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Updated: August 23, 2024
The other, the informer, a genuine mountaineer, still skulked motionless in the darkness. The "revenuers," ascending the road, maintained a slow, lunging gait, as if they had toiled from far. Their abrupt appearance had the effect of a galvanic shock to the man handling the reins, a stalwart, rubicund fellow, who visibly paled. He drew up so suddenly as almost to throw the horses from their feet.
Madge held back, but Layson hurried to the thicket, with gun raised ready for a shot. Just then, from the carefully concealed cave-entrance, came Joe Lorey, rifle poised for trouble, eyes gleaming fiercely, evidently keyed to meet a raid by revenuers. It was plain enough that he believed the noise which had disturbed, alarmed him, had been made by this young sportsman.
The revenuers, she had been informed, were men of devilish craft, unscrupulous cunning. Might not this youth with the fine clothes, the splendid manner, the great learning, the soft voice, the quick resource and the undoubted bravery, very well be one of them?
"What's the row?" the boys heard in the gruff tones of Jerry's father. "Say!" shouted the intruder, evidently a member of their group, "they've done it!" "Who have?" shouted out Jerry quickly. "The revenuers." "What do you mean?" "They got Ridgely." A cry of dismay and excitement ran through the next room. "How do you know?" demanded the elder Dawson. "I saw them myself right near Brantford.
He swore a mighty mountain oath that none of the advancing forces ever should win victory of him. If the revenuers ever tried to get him, let God help them, for they would need help; if Frank Layson stole his girl from him, then let God help him, also, for even more than would the revenuers the young bluegrass gentleman would need assistance from some mighty power.
"Durn my boots ef I didn't furgit the password!" cried Nick Peters with his little falsetto laugh, that seemed keyed for a fleer, although it was most graciously modulated now. "Ye mought hev shot us fur revenuers." "I mought hev shot ye fur wuss," Con Hite growled, rising slowly from his chair, his big dark eyes betokening his displeasure. "I dunno how ye ever kem ter know this place."
Madge spoke slowly. She was not sure, at all, whom she was accusing; her suspicions were indefinite, obscure, but they were taking form within her mind. "Thar's one as I knows on," she slowly answered. "It's th' one as told Joe Lorey that Mr. Frank had set th' revenuers onto him."
He disliked the man, as he disliked all foreigners who dared invasion of his wilderness; he would have feared him, too, had he known that it had really been him and not young Layson and Madge Brierly who had made the noise there in the thicket which had disturbed him, that day, when, armed to meet a raid of revenuers, he had rushed out from his still to find the girl and the young bluegrass gentleman in a close company which worried him almost as much as the appearance of the officers, in fact, could have done.
The revenuers craven wretches he deemed them, and he ground his teeth with rage because of their seeming cowardice in their duty, since their duty could serve his interests might not have felt exactly disposed to risk their lives in these sweet spring days, when perhaps even a man whose life belongs to the government might be presumed to take some pleasure in it, by attempting to raid the den of a gang of moonshiners on the scanty faith of an informer's word, tenuous guaranty at best, and now couched in an anonymous letter, itself synonym for a lie.
"Don't, Joe!" said the girl, looking at the cartridge with the light of horror shining in her eyes. "What you doin' with such devil's stuff?" "I got it for th' revenuers," he said frankly. The mountaineers of the old Cumberland, to this day, make no secret of their deadly hatred for the agents of the government excise.
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