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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Who Crosses Storm Mountain?, by 
+Charles Egbert Craddock     (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Who Crosses Storm Mountain?
+       1911
+
+Author: Charles Egbert Craddock     (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
+
+Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23551]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHO CROSSES STORM MOUNTAIN? ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WHO CROSSES STORM MOUNTAIN?
+
+By Charles Egbert Craddock
+
+1911
+
+
+The wind stirred in the weighted pines; the snow lay on the ground. Here
+and there on its smooth, white expanse footprints betokened the woodland
+gentry abroad. In the pallid glister of the moon, even amid the sparse,
+bluish shadows of the leafless trees, one might discriminate the
+impression of the pronged claw of the wild turkey, the short, swift
+paces of the mink, the padded, doglike paw of the wolf. A progress of a
+yet more ravening suggestion was intimated in great hoof-marks leading
+to the door of a little log cabin all a-crouch in the grim grip of
+winter and loneliness and poverty on the slope of the mountain, among
+heavy, outcropping ledges of rock and beetling, overhanging crags. With
+icy ranges all around as far as the eye could reach, with the vast,
+instarred, dark sky above, it might seem as if sorrow, the world, the
+law could hardly take account of so slight a thing, so remote. But
+smoke was slowly stealing up from its stick-and-clay chimney, and its
+clapboarded roof sheltered a group with scarcely the heart to mend the
+fire.
+
+Two women shivered on the broad hearth before the dispirited embers. One
+had wept so profusely that she had much ado to find a dry spot in her
+blue-checked apron, thrown over her head, wherewith to mop her tears.
+The other, much younger, her fair face reddened, her blue eyes swollen,
+her auburn curling hair all tangled on her shoulders, her voice
+half-choked with sobs, addressed herself to the narration of their
+woes, her cold, listless hands clasped about her knees as she sat on an
+inverted bushel-basket, for there was not a whole chair in the room.
+
+"An' then he jes' tuk an' leveled!" she faltered.
+
+A young hunter standing on the threshold, leaning on his rifle, a
+brace of wild turkeys hanging over his shoulders, half a dozen rabbits
+dangling from his belt, stared at her through the dull, red glow of the
+fading fire in amazed agitation.
+
+"What did he level, Medory--a gun?"
+
+"Wuss'n that!" replied the younger woman. "He leveled the weepon o' the
+law!"
+
+The man turned to look again at the curious disarray of the room. "The
+law don't allow him to do sech ez this!" he blurted out in rising
+anger. "Why, everything hyar is bodaciously broke an' busted! War it the
+sheriff himself ez levied?"
+
+"'Twar jes' the dep'ty critter, Clem Tweed," explained Medora, "mighty
+joki-fied, an' he 'peared ter be middlin' drunk, an' though he said
+su'thin' 'bout exemptions he 'lowed ez we-uns lived at the eend o' the
+world."
+
+Her mother-in-law suddenly lowered the apron from her face.
+
+"'The jumpin'-off place,' war what Clem Tweed called it!" she
+interpolated with a fiery eye of indignant reminiscence.
+
+"He did! He did!" Medora bitterly resented this fling at the remoteness
+of their poor home. "An' he said whilst hyar he'd level on everything
+in sight, ez he hoped never ter travel sech roads agin--everything in
+sight, even the baby an' the cat!"
+
+"Shucks, Medory, ye know the dep'ty man war funnin' whenst he said that
+about the baby an' the cat! Ye know ez Clem admitted he hed Christmas in
+his bones!" the elder objected.
+
+"Waal, war Clem Tweed funnin' whenst he done sech ez that, in levyin' an
+execution?" Bruce Gilhooley pointed with his ramrod at the wreck of the
+furniture.
+
+The two women burst into lugubrious sobs and rocked themselves back and
+forth in unison. "'Twar _Dad!_" Medora moaned, in smothered accents.
+
+A pause of bewilderment ensued. Then the young man's face took on an
+expression of dismay so ominous that Medora's tears were checked in
+the ghastly fear of disasters yet to come to her father-in-law. Now
+and again she glanced anxiously over her shoulder at an oblong black
+aperture in the dusk which betokened the open door of the shed-room.
+Some one lurked there, evidently cherishing all aloof a grief, an anger,
+a despair too poignant to share.
+
+"Dad warn't hyar whenst the dep'ty leveled," she said. "An' mighty glad
+we war--kase somebody mought hev got hurt. But whenst Dad kem home an'
+larnt the news he jes'--he jes'--he jes' lept about like a painter."
+
+"He did! He did!" asseverated a voice from the veiled head, all muffled
+in the checked apron.
+
+"Dad 'lowed," continued Medora, "ez Peter Petrie hev persecuted and druv
+him ter the wall. Fust he tricked Dad out 'n some unoccupied lan' what
+Dad hed begun ter clear, an' Petrie got it entered fust an' tuk out a
+grant an' holds the title! An' whenst Dad lay claim ter it Peter Petrie
+declared ef enny Gilhooley dared ter cross Storm Mounting he'd break
+every bone in his body!"
+
+"A true word--the insurance of the critter!" came from the blue-checked
+veil.
+
+A stir in the shed-room---a half-suppressed cough and a clearing of the
+throat. "An' then Dad fell on Pete Petrie at the Crossroads' store, whar
+the critter hed stopped with his mail-pouch, an' Dad trounced him well
+afore all the crowd o' loafers thar!"
+
+"Bless the Lord, he did!" the checked apron voiced a melancholy triumph.
+
+"An' then, ye remember whenst Dad set out fire in the woods las' fall
+ter burn off the trash on his own lan', the flames run jes' a leetle
+over his line an' on ter them woods on Storm Mounting, doin' no harm ter
+nobody, nor nuthin'!"
+
+"Not a mite--not a mite," asseverated the apron.
+
+"An' ez sech appears ter be agin the law Petrie gin information an' Dad
+war fined five dollars!"
+
+"An' paid it!" cried Jane Gilhooley. "Ye know that!"
+
+"An' then, ez it 'pears ter be the law ez one hundred dollars fur sech
+an offense is ter be forfeited ter ennybody ez will sue fur it," Medora
+resumed, "Petrie seen his chance ter git even fur bein' beat in a
+reg'lar knock-down-an'-drag-out fight, an'," with the rising inflection
+of a climax, "he hev sued and got jedgmint!"
+
+"An' so what that half-drunk dep'ty, Clem Tweed, calls an execution war
+leveled!" exclaimed Jane Gilhooley, her veiled head swaying forlornly as
+she sobbed invisibly.
+
+"But Dad 'lowed ez Peter Petrie shouldn't hev none o' his gear,"
+Medora's eyes flashed with a responsive sentiment.
+
+"His gran'mam's warpin' bars!" suggested the elder woman.
+
+"The spinnin'-wheels she brung from No'th Carliny," enumerated Medora,
+"the loom an' the candle-moulds."
+
+"The cheers his dad made fur his mam whenst they begun housekeeping"
+said Jane Gilhooley's muffled voice.
+
+"The press an' the safe," Medora continued.
+
+"The pot an' the oven," chokingly responded the apron.
+
+"The churn an' the piggins!"
+
+"The skillet an' the trivet!"
+
+Medora, fairly flinching from the inventory of all the household goods,
+so desecrated and "leveled on," returned to the salient incident of
+the day. "Dad jes' tuk an axe an' bust up every yearthly thing in the
+house!"
+
+"An' now we-uns ain't got nuthin'." The elder woman looked about in
+stunned dismay, her little black eyes a mere gleam of a pupil in the
+midst of their swollen lids and network of wrinkles.
+
+One of the miseries of the very ignorant is, paradoxically, the partial
+character of their privations. If the unknown were to them practically
+non-existent they might find solace in sluggish and secure content. But
+even the smallest circle of being touches continually the periphery
+of wider spheres. The air is freighted with echoes of undistinguished
+sounds. Powers, illimitable, absolute, uncomprehended, seem to hold
+an inimical sway over their lives and of these the most dreaded is
+the benign law, framed for their protection, spreading above them an
+unperceived, unimagined aegis. Thus there was hardly an article in
+the house which was not exempt by statute from execution, and the house
+itself and land worth only a hundred or two dollars were protected by
+the homestead law. The facetious deputy, Clem Tweed, with "Christmas in
+his bones," would have committed a misdemeanor in seriously levying upon
+them. He had held the affair as a capital farce--even affecting with
+wild, appropriating gambols to seize the baby and the cat--and fully
+realized that malice only had prompted the whole proceeding, to
+humiliate Ross Gilhooley and illustrate the completeness of the victory
+which Peter Petrie had won over his enemy.
+
+The younger Gilhooley, however, quaked as his limited intelligence laid
+hold on the fact that if the law had permitted a levy on the household
+goods to satisfy the judgment of Peter Petrie their destruction was
+in itself a balking of the process, resistance to the law, and with an
+unimagined penalty.
+
+"We-uns hev got ter git away from hyar somehows!" he said with decision.
+
+The idea of bluff Ross Gilhooley in the clutches of the law because of
+one fierce moment of goaded and petulant despair, with the ignominy of a
+criminal accusation, with all the sordid concomitants of arrest and
+the jail, was infinitely terrible to his unaccustomed imagination. He
+revolted from its contemplation with a personal application. For an
+honest man, however poor, feels all the high prerogatives of honor.
+
+There was a step in the shed-room where Ross Gilhooley had lurked and
+listened. His wrath now spent, his mind had traveled the obvious course
+to his son's conclusion. He stood a gigantic, bearded shadow in the
+doorway, half ashamed, wholly repentant, dimly, vaguely fearful, and all
+responsive and quivering to the idea of flight. "I been studyin' some
+'bout goin' ter Minervy Sue's in Georgy," he said creakingly, as if his
+voice had suffered from its unwonted disuse.
+
+"An' none too soon," said Bruce doggedly. "The oxen is Medory's, bein'
+lef' ter her whenst her dad died, an' the wagin is mine! Quit foolin'
+along o' that thar fire, Medory!" For with her bright hair hanging
+curling over her cheeks his young wife had leaned forward to start it
+anew.
+
+"Never ter kindle it agin on this ha'th-stone!" she cried with a
+poignant realization of the significance of the uprooting of the
+roof-tree and the wide, vague world without. And still once more the two
+women fell to bemoaning their fate of exile beside the expiring embers,
+while the elder Gilhooley's voice sounded bluffly outside calling the
+oxen, and his son was rattling their heavy yoke in the corner.
+
+They were well advanced on their journey ere yet the snowy Christmas
+dawn was in the sky. So slow a progress was ill-associated with the idea
+of flight. It was almost noiseless--the great hoofs of the oxen fell all
+muffled on the deep snow still whitely a-glitter with the moon, hanging
+dense and opaque in the western sky, and flecked with the dendroidal
+images of the overshadowing trees. The immense bovine heads swayed to
+and fro, cadenced to the deliberate pace, and more than once a muttered
+low of distaste and protest rose with the vapor curling upward from lip
+and nostril into the icy air. On the front seat of the cumbrous, white,
+canvas-covered vehicle was Medora, her bright hair blowing out from the
+folds of a red shawl worn hood-wise; she held a cord attached to the
+horns of one of the oxen by which she sought to guide the yoke in those
+intervals when her husband, who walked by their side with a goad, must
+needs fall to the rear to drive up a cow and calf. Inside the wagon Ross
+Gilhooley did naught but bow his head between his hands as if he could
+not face the coming day charged with he knew not what destiny for him.
+His wife was adjusting and readjusting the limited gear they had dared
+to bring off with them--their forlorn rags of clothing and bedding, all
+in shapeless bundles; sundry gourds full of soft soap, salt, tobacco,
+and a scanty store of provisions, which she feared would not last them
+all the way to Georgia to the home of Minervy Sue, their daughter.
+
+No one touched a space deeply filled with straw, but now and
+again Medora glanced back at it with the dawning of a smile in her
+grief-stricken face that cold, nor fear, nor despair could wholly
+overcast. Three small heads, all golden and curly, all pink-cheeked and
+fair, all blissfully slumbering, rested there as if they had been so
+many dolls packed away thus for fear of breaking. But they had no
+other couch than the straw, for Ross Gilhooley had not spared the
+feather-beds, and the little cabin at the Notch was now half full of the
+fluff ripped out by his sharp knife from the split ticks.
+
+Down the mountain the fugitives went, as silent as their shadows; and at
+last, when one might hardly know if it were the sheen of the moon that
+still illuminated the wan and wintry scene, or the reflection from the
+snow, or the dawning of the dark-gray day, the river came in sight, all
+a rippling, steely expanse under the chill wind between its ice-girt
+crags and snowy banks.
+
+The oxen went down to the ford in a lumbering run. Bruce sprang upon the
+tailboard to ride, the dogs chased the cow and calf to the crossing. The
+wheels grated ominously against great submerged boulders; the surging
+waves rose almost to the wagon-bed; the wind struck aslant the immense,
+cumbrous cover, threatening to capsize it; and, suddenly, in the midst
+of the transit, a sound, as clear as a bugle in the rare icy air, as
+searchingly sweet!
+
+All were motionless for an instant, doubtful, anxious, listening--only
+the wintry wind with its keen sibilance; only the dash of the swift
+current; only the grating of the wheels on the sand as the oxen reached
+the opposite margin!
+
+But hark, again! A clear tenor voice in the fag end of an old song:
+
+     "An' my bigges' bottle war my bes' friend,
+     An' my week's work was all at an end!"
+
+It issued from beyond the right fork of the road in advance, and an
+instant panic ensued. Discovery was hard upon them. Their laborious
+device was brought to naught should any eye espy them in their hasty
+flight to the State line. It had not seemed impossible that ere the day
+should dawn they might be far away in those impenetrable forests
+where one may journey many a league, meeting naught more inimical or
+speculative than bear or deer. It still was worth the effort.
+
+With a sudden spring from the tailboard of the wagon Bruce Gilhooley
+reached the yoke, fiercely goading the oxen onward. With an abrupt
+lurch, in which the vehicle swayed precariously and ponderously from
+side to side, they started up the steep, snowy bank, and breaking into
+their ungainly rim were guided into the left fork of the road. It was
+a level stretch and fringed about with pines, and soon all sight of the
+pilgrims was lost amidst the heavy snow-laden boughs.
+
+The river bank was silent and solitary; and after a considerable
+interval a man rode down from the right fork to the ford.
+
+More than once his horse refused the passage. A sort of parrot-faced man
+he was, known as Tank Dysart, young, red-haired, with a long, bent nose
+and a preposterous air of knowingness and turbulent inquiry. He cocked
+his head on one side with a snort of surprised indignation, and beat
+with both heels, but again the horse, sidling about the drifts, declined
+the direct passage and essayed to cross elsewhere.
+
+All at once a bundle of red flannel, lying in the drift close to the
+water's edge, caught his attention, and suddenly there issued forth a
+lusty bawl. The horseman would have turned pale but for the whisky which
+had permanently incarnadined the bend of his nose. As it was, however,
+he looked far more dismayed than the facts might seem to warrant.
+
+"It's the booze--I got 'em again fur sartain!" he quavered in plaintive
+helplessness, his terrified eyes fixed on the squirming bundle.
+
+Then, drunk as he was, he perceived the rift in his logic "Gol-darn ye!"
+he exclaimed, violently kicking the horse, "you-uns ain't got no call
+ter view visions an' see sights--ye old water-bibber!"
+
+As the horse continued to snort and back away from the object Tank
+Dysart became convinced of its reality. Still mounted, he passed close
+enough alongside for a grasp at it. The old red-flannel cape and hood
+disclosed a plump infant about ten months of age, whimpering and cruelly
+rubbing his eyes with his fists, and now bawling outright with rage;
+as he chanced to meet the gaze of his rescuer he paused to laugh in
+a one-sided way, displaying two pearly teeth and a very beguiling
+red tongue, but again stiffening himself he yelled as behooves a
+self-respecting baby so obviously misplaced.
+
+Tank Dysart held him out at arm's length in his strong grasp, surveying
+him in mingled astonishment and delight. "Why, bless my soul, Christmas
+gift!" he addressed him. "I'm powerful obligated fur yer company!"
+
+For the genial infant giggled and sputtered and gurgled inconsistently
+in the midst of his bawling, and banteringly kicked out one soft foot
+in a snug, red sock, faking Tank full in the chest; then he stiffened,
+swayed backward and screamed again as if in agonies of grief.
+
+"Sufferin' Moses!" grinned the drunkard. "I wouldn't take nuthin' fur
+ye! Ye air a find, an' no mistake!" The word suggested illusion. "Ye
+ain't no snake, now--nary toad--nary green rabbit--no sort'n jim-jam?"
+he stipulated apprehensively.
+
+The baby babbled gleefully, and, as if attesting its reality, delivered
+half a dozen strong kicks with those active plump feet, encased in the
+smart red socks.
+
+It suddenly occurred to the drunkard that here was a duty owing--to seek
+out the child's parents. Even to his befuddled brain that fact was plain
+enough. The little creature had been lost evidently from some family of
+travelers who would presently retrace their way seeking him.
+
+When Bruce Gilhooley had sprung from the tailboard of the wagon in
+that moment of tumultuous panic he had not noticed the bundle of straw
+dislodged. Falling with it softly into the deep snowdrift the child had
+continued to slumber quietly till awakened by the cold to silence and
+loneliness, and then this strange rencontre.
+
+With a half-discriminated idea of overtaking the supposed travelers,
+Tank Dysart briskly forded the river, and, pressing his horse to a
+canter, made off in the opposite direction.
+
+Gayly they fared along for a time, Tank frequently refreshing himself
+from a "tickler," facetiously so-called, which he carried in his pocket.
+Occasionally he generously offered the baby the stopper to suck, and as
+the child smacked his lips with evident relish Tank roared out again in
+his fine and flexible tenor:
+
+"For my bigges' bottle war my bes' friend, an' my week's work war all at
+an end!"
+
+The horse, by far the nobler animal of the two, stood still ever and
+anon when the drunken creature swayed back and forth in his saddle,
+imperiling his equilibrium. Even to his besotted mind, as he grew
+more intoxicated, the danger to the child in his erratic grasp became
+apparent.
+
+"I got ter put him in a safe place--a Christmas gift," he now and then
+stuttered.
+
+When he came at last within reach of a human habitation he had been for
+some time consciously on the point of falling from the saddle with
+the infant, who was now quietly asleep. He noted, as in a dream, the
+Crossroads' store, which was also the post-office; standing in front
+of the log cabin was a horse already saddled hanging down a dull,
+dispirited head as he awaited the mail-rider through a long, cold
+interval, and bearing a United States mail-pouch, mouldy, flabby,
+nearly empty. The door of the store was closed against the cold; the
+blacksmith's shop was far down the road; the two or three scattered
+dwellings showed no sign of life but the wreaths of blue smoke curling
+up from the clay-and-stick chimneys.
+
+Perhaps it was the impunity of the moment that suggested the idea to
+Dysart's whimsical drunken fancy. He never knew. He suddenly tried the
+mouth of the pouch. It was locked. Nothing daunted, a stroke of a
+keen knife slit the upper part of the side seam, the sleeping baby was
+slipped into the aperture, and Tank Dysart rode off chuckling with glee
+to think of the dismay of the mail-rider when the mall-pouch should
+break forth with squeals and quiver with kicks, which embarrassment
+would probably not befall him until far away in the wilderness with his
+perplexity, for there had been something stronger on that stopper than
+milk or cambric tea.
+
+As Tank went he muttered something about the security of the United
+States mail, wherein he had had the forethought to deposit his Christmas
+gift, and forthwith he flung himself into the shuck-pen, where he fell
+asleep, and was not found till half-frozen, his whereabouts being at
+last disclosed to the storekeeper by the persistent presence of his
+faithful steed standing hard by. Tank was humanely cared for by this
+functionary, but several days elapsed before he altogether recovered
+consciousness; it was naturally a confused, disconnected train of
+impressions which his mind retained. At first, in a maudlin state,
+he demanded of the storekeeper, in his capacity as postmaster also, a
+package, a Christmas gift, which he averred he should receive by
+mail. Albeit this was esteemed merely an inebriated fancy, such is the
+sensitiveness of the United States postal service on the subject of
+missing mail matter that the postmaster, half-irritated, half-nervous,
+detailed it to the mail-rider. "Tank 'lows ez he put it into the mail
+hyar himself!"
+
+Peter Petrie, a lowering-eyed, severe-visaged, square-jawed man, gave
+Tank Dysart only a glance of ire from under his hat-brim, as if the
+matter were not worth the waste of a word.
+
+Dysart, wreck though he was, had not yet lost all conscience. He was in
+an agony of remorse and doubt. It kept him sober longer than he had
+been for five years, for he was a professed drunkard and idler, scarcely
+considered responsible. He could not be sure that he had experienced
+aught which he seemed to remember--he hoped it was all only his drunken
+fancy, for what could have been the fate of the child subject to the
+freaks of his imbecile folly! He was reassured to hear no rumors of a
+lost child, and yet so definite were the images of his recollection that
+they must needs constrain his credulity.
+
+He felt it in the nature of a rescue one day when, as he chanced to join
+a group of gossips loitering around the fire of the forge, he heard the
+smith ask casually: "Who is that thar baby visitin' at Peter Petrie 's
+over yander acrost Storm Mounting?"
+
+"Gran'child, I reckon," suggested his big-boned, bare-armed, soot-grimed
+striker.
+
+"Peter Petrie hain't got nare gran'-child," said one of the loungers.
+
+Tank, sober for once, held his breath to listen.
+
+"Behaves powerful like a gran'dad," observed the smith, holding a
+horseshoe with the tongs in the fire while the striker laid hold on
+the bellows and the sighing sound surged to and fro and the white blaze
+flared forth, showing the interested faces of the group in the dusky
+smithy, and among them the horse whose shoe was making, while another
+stood at the open door defined against the snow. "Behaves like he ain't
+got a mite o' sense. I war goin' by thar one day las' week an' I stepped
+up on the porch ter pass the time o' day with Pete an' his wife, an' the
+door war open. And' what d'ye s'pose I seen! Old Peter Petrie
+a-goin' round the floor on all fours, an' a-settin' on his back war
+a baby--powerful peart youngster--jes' a-grinnin' an' a-whoopin' an'
+a-poundin' old Peter with a whip! An' Pete galloped, he did! Didn't
+seem beset with them rheumatics he used ter talk about--peartest leetle
+'possum of a baby!"
+
+Tank Dysart lost no time in his investigations and he had the courage of
+his convictions. He did not scruple to call Peter Petrie to his face a
+mail-robber.
+
+"Ye tuk a package deposited in the United States' mail and converted it
+to your own use," he vociferated.
+
+"'Twar neither stamped nor addressed," old Petrie gruffly contended,
+albeit obviously disconcerted.
+
+Dysart even sought to induce the postmaster to send a complaint of the
+rider to the postal authorities.
+
+"I got too much respec' fur my job," replied that worthy, jocosely eying
+Tank across the counter of the store. "I ain't goin' ter let on ter the
+folks in Washington that we send babies about in the mail-bags hyar in
+the mountings."
+
+The social acquaintance of the little man had necessarily been rather
+limited, but one day a neighbor, attracted to the Petrie cabin by idle
+curiosity concerning the waif robbed from the mails, gazed upon him for
+one astonished instant and then proclaimed his identity.
+
+"Nare Gilhooley should ever cross Storm Mounting, 'cordin ter yer saying
+Petey, an' hyar ye hev been totin' Boss Gilhooley 's gran'son back an'
+forth across Old Stormy, an' all yer spare time ye spend on yer hands
+an' knees bar kin' like a dog jes' ter pleasure him."
+
+Peter Petrie changed countenance suddenly. His square, bristly, grim jaw
+hardened and stiffened, so dear to him were all his stubborn convictions
+and grizzly, ancient feuds. But he bestirred himself to cause
+information to be conveyed to Bruce Gilhooley of his son's whereabouts
+for he readily suspected that the family had fled to Minervy Sue's in
+Georgia. Peter Petrie sustained in this act of conscience a grievous
+wrench, for it foreshadowed parting with the choice missive filched from
+the mail-bag, but he was not unmindful of the anguish and bereavement
+of the mother, and somehow the thought was peculiarly coercive at this
+season.
+
+"I don't want ter even up with King Herod, now, sure!" he averred to
+himself one night as he sat late over the embers, reviewing his plans
+all made. He thought much in these lone hours as He heard the wind speed
+past, the trees crack under their weight of snow, and noted through the
+tiny window the glister of a great star of a supernal lustre, high above
+the pines, what a freight of joy the tidings of this child would bear to
+the bleeding hearts of his kindred. Albeit so humble, the parallel must
+needs arise suggesting the everlasting joy the existence of another
+Child had brought to the souls of all kindreds, all peoples. "Peace,
+peace," he reiterated, as the red coals crumbled and the gray ash
+spread; "Peace an' good-will!"
+
+The words seemed to epitomize all religion, all value, all hope' and
+somehow they so dwelt in his mind that the next day he was moved to add
+a personal message to old Boss Gilhooley in sending the more important
+information to Bruce.
+
+"Let on ter Boss," he charged the envoy, "ez--ez--that thar jedgmint
+an' execution issued war jes' formal--ye mought say--jes' ter hev all
+the papers reg'lar."
+
+By virtue of more attrition with the world the mail-rider was more
+sophisticated than his enemy, and sooth to say, more sophistical.
+
+"Boss is writ-proof, the old fool, though he war minded ter cut me out'n
+my levy if he could! But waal, jes' tell him from me ez we-uns hev hed
+a heap o' pleasure in the baby's company in the Chris 'mus, an' we-uns
+expec' ter borry him some whenst they all gits home!"
+
+To the child's kindred the news was as if he had risen from the dead,
+and the gratitude of the Gilhooleys to Petrie knew no bounds. They had
+accounted the baby drowned when, missing him, they had retraced their
+way, finding naught but a bit of old blanket on which he had lain, close
+to the verge of the cruel river. Boss Gilhooley, softened and rendered
+tractable by exile and sorrow, upon his return lent himself to an
+affected warmth toward Peter Petrie which gradually assumed all the
+fervors of sincerity. The neighbors indeed were moved to say that the
+two friends and ancient enemies, when both on all fours and barking for
+the delight of the baby, were never so little like dogs in all their
+lives.
+
+Thus a child shall lead them.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Who Crosses Storm Mountain?, by 
+Charles Egbert Craddock     (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
+
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