The despot of Broomsedge Cove

On a certain steep and savage slope of the Great Smoky Mountains, the primeval wilderness for many miles is unbroken save by one meagre clearing. The presence of humanity upon the earth is further attested only by a log cabin, high on the rugged slant. At night the stars seem hardly more aloof than the valley below. By day the mountains assert their solemn vicinage, an austere company. The clouds that silently commune with the great peaks, the sinister and scathing deeds of the lightnings, the passionate rhetoric of the thunders, the triumphal pageantry of the sunset-tides, and the wistful yearnings of the dawn aspiring to the day,—these might seem the only incidents of this lonely and exalted life. So august is this mountain scheme that it fills all the visible world with its massive multitudinous presence; still stretching out into the dim blue distances an infinite perspective of peak and range and lateral spur, till one may hardly believe that the fancy does not juggle with the fact.

One day a sound impinged suddenly upon its impressive silence,—faint and far, but even in the echo charged with alien suggestions; not akin to the woods or the waters, to the cry of beast or of bird; subtly at variance with the mountain solitude, imposed upon it, neither of its essence nor its outgrowth. A soul informed the sound, for it was the voice of a man singing aloud in the wilderness,—singing with so ecstatic a fervor, with tones so robust and full, that distant peaks were voiced with fugue-like feignings, rising to sudden outbursts and sinking to silence, as the melody waxed or waned. It swung and swayed in rhythmic cadences across the valley. It might have seemed a spirit in the air, for with the hymning echoes it was hard to say whence it came. But two mountaineers, standing beside the fence of the little cornfield in the clearing, gazed expectantly up the road, that, precarious and rocky, ran along the verge of the slope. For the song grew louder and more distinct, and presently in its midst was heard the beat of rapid hoofs. A moment more, and the young psalmist came around a curve, galloping recklessly down beneath the fringed boughs of the firs and the pines, still singing aloud; the reins upon his horse’s neck, his rifle held across the pommel of the saddle, his broad hat thrust upon the back of his head, his eyes scarcely turning toward the men that stood by the wayside.

He had evidently not intended to stop, but one of them threw up his arm and hailed him.

“Hy’re, Teck! hold up!”

The rider drew rein. The rapt expression of his countenance abruptly changed. He fixed imperative, worldly eyes upon the speaker. They were deeply set, of a dark blue color, full of a play of expression, and despite the mundane intimations of the moment they held the only suggestions in his face of a spiritual possibility. He had a heavy lower jaw, stern and insistent. A firm, immobile mouth disclosed strong, even teeth. His nose was slightly aquiline, and he had definitely marked black eyebrows. His short dark beard, worn after the manner common in the region, and the usual brown jeans garb, lent his face no similarity to the faces of the others. There was a strong individuality, magnetism, about him, and before his glance the peremptory spirit of his interlocutor was slightly abated. It was only after he had demanded, “What ye want?” that he was asked in turn,—

“Whar ye been?”

“Been a-huntin’,” said Teck Jepson. He laid one hand upon the barrel of his rifle on the pommel of his saddle, as if to call attention to it.

“Didn’t ye get nuthin’?”

“Naw. I tuk ter studyin’ ’bout’n the Bible, an’ a-sing-in’, an’ I warn’t a-goin’ ter thwart the sperit. I ain’t tuk aim this day.”

There was so obvious a pride in this statement that it imposed upon the others as a valid source of satisfaction.

They all looked meditatively at the spaces of the sunlit valley for a moment. The shadow of a great wing flickered by. A cow-bell jangled from the slope below.

“Waal, I expec’ Ben hyar mought hev his say-so ’bout’n studyin’ on the Bible, jes’ in the time fur pullin’ fodder,” suggested Eli Strobe.

He was the constable of the district, a heavy, thick-set fellow, forty years of age, perhaps, and of medium height. He had a large head and a certain lowering side glance, barely lifting the lids of his slow dark eyes with a sullen, bovine expression. He carried himself in a deliberate pondering manner, and with distinct aggressiveness. He wore his broad black wool hat pulled far over his brow. His boots were drawn to the knee over his blue jeans trousers, and were graced with large spurs. His features were straight and regular, handsome in their way, and his face was characterized by a sort of surly dignity. He stood sturdily in the road, with his hands in his pockets, and looked up from under the brim of his hat at the horseman.

Jepson lifted his head loftily. “I’d ruther be in the wilderness with the sperit than with the gleaners in the richest fields o’ the yearth!”

Despite a sanctimonious twang imitated from the circuit rider, his voice in speaking betokened his gift in song. It was rich and low, and as smooth as velvet.

The constable, at a spiritual disadvantage, recanted with acerbity. “I reckon so! Ennybody else would, too. Ye talk ez ef nobody hedn’t no religion but yerse’f.”

“Laws-a-massy!” exclaimed Jepson’s half-brother, Ben Bowles. “Laws-a-massy! whenst Teck gits ter studyin’ ’bout the Bible-folks, I’d jes’ ez lief he’d wander ez work. He talks ter me till them tales hender me mighty nigh ez much ez him. No fodder sca’cely would hev been pulled hyar ter-day ef he hed stayed.”

The mention of his work reminded him of it anew. As he stood in the turn-row, he began to tear from the stalwart stalks of the Indian corn, tasseled far higher than his head, the long blue-green and glossy blades, rustling at a touch and shining in the sun. He was in his shirt-sleeves, a gaunt, shambling fellow, with yellow beard and hair, and long, tobacco-stained teeth; he had a docile, acquiescent face and a temporizing blue eye. Few men could contrive to agree with both Jepson and Strobe, but to Ben Bowles no miracle of trimming was impossible. The corn was fine; the heavy ears, swathed in their crisp husks and crested with sun-embrowned silk, hung far from the stalks, about which trumpet vines twined, the blossoms flaunting scarlet. There even peered out now and then the tender blue eyes of morning-glories, still open, a-bloom in the dank shadow. The more prosaic growth of pumpkins was about the roots, and sometimes Bowles caught his awkward feet in the vines, and added a stumble to his shamble.

“The sperit hev been with me strong,—mighty strong, ter-day,” said Teck Jepson suddenly. “I hev been studyin’ on Moses, from the time he lef’ the saidges by the ruver bank,” he added, bridling with a sentiment that was strikingly like the pride of earth. Then, as he gazed down at the landscape, his face softened and grew pensive.

The great ranges were slowly empurpled against the pale eastern horizon, delicately blue, for the sun was in the western skies. How splendidly saffron those vast spaces glowed! What purity and richness of tint! Here and there were pearly wing-like sweeps of an incomparable glister; and the clouds, ambitious, must needs climb the zenith, with piled and stately mountainous effects, gleaming white, opaque and dazzling. The focal fires of the great orb were unquenched, and still the yellow divergent rays streamed forth; yet in its heart was suggested that vermilion smouldering of the sunset, and the western hills were waiting.

“’Twar tur’ble hard on Moses,” said Teck Jepson dreamily, “when the Lord shut him out’n Canaan, arter travelin’ through the wilderness. Tur’ble, tur’ble hard!”

There was naught in the scene to suggest to a mind familiar with the facts an Oriental landscape,—naught akin to the hills of Judæa. It was essentially of the New World, essentially of the Great Smoky Mountains. Yet ignorance has its license. It never occurred to Teck Jepson that his Biblical heroes had lived elsewhere. Their history had to him an intimate personal relation, as of the story of an ancestor in the homestead ways and closely familiar. He brooded upon these narrations, instinct with dramatic movement, enriched with poetic color, and localized in his robust imagination, till he could trace Hagar’s wild wanderings in the fastnesses; could show where Jacob slept and piled his altar of stones; could distinguish the bush, of all others on the “bald,” that blazed with fire from heaven, when the angel of the Lord stood within it. Somehow, even in their grotesque variation, they lost no dignity in their transmission to the modern conditions of his fancy. Did the facts lack significance because it was along the gullied red clay roads of Piomingo Cove that he saw David, the smiling stripling, running and holding high in his hand the bit of cloth cut from Saul’s garments, while the king had slept in a cave at the base of Chilhowee Mountain? And how was the splendid miracle of translation discredited because Jepson believed that the chariot of the Lord had rested in scarlet and purple clouds upon the towering summit of Thunderhead, that Elijah might thence ascend into heaven?

He mistook the dramatic instinct, that entranced him with these splendid epics, for religion. He sang loud and long in the meetings, with a rich voice and a fervid indorsement of the sentiment of the rude hymns, but he told few experiences; his soul seemed untroubled, unstirred; he neither shouted nor exhorted others, and in the midst of exhortation he often dropped asleep. But if the text were from the Old Testament, rich in narrative, his fine head was alert, his eyes grew eager and intent; he would lean forward, to lose no word, his hand on the back of the bench in front of him, and often his strong hand trembled. He was an earnest advocate of education. “Let the Bible be read!” he would exclaim in a thunderous, coercive voice, strong with the sincerity of his own wish to read. For he was sometimes aware that he carried with him broken impressions of the stories that emblazoned his mind. Then his quick supplementing fancy would unconsciously assert itself anew, the rift would close, and the continuity would stretch forth perfected.

His was the mind receptive, romantic. The endowment to believe the essential verity, undemonstrable though it be, to see that which is not before the material eye, to feel the abstract sentiment, he shared with those for whom tradition has woven its fine, embellished webs, and history has penned its heroic page, and poets have sung and have soared. The gift was in the nature of a sarcasm, bestowed here. He had not even the cradle lore of other men. Niggard circumstance had environed him with all the limitations of ignorance. In these close bounds, the readings of the circuit rider gave him the only collations of connected fact, the only narrative, the only glimpse of a status of people more amply endowed than those about him; and the dramatic instinct vivified the meagre details, caused them to glow before him, and they served for him as the libraries of the world serve for other men.