On the Long Road

by Raymond S. Spears

On the LONG ROAD

by
Raymond S. Spears

IT was pretty weather in northern Alabama. The Tennessee River was in tide, owing to long rains in central Tennessee, and the water was pouring over the banks into the swamps along the south. But the sun was warm, the ducks were shooting northward, and coons and possums were basking on the tops of hollow sycamore-limbs.

Coming down, the river were people “going West.” Some were in shanty-boats, some in skiffs, and a few were on log rafts on which had been built little lean-to camps. They were farmers out of Clinch, French Broad, Little Tennessee, Illiwasse, and other streams, bound for Texas by way of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Atchafalaya.

They had heard from friends who went before that down in Texas one could get two-bale cotton land for the price of hog-wallows on the flanks of the Cumberlands. So they had sold out their holdings, built little craft of some sort, and were most of them destined to become happy shanty-boaters on the lower Mississippi.

Among the rest were Gene Dundon and his wife. This was their honeymoon as well as their home-seeking. They had slipped away from Tazewell County after a secret marriage before a kindly old parson, Hathaway Blake. Old Hathaway loved the young people. He liked to see the stalwart young mountaineer “steal his girl,” in spite of opposition, and “run her” to some new home.

He knew Gene Dundon and Hattie Brown, Why shouldn't he? Hattie was a pretty girl who sang at revivals, and Gene could shoot the head off a squirrel at sixty yards, What Hathaway did not know was the existence of Lottie Kemple, up Neuman's Ridge way, where Dundon had been a frequent visitor.

She had sent word down to Dundon that he must come to see her, and the next night but one Dundon “started West” with Hattie Brown. Dundon did not quite understand Lottie. He thought she would forget. Even if she did not, she would not know what had become of him until he was well on his way to Texas.

It was a week after he had started when Lottie Kemple rode down to Clinch and heard the truth from the parson's own lips. She wept for an hour, while the white-haired old man patted her head, tried to comfort her, and assured her that he would be her best friend. She dried her eyes at last, smiled faintly, and, after a bite to eat, asked the parson's wife for a “snack” to last her on her way. Finally she rode away on her pony into the coming night.

“I shore must be goin'!” she cried. “I shore must. Hit's a long road, an' time's sho't—yassuh!”

She galloped up the trail till she was out of sight of the parson's house. Then she trained her pony into the woods, up the ridge back to the hill-path. Turning her face southward, she started down the river.

All night she rode, but not at a gallop, because it was a long race, and she must save her horse. She knew the way—she had read the stars many a night by Dundon's side, from some point of rock above the valleys. She laughed mirthlessly as she rode. She had been happy once.

It was a wild country, and the bridle-path lay through a mountain forest. She could look down nearly a thousand feet upon narrow, level bottoms, where she detected “an occasional reddish glow, the reflection of fire or smoke above a stick-and-mud chimney. Once, stopping to rest her horse, she heard a rabbit running away in the brush.

Dawn found her with tired eyes staring at the path ahead. A few miles farther on, and she turned down from the ridge road and arrived at Campbell's store-house. Campbell's wife was a first cousin.

“I'm travelin',” Lottie laughed gleefully. “I'm on the long road. Sho. I be'n goin' all night—yassuh!”

“Sho!” Mrs. Campbell exclaimed. “Some 'man stole yo', Lottie?”

“Nossuh! I'm goin' to steal a man—hue!” Lottie answered.

Mrs. Campbell laughed at that, and Lottie remained with her over the next night. Then she rode on down the valley where there was a second cousin, beyond whose home she had neither friends nor relatives.

Three days later she rode through Knoxville at noon, sunbonneted, rosy-cheeked, with her rifle across her lap. She had heard of Dundon on the riverside just above the Holston-French Broad fork. He had gone by the week before in a little red shanty-boat, and the girl with him had been all smiles. Dundon was good to her.

Lottie was in a strange country now, and the people she met along the road stared at her. She did not smile now; her Kemple lips were set and a little drooping.

When night came she stopped at some riverside farmhouse. She was going, she told the people, to see relatives, to visit her brother, to find her sister—any excuse served her. Her only concern was to remember in the morning the story she had told the night before.

Once she let slip the truth. It was at the Stone Shoals. She had forded them, and on the far side she found a white man mending hoop-nets. He was talkative, and when she asked if shanty-boaters went down the river, he answered:

“Right smart, yassuh. Ho law! They was a mountain man drapped down three days ago. Hit war right windy, and that man got blowed out the channel—hit's on'y two foot deep, anyhow. An' hisn's bo't got stuck onto the Buffalo bar, right yonder, yassuh. An' say, he was jes' the tomfoolingest man! He an' his woman was all scairt up.”

“A little red shanty-boat—a woman with black hair?”

“Yassuh! He had a scar onto his cheek.”

“On'y three days!” Lottie cried. “I'll get that man! Yassuh!”

“Sho!” the fisherman exclaimed. “You goin' to kill that man?”

But Lottie leaped into the saddle again and galloped away, while the old fisherman rose stiffly to his feet and stared after her, his net-needle in his hand.

At Loudon, Gene Dundon and his wife heard bad news. Gene had left his address with his brother, Jim, and now, at the end of two weeks, Jim had sent a letter in order that Gene might know whether Hattie Brown's folks were following him or not.

The letter read:

 

Dear Gene—The folks is all well and paw kill anuther hawg las nite an we got the uper lot plowd las eving and i saw delp Brown after yo got away an he was mad but sad he wud kil yo when yo got back so i think he ant mad enuf to get yo by that time but lottie kempel is gon an her poney an she past Grale ford two das later an has her skurel gun an nobuddy nos is she alive or ded or war she is wel i reckin thar ain much to tel for it is lat candel lite an we air goin to plow the corn tomorer an maw plant the garding good by jim.

 

When Gene read that Lottie had left home, he remembered many things about Lottie Kemple which he had forgotten under the spell of Hattie Brown's pretty eyes and gentle voice. Lottie had said once that the man who tried to “get shet” of her would surely “dread it,” and now he had done that. He wondered what he had to dread? After the letter's arrival, he began to hurry down the river. He started early in the morning, and floated till almost dark, but as he floated it seemed as though he was the chosen companion of misfortune. He had lost hours of good floating by going aground on Stone Shoals. Day after day he had been held back by dry gales out of the south. Storms held him, and when the drift was running his wife tormented his heart with the fear that some of the flotsam would crush the thin sides of his shanty-boat.

While Dundon lost time, Lottie gained. She sold her pony at Walnut and bought a canoe—a long, light plank canoe—and she drove it down stream, hugging the banks when the winds blew and seeking the swiftest current when the day was calm. Her journeys down the Holston on rafts and in small boats, visiting her relatives, had prepared her for the long race.

She stopped on shanty-boats and at Vulture Island she heard that she was only a day behind the little red shanty-boat. But now she had a chance to travel with an old farmer's family. It was threatening weather—the spring crop rains seemed to be at hand—and for a week she floated no more than a few miles a day, hoping for clear weather.

The next time she heard of the little red shanty-boat it was three days ahead. Then, one murky morning, she abandoned her friends, took to her canoe again, and started on. As she paddled, the clouds broke away, the sun came out, and the girl knew that she had done well to follow in the canoe.

The river was full to the bank. Orioles were singing in the elms, and bluejays were screaming in flocks. At night the mocking-birds were dreaming in the willows.

Lottie paddled all day long, and when night came she did not go ashore. The river, she knew, was safe for the hundred miles to Mussel Shoals. Tired out at last, the vengeance-seeker curled down on the straw in the bottom of the canoe and went to sleep. The sun wakened her.

It was a glorious spring day. Birds sang, the scent of countless blossoms filled the air, the pale green of new-born leaves colored the landscape, and the river itself was the color of liquid gold. In her heart the girl felt that the chase was nearing an end. She was weary and sad, and the thought pleased her,

She scanned the shores carefully, watching the inlets lest the little red shanty-boat be tied up in one. At Decatur, she studied the shanty-boat town till she had seen every boat in it. A few miles below, she saw the big floating sawmill, and one of the deck hands warned her that the shoals were not far below.

Just before sundown, she spied a shanty-boat making toward the south bank in the bend below her. She ran her canoe into the shadow of the trees and floated slowly toward the craft. The man at the sweeps was Gene Dundon, and the woman by his side was the one who had been Hattie Brown. Catching a branch, Lottie Kemple waited for the night to fall. She dropped down to within a hundred yards of the boat, and then tied fast.

She could hear the sound of voices; she heard Hattie begin to sing. The sound cut the deserted girl to the heart. The shadow on the window-curtain was that of Gene; she saw that he was at the table, about to eat supper. After a time, Hattie came and sat down at the same side of the table with him. The sight of the silhouette wounded the other woman cruelly, but she held her breath.

The minutes dragged along. After a time the light was blown out and Lottie watched the stars to make sure that she did not think an age had passed when only minutes had gone by. Slowly, the roar of the great Muscle Shoals became more and more audible as the night grew older. It was only a little way to the canal wing dam, and below that was the water—tumbling over ledges of rocks, splitting on the points of islands, jumping up and down in the wild abandon of a mile wide river, torn by jagged stone and whipped into foam by sawyer snags.

At last, when a pale star had passed through the breadth of a tree, Lottie let go her hold and floated down the slack water to the little cabin-boat. She was in the shadow, and all was quiet within. The sucking of the water along the bank helped to conceal her movements.

The boat was tied to the bank by two long ropes, one from each gunwale. They hung slack most of the time, but occasionally the current tugged at the silent craft, straightening out the lines. Lottie slipped the lines from their stakes, and when next the current tugged, the shanty-boat came away.

Lottie watched the craft clear the brush and saw it drawn steadily into the main current. Then she drove her canoe into the wake and sitting, with her chin on her fists, and her elbows on her knees, she floated with the shanty-boat, a few yards behind, toward the leaping waters.

Ahead of her, a mile away, was the light marking the entrance to the canal. Below that, a gray haze hung above the gloomy river, and out of the haze came the roar, heaving and rolling as the water pounded upon the rocks.

The boat floated along steadily and quietly. There were no waves on the water, no wind in the air. The huge, dark masses of the bank seemed to be marching past the stars above the tree-tops. On the water, a few gleams of light flickered and darted. The light at the entrance to the canal grew plainer as it became nearer.

The canoe and the shanty-boat floated on down, turning from side to side as the eddies in the current caught them. The shanty-boat came between the canoe and the light, and the girl saw a little halo of light along the roof of the boat, showing that there was a faint shadow cast by the light, it was so near.

Ahead, the gray mist became whiter, and to right and left, two banks of trees on islands marked the way to the wing dam. Down the center of the way led the shanty-boat. Now the roar became furious and tumultuous. The light had been passed. The girl in the canoe made no motion and uttered no sound.

Suddenly, a light flashed-in the shanty-boat—it flickered a moment, and then burned steadily. The front door opened and a beam of light—yellow lamp light—shot out into the night. It struck against the gray fog-bank above the leaping water. Then the shadow of a human form was thrown against the gray mist, with the arms raised in astonishment.

The next instant, a far-heard scream—a man's scream—cut through the roar of the waters. Then the shanty-boat pitched over, down and out of sight. A moment later, the canoe dipped at the fall and the girl, her eyes shut now, but her position unchanged, followed her faithless sweetheart.