The story of Keedon Bluffs

Towering into the air, reflected deep in the river, the great height of Keedon Bluffs is doubled to the casual glance and augmented in popular rumor. Nevertheless a vast mass of rock it is, splintered and creviced, and with rugged, beetling ledges, all atilt, and here and there a niche which holds a hardy shrub, subsisting surely on the bounty of the air or the smile of the sun, for scant sustenance can be coaxed from the solid sandstone.

Here bats and lizards colonize, and amongst the trailing vines winged songsters find a home, and sometimes stealthy, four-footed, marauding shadows, famous climbers, creep in and out of the hollows of the rocks, for it is in the very heart of the wilderness on a slope of the Great Smoky Range. Naught was likely to behold them—save their own bright-eyed images in the swift current below, or perhaps a wayfaring cloud above, journeying adown the sky from the zenith—until one day a boy chanced to come this way in driving home the cow; he paused on one side of the horseshoe bend, which the river describes just here, and gazed fixedly across the bight at the bluffs.

If at this moment one of the shy dwellers of the cliff had thrust forth an unwary head there was no need to hastily withdraw it. The boy’s attention was concentrated on a motionless object lying on a ledge; he looked at it in doubting surprise. It was a cannon-ball, precariously lodged where it had fallen, spent and harmless, years ago.

For Keedon Bluffs had not always been so silent. They had echoed the clamors of artillery. Not that a battle was ever fought in these fastnesses, but once from a distant point the woods in the cove were shelled, and, ranging further than the bursting bombs, this solid round shot cleared the river at the mountain’s base, and dropped at last on the ledge, remaining the only memento of the day. Covered with rust, half draped by a vine, peaceful and motionless and mute, it lay. And Ike Guyther, looking at it, wished that he had lived in those times of riding and raiding, when the batteries roared their sulphurous thunder, and flung their shells, hurtling along these quiet woodland ways, with fuses all a-flaring.

“Folks in them days hed a chance ter show thar grit, an’ ride, an’ fight, an’ fire off them big guns,” he grumbled, when he had gone back to his father’s cabin, in Tanglefoot Cove, three miles away, and had detailed his discovery to the fireside group. “They war mos’ly boys, no older sca’cely ’n me. An’ hyar I be—_a-drivin’ up the cow_!”

“Waal, now,” exclaimed his mother in her consolatory drawl, “ye oughter be powerful thankful ye hev got a cow ter drive. The gu’rillas made beef o’ yer aunt Jemimy’s cow.”

“An’ fur goodness’ sake look at yer uncle Abner ef ye hanker so ter go a-fightin’,” his aunt Jemima tartly admonished him.

There sat all day beside the wood-fire a man of middle age, but with a face strangely young. It was like the face of a faded painting, changing only in the loss of color. The hair, growing off a broad forehead, was bleaching fast; the tints had become dim on cheek and lip, but time and care had drawn no lines, and an expression of childlike tranquillity hovered about the downcast eyes, forever shielded by the drooping lids. Life seemed to have ended for him twenty years before, on a day surcharged with disaster, when the great gun, which had been a sort of Thor to him, and which he had served with an admiring affection and reverent care, was spiked by its own cannoneers that it might fall useless into the hands of the enemy. It was the last thing he ever saw—this great silenced god of thunder—as he stood beside it with the sponge-staff in his hand. For among the shells shrieking through the smoky air, one was laden with his doom. A hiss close at hand, the din of an abrupt explosion, and he fell unconscious under the carriage of the piece, and there he was captured.

And when the war was over and he came forth alike from the prison and the hospital, blinded and helpless, naught remained to him but to vaguely ponder on what had been in the days that had gone forever, for he hardly seemed to look to the future, and the present was empty-handed.

He had met his grief and the darkness with a stoicism difficult to comprehend. He spent his days in calm unimbittered meditation, not gentle, but with flashes of his old spirit to attest his unchanged identity. Acclimated to sorrow, without hope, or fear, or anxiety, or participation in life, time could but pass him by, and youth seemed to abide with him.

The old martial interest flared up when Ike told of his discovery on the ledge of Keedon Bluffs.

“What kind o’ ball, Ike?” he demanded.

But Ike had been born too late to be discerning as to warlike projectiles.

“I wisht I could lay my hand on it!” said the blind artillery-man. “I’ll be bound I’d know, ef I jes’ could heft it wunst! Whar did it lodge, Ike? Could I make out ter git a-nigh it? Could ye an’ me git thar tergether?”

“Ye ’pear b’reft, Abner!” aunt Jemima cried out angrily. “Ye mus’ hev los’ more ’n yer sight. Hev ye furgot how Keedon Bluffs look? Thar ain’t nobody sca’cely ez could keep foot-hold ’mongst them sheer cliffs. An’ ye oughtn’t ter be aggin’ on Ike ter climb sech places—git his neck bruk. Ye hain’t got no call, sure, ter set store on no mo’ cannon-balls, an’ artillery, an’ sech. I ’low ez ye’d hev hed enough o’ guns, an’ I wish ye’d never hed nuthin’ ter do with no rebels.”

For this was one of the divided families so usual in East Tennessee, and while the elders had clung to the traditions of their fathers—the men fighting staunchly for the Union—the youngest had as a mere boy fled from his home to join the Confederate forces, and had stood by his gun through many a fiery hail of battle storms. But the bitterness of these differences was fast dying out.

“I hev gin the word,” said Ike’s father, and grizzled, and stern, and gigantic, he looked eminently fitted to maintain his behests, “ez no mo’ politics air ter be talked roun’ this ha’th-stone, Jemimy.”

“I ain’t talkin’ no politics,” retorted aunt Jemima, sharply. “But I ain’t goin’ ter hold my jaw tee-totally. I never kin git over hevin’ Ab settin’ up hyar plumb benighted! plumb benighted!—ez blind ez a mole!” She shook her head with a sort of acrimonious melancholy.

“Yes,” drawlingly admitted the blind artillery-man, all unmoved by this uncheerful discourse. “Yes, that’s a true word.” He lifted his head suddenly and tossed back the gray hair from his boyish face. “But I hev seen—sights!”

Even less tolerated than politics were Ike’s repinings and longings for some flaunting military exploit. “Take yer axe,” his soldier-father said sternly, “an’ show what sort’n grit ye hev got at the wood-pile.”

The blind man with a laugh more leniently suggested, “Ye wouldn’t hev been much use ter we-uns in our battery, Ike, throwin’ up a yearth-work ter pertect the guns an’ sech, seein’ the way ye fairly _de_-spise a spade.”

Ike had yet to learn that it is the spirit in which a deed is done that dignifies and magnifies it.

He found the stories of the military glories he would have achieved, had the opportunity fallen to his lot, much more gently treated by a certain young neighbor, who had indeed a good and willing pair of ears, and much readiness and adaptability of assent. Very pliable, withal, was “Skimpy” Sawyer—by the nickname “Skimpy” he was familiarly known, a tribute to his extreme spareness. He was peculiarly thin, and wiry, and loose-jointed. He had a good-natured freckled face, paler for the contrast with a crop of red hair; a twinkling and beguiling brown eye; great nimbleness of limb; and many comical twists of countenance at command.

He accompanied Ike blithely enough to Keedon Bluffs, one afternoon, to look at the cannon-ball on the ledge. A bridle-path, almost a road it might have seemed—for the woods, bereft of undergrowth by the annual conflagrations, gave it space—wound along the side of the mountain near the verge of the cliffs. The river, all scarlet, and silver, and glinting blue, was swirling far down in the chasm beneath them; the sheer sandstone bank rose opposite, solid as a wall; and beyond, the cove—its woods, and cabins, and roads, and fences, bounded by the interlacing mountains—lay spread out like an open map.

Peaceful enough it was to-day, as the boys stood on the Bluffs. There were wings, homeward bound, hurrying through the air, instead of shells with fuses burning bright against the sunset sky. No bugle sang. The river was murmuring low a plaintive minor lay that one might hear forever and never tire. Scanty shrubs of dogwood and sour-wood flaunted, red and orange, from the rifts of the great crags; here and there were fissures, irregularly shaped, and dark, save that upon the upper arch of each a ceaseless silvery light shimmered, reflected from the water. On one of the many ledges the cannon-ball lay unstirred.

“Skimpy, I b’lieve I could actially climb down this hyar bluff an’ coon it roun’ that thar ledge an’ git that ball,” said Ike, balancing himself dangerously over the precipice.

So far did it overhang the river at this point that he was startled by seeing a hat and face suddenly looking up at him from the depths below, and it was a moment before he realized that the hat and face were his own, mirrored in a dark pool.

“Ye couldn’t climb up ag’in with it in yer paw,” retorted Skimpy.

“Naw,” Ike admitted. “But ennyhow I’d like ter climb down thar an’ see what’s in them hollows. I b’lieve I could git inter one o’ ’em.”

Skimpy had taken a handful of pebbles and was skipping them down the river. He turned so suddenly that the one in his hand flew wide of the mark and nearly tipped his friend’s hat off his head.

“What air ye a-hankerin’ ter git in one o’ them holes fur?” he demanded, surprised, “so ez ye can’t git out ag’in? ’Pears-like ter me they’d be a mighty tight fit on sech a big corn-fed shoat ez ye air. An’ then I’d hev ter climb down thar an’ break my neck, I reckon, ter pull ye out by the heels.”

“I wouldn’t git in ’thout thar ’peared ter be plenty o’ elbow room,” Ike qualified.

“Who’s that?” said Skimpy, suddenly.

So absorbed had they been that until this moment they were not aware of a slow approach along the road behind them. The sight of a stranger was unusual, but so little curiosity do the mountaineers manifest in unknown passers-by that if the man’s manner had had no appeal to the boys, they would hardly have lifted their eyes; they would not even have stared after his back was turned.

But the stranger was about to hail them. He had already lifted his hand with an awkward wave of salutation. Still he fixed his eyes upon them and did not speak as he slouched toward them, and the two boys were impressed with the conviction that he had heard every word that they had been saying.

He was a tall, dawdling fellow of forty, perhaps, carrying a rifle on his shoulder, and dressed in an old brown jeans suit, ill-mended and patched here and there, and with some rents not patched at all. His hair, long and brown, streaked with gray, hung down to his collar beneath his old broad-brimmed wool hat. His face was lined and cadaverous, his features were sharp and shrewd. His eyes, bright, small, dark, and somehow not reassuring, expressed a sort of anxiety and anger that the boys could not comprehend.