance through the benighted hills.