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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 63014 ***

  Masterpieces of
  Adventure

  _In Four Volumes_

  STORIES OF DESERT PLACES



  Edited by
  Nella Braddy



  Garden City New York
  Doubleday, Page & Company
  1922




  COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY
  DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
  INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
  AT
  THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.




  GRATEFULLY DEDICATED
  TO
  BLANCHE COLTON WILLIAMS, Ph.D.




EDITOR'S NOTE

In these volumes the word _adventure_ has been used in its broadest
sense to cover not only strange happenings in strange places but also
love and life and death--all things that have to do with the great
adventure of living.  Questions as to the fitness of a story were
settled by examining the qualities of the narrative as such rather
than by reference to a technical classification of short stories.

It is the inalienable right of the editor of a work of this kind to
plead copyright difficulties in extenuation for whatever faults it
may possess.  We beg the reader to believe that this is why his
favorite story was omitted while one vastly inferior was included.




CONTENTS


I. THE BARON'S QUARRY
      _Edgerton Castle_

II. A MAN AND SOME OTHERS
      _Stephen Crane_

III. THE OUTLAWS
      _Selma Lagerlöf_

IV. PRINCESS BOB AND HER FRIENDS
      _Bret Harte_

V. THE THREE STRANGERS
      _Thomas Hardy_

VI. THE PASSING OF BLACK EAGLE
      _O. Henry_

VII. NIÑO DIABLO
      _W. H. Hudson_




Masterpieces of Adventure

_STORIES OF DESERT PLACES_


I

THE BARON'S QUARRY*

EGERTON CASTLE

*Reprinted by permission of D. Appleton & Co.


"Oh no, I assure you, you are not boring Mr. Marshfield," said this
personage himself in his gentle voice--that curious voice that could
flow on for hours, promulgating profound and startling theories on
every department of human knowledge or conducting paradoxical
arguments without a single inflection or pause of hesitation.  "I am,
on the contrary, much interested in your hunting talk.  To paraphrase
a well-worn quotation somewhat widely, _nihil humanum a me alienum
est_.  Even hunting stories may have their point of biological
interest: the philologist sometimes pricks his ear to the jargon of
the chase; moreover, I am not incapable of appreciating the
subject-matter itself.  This seems to excite some derision.  I admit
I am not much of a sportsman to look at, nor, indeed, by instinct,
yet I have had some out-of-the-way experiences in that
line--generally when intent on other pursuits.  I doubt, for
instance, if even you, Major Travers, notwithstanding your well-known
exploits against man and beast, notwithstanding that doubtful smile
of yours, could match the strangeness of a certain hunting adventure
in which I played an important part."

The speaker's small, deep-set, black eyes, that never warmed to
anything more human than a purely speculative, scientific interest in
his surroundings, here wandered round the sceptical yet expectant
circle with bland amusement.  He stretched out his bloodless fingers
for another of his host's superfine cigars and proceeded, with only
such interruptions as were occasioned by the lighting and careful
smoking of the latter.


"I was returning home after my prolonged stay in Petersburg,
intending to linger on my way and test with mine own ears certain
among the many dialects of eastern Europe--anent which there is a
symmetrical little cluster of philological knotty points it is my
modest intention one day to unravel.  However, that is neither here
nor there.  On the road to Hungary I bethought myself opportunely of
proving the once pressingly offered hospitality of the Baron
Kossowski.

"You may have met the man, Major Travers, he was a tremendous
sportsman, if you like.  I first came across him at McNeil's place in
remote Ireland.  Now, being in Bukowina, within measurable distance
of his Carpathian abode, and curious to see a Polish lord at home, I
remembered his invitation.  It was already of long standing, but it
had been warm, born in fact of a sudden fit of enthusiasm for
me"--here a half-mocking smile quivered an instant under the
speaker's black moustache--"which, as it was characteristic, I may as
well tell you about.

"It was on the day of, or rather, to be accurate, on the day after my
arrival, toward the small hours of the morning, in the smoking-room
at Rathdrum.  Our host was peacefully snoring over his empty pipe and
his seventh glass of whiskey, also empty.  The rest of the men had
slunk off to bed.  The baron, who all unknown to himself had been a
subject of most interesting observation to me the whole evening,
being now practically alone with me, condescended to turn an eye, as
wide awake as a fox's, albeit slightly bloodshot, upon the
contemptible white-faced person who had preferred spending the raw
hours over his papers, within the radius of a glorious fire's warmth,
to creeping slily over treacherous quagmires in the pursuit of timid
bog creatures (snipe shooting had been the order of the day)--the
baron, I say, became aware of my existence and entered into
conversation with me.

"He would no doubt have been much surprised could he have known that
he was already mapped out, craniologically and physiognomically,
catalogued with care, and neatly laid by in his proper ethnological
box, in my private type museum, that, as I sat and examined him from
my different coigns of vantage in library, in dining and smoking room
that evening, not a look of his, not a gesture went forth but had
significance for me.

"You, I had thought, with your broad shoulders and deep chest, your
massive head that should have gone with a tall stature, not with
those short, sturdy limbs; with your thick red hair, that should have
been black for that matter, with your wide-set, yellow eyes, you
would be a real puzzle to one who did not recognize in you equal
mixtures of the fair, stalwart, and muscular Slav with the
bilious-sanguine, thick-set, wiry Turanian.  Your pedigree would no
doubt bear me out; there is as much of the Magyar as of the Pole in
your anatomy.  Athlete, and yet a tangle of nerves; a ferocious brute
at bottom, I dare say, for your broad forehead inclines to flatness,
under your bristling beard your jaw must protrude, and the base of
your skull is ominously thick.  And, with all that, capable of ideal
transports; when that girl played and sang to-night I saw the
swelling of your eyelid veins, and how that small, tenacious,
clawlike hand of yours twitched.  You would be a fine leader of
men--but God help the wretches in your power!

"So had I mused upon him.  Yet I confess that when we came into
closer contact with each other even I was not proof against the
singular courtesy of his manner and his unaccountable personal charm.

"Our conversation soon grew interesting; to me as a matter of course,
and evidently to him also.  A few general words led to interchange of
remarks upon the country we were both visitors in and so to national
characteristics--Pole and Irishman have not a few in common, both in
their nature and history.  An observation which he made, not without
a certain flash in his light eyes and a transient uncovering of the
teeth, on the Irish type of female beauty, suddenly suggested to me a
stanza of an ancient Polish ballad, very full of milk-and-blood
imagery, of alternating ferocity and voluptuousness.  This I quoted
to the astounded foreigner, in the vernacular, and this it was that
metamorphosed his mere perfection of civility into sudden warmth,
and, in fact, procured me the invitation in question.

"When I left Rathdrum the baron's last words to me were that if I
ever thought of visiting his country otherwise than in books he held
me bound to make Yany, his Galician seat, my headquarters of study.

"From Czernowicz, therefore, where I stopped some time, I wrote,
received in due time a few lines of prettily worded reply, and
ultimately entered my sled in the nearest town to, yet at a most
forbidding distance from, Yany, and started on my journey thither.

"The undertaking meant many long hours of undulation and skidding
over the November snow, to the somniferous bell-jangle of my dirty
little horses; the only impression of interest being a weird gipsy
concert I came in for at a miserable drinking-booth half buried in
the snow where we halted for the refreshment of man and beast.  Here,
I remember, I discovered a very definite connection between the
characteristic run of the tsimbol, the peculiar bite of the
Zigeuner's bow on his fiddle-string, and some distinctive points of
Turanian tongues--in other countries, in Spain for instance, your
gipsy speaks differently on his instrument.  But, oddly enough, when
I later attempted to put this observation on paper I could find no
word to express it."


A few of our company evinced signs of sleepiness, but most of us who
knew Marshfield, and that he who could, unless he had something novel
to say, be as silent and retiring as he now evinced signs of being
copious, awaited further with patience.  He has his own deliberate
way of speaking, which he evidently enjoys greatly, though it be
occasionally trying to his listeners.

"On the afternoon of my second day's drive, the snow, which till then
had fallen fine and continuous, ceased, and my Jehu, suddenly
interrupting himself in the midst of some exciting wolf story, quite
in keeping with the time of year and the wild surroundings, pointed
to a distant spot against the grey sky to the north-west, between two
wood-covered folds of ground--the first eastern spurs of the great
Carpathian chain.

"'There stands Yany,' said he.

"I looked at my far-off goal with interest.  As we drew nearer, the
sinking sun, just dipping behind the hills, tinged the now distinct
frontage with a cold, copperlike gleam, but it was only for a minute;
the next the building became nothing more to the eye than a black
irregular silhouette against the crimson sky.

"Before we entered the long, steep avenue of poplars, the early
winter darkness was upon us, rendered all the more depressing by grey
mists which gave a ghostly aspect to such objects as the sheen of the
snow rendered visible.  Once or twice there were feeble flashes of
light looming in iridescent halos as we passed little clusters of
hovels, but for which I should have been induced to fancy that the
great Hof stood alone in the wilderness, such was the deathly
stillness around.  But even as the tall square building rose before
us above the vapour, yellow lighted in various stories, and mighty in
height and breadth, there broke upon my ear a deep-mouthed, menacing
bay, which gave at once almost alarming reality to the eerie
surroundings.

"'His lordship's boar and wolf hounds,' quoth my charioteer calmly,
unmindful of the regular pandemonium of howls and barks which ensued
as he skilfully turned his horses through the gateway and flogged the
tired beasts into a sort of shambling canter that we might land with
glory before the house door; a weakness common, I believe, to drivers
of all nations.

"I alighted in the court of honour, and while awaiting an answer to
my tug at the bell, stood, broken with fatigue, depressed, chilled
and aching, questioning the wisdom of my proceedings and the amount
of comfort, physical and moral, that was likely to await me in a
_tête-à-tête_ visit with a well-mannered savage in his own home.

"The unkempt tribe of stable retainers who began to gather round me
and my rough vehicle in the gloom, with their evil-smelling
sheepskins and their resigned battered visages, were not calculated
to reassure me.  Yet when the door opened, there stood a smart
chasseur and a solemn major-domo who might but just have stepped out
of Mayfair; and there was displayed a spreading vista of warm,
deep-coloured halls, with here a statue and there a stuffed bear, and
underfoot pile carpets strewn with rarest skins.

"Marvelling, yet comforted withal, I followed the solemn butler, who
received me with the deference due to an expected guest and expressed
the master's regret for his enforced absence till dinner-time.  I
traversed vast rooms, each more sumptuous than the last, feeling the
strangeness of the contrast between the outer desolation and this
sybaritic excess of luxury growing ever more strongly upon me; caught
a glimpse of a picture-gallery, where peculiar yet admirably executed
latter-day French pictures hung side by side with ferocious boar
hunts of Snyder and such kin; and, at length, was ushered into a most
cheerful room, modern to excess in its comfortable promise, where, in
addition to the tall stove necessary for warmth, there burned on an
open hearth a vastly pleasant fire of resinous logs, and where, on a
low table, awaited me a dainty service of fragrant Russian tea.

"My impression of utter novelty seemed somehow enhanced by this
unexpected refinement in the heart of the solitudes and in such a
rugged shell, and yet, when I came to reflect, it was only
characteristic of my cosmopolitan host.  But another surprise was in
store for me.

"When I had recovered bodily warmth and mental equilibrium in my
downy armchair, before the roaring logs, and during the delicious
absorption of my second glass of tea, I turned my attention to the
French valet, evidently the baron's own man, who was deftly unpacking
my portmanteau, and who, unless my practised eye deceived me, asked
for nothing better than to entertain me with agreeable conversation
the while.

"'Your master is out, then,' quoth I, knowing that the most trivial
remark would suffice to start him.

"True, monseigneur was out; he was desolated in despair (this with
the national amiable and imaginative instinct); but it was doubtless
important business.  M. le Baron had the visit of his factor during
the midday meal; had left the table hurriedly, and had not been seen
since.  Madame la Baronne had been a little suffering, but she would
receive monsieur.

"'Madame!' exclaimed I, astounded.  'Is your master then married?
since when?'--visions of a fair Tartar, fit mate for my baron,
immediately springing somewhat alluringly before my mental vision.
But the answer dispelled the picturesque fancy.

"'Oh yes,' said the man, with a somewhat peculiar expression.  'Yes,
monseigneur is married.  Did monsieur not know?  And yet it was from
England that monseigneur brought back his wife.'

"'An Englishwoman!'

"My first thought was one of pity; an Englishwoman alone in this
wilderness--two days' drive from even a railway station--and at the
mercy of Kossowski!  But the next minute I reversed my judgment.
Probably she adored her rufous lord, took his veneer of courtesy--a
veneer of the most exquisite polish, I grant you, but perilously
thin--for the very perfection of chivalry.  Or perchance it was his
inner savageness itself that charmed her; the most refined women
often amaze one by the fascination which the preponderance of the
brute in the opposite sex seems to have for them.

"I was anxious to hear more.

"'Is it not dull for the lady here at this time of year?'

"The valet raised his shoulders with a gesture of despair that was
almost passionate.

"Dull!  Ah, monsieur could not conceive to himself the dulness of it.
That poor Madame la Baronne! not even a little child to keep her
company on the long, long days when there was nothing but snow in the
heaven and on the earth and the howling of the wind and the dogs to
cheer her.  At the beginning, indeed, it had been different; when the
master first brought home his bride the house was gay enough.  It was
all redecorated and refurnished to receive her (monsieur should have
seen it before, a mere _rendezvous-de-chasse_--for the matter of that
so were all the country houses in these parts!)  Ah, that was the
good time!  There were visits month after month; parties, sleighing,
dancing, trips to St. Petersburg and Vienna.  But this year it seemed
they were to have nothing but boars and wolves.  How madame could
stand it--well, it was not for him to speak--and heaving a deep sigh
he delicately inserted my white tie round my collar, and with a
flourish twisted it into an irreproachable bow beneath my chin.

"I did not think it right to cross-examine the willing talker any
further, especially as, despite his last asseveration, there were
evidently volumes he still wished to pour forth; but I confess that,
as I made my way slowly out of my room along the noiseless length of
passage, I was conscious of an unwonted, not to say vulgar, curiosity
concerning the woman who had captivated such a man as the Baron
Kossowski.

"In a fit of speculative abstraction I must have taken the wrong
turning, for I presently found myself in a long, narrow passage I did
not remember.  I was retracing my steps when there came the sound of
rapid footfalls upon stone flags; a little door flew open in the wall
close to me, and a small, thick-set man, huddled in the rough
sheepskin of the Galician peasant, with a mangy fur cap on his head,
nearly ran headlong into my arms.  I was about condescendingly to
interpellate him in my best Polish when I caught the gleam of an
angry yellow eye and noted the bristle of a red beard--Kossowski!

"Amazed, I fell back a step in silence.  With a growl, like an
uncouth animal disturbed, he drew his filthy cap over his brow with a
savage gesture and pursued his way down the corridor at a sort of
wild-boar trot.

"This first meeting between host and guest was so odd, so
incongruous, that it afforded me plenty of food for a fresh line of
conjecture as I traced my way back to the picture-gallery, and from
thence successfully to the drawing-room, which, as the door was ajar,
I could not this time mistake.

"It was large and lofty and dimly lit by shaded lamps; through the
rosy gloom I could at first only just make out a slender figure by
the hearth; but as I advanced, this was resolved into a singularly
graceful woman in clinging, fur-trimmed velvet gown, who, with one
hand resting on the high mantelpiece, the other hanging listlessly by
her side, stood gazing down at the crumbling wood fire as if in a
dream.

"My friends are kind enough to say that I have a catlike tread; I
know not how that may be, at any rate the carpet I was walking upon
was thick enough to smother a heavier footfall; not until I was quite
close to her did my hostess become aware of my presence.  Then she
started violently and looked over her shoulder at me with dilating
eyes.  Evidently a nervous creature, I saw the pulse in her throat,
strained by her attitude, flutter like a terrified bird.

"The next instant she had stretched out her hand with sweet, English
words of welcome, and the face, which I had been comparing in my mind
to that of Guide's Cenci, became transformed by the arch and
exquisite smile of a Greuse.  For more than two years I had had no
intercourse with any of my nationality.  I could conceive the sound
of his native tongue under such circumstances moving a man in a
curious, unexpected fashion.

"I babbled some commonplace reply, after which there was silence
while we stood opposite each other, she looking at me expectantly.
At length, with a sigh checked by a smile and an overtone of sadness
in a voice that yet tried to be sprightly:--

"'Am I then so changed, Mr. Marshfield?' she asked.  And all at once
I knew her: the girl whose nightingale throat had redeemed the
desolation of the evenings at Rathdrum, whose sunny beauty had seemed
(even to my celebrated, cold-blooded aestheticism) worthy to haunt a
man's dreams.  Yes, there was the subtle curve of waist, the warm
line of throat, the dainty foot, the slender, tip-tilted
fingers--witty fingers, as I had classified them--which I now shook
like a true Briton, instead of availing myself of the privilege the
country gave me, and kissing her slender wrist.

"But she was changed; and I told her so with unconventional
frankness, studying her closely as I spoke.

"'I am afraid,' I said gravely, 'that this place does not agree with
you.'

"She shrank from my scrutiny with a nervous movement and flushed to
the roots of her red-brown hair.  Then she answered coldly that I was
wrong, that she was in excellent health, but that she could not
expect, any more than other people, to preserve perennial youth (I
rapidly calculated she might be two-and-twenty), though indeed, with
a little forced laugh, it was scarcely flattering to hear one had
altered out of all recognition.  Then, without allowing me time to
reply, she plunged into a general topic of conversation which, as I
should have been obtuse indeed not to take the hint, I did my best to
keep up.

"But while she talked of Vienna and Warsaw, of her distant neighbours
and last year's visitors, it was evident that her mind was elsewhere;
her eye wandered, she lost the thread of her discourse; answered me
at random, and smiled her piteous smile incongruously.

"However lonely she might be in her solitary splendour, the company
of a countryman was evidently no such welcome diversion.

"After a little while she seemed to feel herself that she was lacking
in cordiality, and, bringing her absent gaze to bear upon me with a
puzzled, strained look:--

"'I fear you will find it very dull,' she said; 'my husband is so
wrapped up this winter in his country life and his sport, you are the
first visitor we have had.  There is nothing but guns and horses
here, and you do not care for these things.'

"The door creaked behind us; and the baron entered, in faultless
evening dress.  Before she turned toward him I was sharp enough to
catch again the upleaping of a quick dread in her eyes, not even so
much dread perhaps, I thought afterward, as horror--the horror we
notice in some animals at the nearing of a beast of prey.  It was
gone in a second, and she was smiling.  But it was a revelation.

"Perhaps he beat her in Russian fashion, and she as an English woman
was narrow-minded enough to resent this; or perhaps merely I had the
misfortune to arrive during a matrimonial misunderstanding.

"The baron would not give me leisure to reflect; he was so very
effusive in his greeting--not a hint of our previous meeting--unlike
my hostess, all in all to me; eager to listen, to reply; almost
affectionate, full of references to old times and genial allusions.
No doubt when he chose he could be the most charming of men; there
were moments when, looking at him in his correct attire, hearkening
to his cultured voice, marking his quiet smile and restrained
gesture, the almost exaggerated politeness of his manner to his wife,
whose fingers he had kissed with pretty, old-fashioned gallantry upon
his entrance, I asked myself, could that encounter in the passage
have been a dream? could that savage in the sheepskin be my courteous
entertainer?

"'Just as I came in, did I hear my wife say there was nothing for you
to do in this place?' he said presently to me.  Then, turning to
her:--

"'You do not seem to know Mr. Marshfield.  Wherever he can open his
eyes, there is for him something to see which might not interest
other men.  He will find things in my library which I have no notion
of.  He will discover objects for scientific observation in all the
members of my household, not only in the good-looking maids--though
he could, I have no doubt, tell their points as I could those of a
horse.  We have maidens here of several distinct races, Marshfield.
We have also witches, and Jew leeches, and holy daft people.  In any
case, Yany, with all its dependencies, material, male, and female,
are at your disposal, for what you can make out of them.'

"'It is good,' he went on gaily, 'that you should happen to have this
happy disposition, for I fear that, no later than to-morrow, I may
have to absent myself from home.  I have heard that there are news of
wolves--they menace to be a greater pest than usual this winter, but
I am going to drive them on quite a new plan, and it will go hard
with me if I don't come even with them.  Well for you, by the way,
Marshfield, that you did not pass within their scent to-day.'  Then,
musingly: 'I should not give much for the life of a traveller who
happened to wander in these parts just now.'  Here he interrupted
himself hastily, and went over to his wife who had sunk back on her
chair, livid, seemingly on the point of swooning.

"His gaze was devouring; so might a man look at the woman he adored,
in his anxiety.

"'What! faint, Violet, alarmed!'  His voice was subdued, yet there
was an unmistakable thrill of emotion in it.

"'Pshaw!' thought I to myself, 'the man is a model husband.'

"She clenched her hands, and by sheer force of will seemed to pull
herself together.  These nervous women have often an unexpected fund
of strength.

"'Come, that is well,' said the baron, with a flickering smile; 'Mr.
Marshfield will think you but badly acclimatized to Poland if a
little wolf-scare can upset you.  My dear wife is so soft-hearted,'
he went on to me, 'that she is capable of making herself quite ill
over the sad fate that might have, but has not, overcome you.  Or,
perhaps,' he added, in a still gentler voice, 'her fear is that I may
expose myself to danger for the public weal.'

"She turned her head away, but I saw her set her teeth as if to choke
a sob.  The baron chuckled in his throat and seemed to luxuriate in
the pleasant thought.

"At this moment folding doors were thrown open, and supper was
announced.  I offered my arm, she rose and took it in silence.  This
silence she maintained during the first part of the meal, despite her
husband's brilliant conversation and almost uproarious spirits.  But,
by and by, a bright colour mounted to her cheeks and lustre to her
eyes.  I suppose you will all think me horribly unpoetical if I add
that she drank several glasses of champagne one after the other, a
fact which perhaps may account for the change.

"At any rate she spoke and laughed and looked lovely, and I did not
wonder that the baron could hardly keep his eyes off her.
But--whether it was her wifely anxiety or not--it was evident her
mind was not at ease through it all, and I fancied that her
brightness was feverish, her merriment slightly hysterical.

"After supper--an exquisite one it was--we adjourned together, in
foreign fashion, to the drawing-room; the baron threw himself into a
chair and, somewhat with the air of a pasha, demanded music.  He was
flushed; the veins of his forehead were swollen and stood out like
cords; the wine drunk at table was potent; even through my phlegmatic
frame it ran hotly.

"She hesitated a moment or two, then docilely sat down to the piano.
That she could sing I have already made clear; how she could sing,
with what pathos, passion, as well as perfect art, I had never
realized before.

"When the song was ended she remained for a while, with eyes lost in
distance, very still, save for her quick breathing.  It was clear she
was moved by the music; indeed she must have thrown her whole soul
into it.

"At first we, the audience, paid her the rare compliment of silence.
Then the baron broke forth into loud applause.

"'Brava, brava! that was really said _con amore_.  A delicious
love-song, delicious--but French.  You must sing one of our Slav
melodies for Marshfield before you allow us to go and smoke.'

"She started from her reverie with a flush, and after a pause struck
slowly a few simple chords, then began one of those strangely sweet
yet intensely pathetic Russian airs which give one a curious
revelation of the profound, endless melancholy lurking in the
national mind.

"'What do you think of it?' asked the baron of me when it ceased.

"'What I have always thought of such music--it is that of a hopeless
people; poetical, crushed, and resigned.'

"He gave a loud laugh.  'Hear the analyst, the psychologue--why, man,
it is a love-song!  Is it possible that we, uncivilized, are truer
realists than our hyper-cultured Western neighbours?  Have we gone to
the root of the matter, in our simple way?'

"The baroness got up abruptly.  She looked white and spent; there
were bistre circles round her eyes.

"'I am tired,' she said, with dry lips.  'You will excuse me, Mr.
Marshfield, I must really go to bed.'

"'Go to bed, go to bed,' cried her husband gaily.  Then, quoting in
Russian from the song she had just sung: 'Sleep, my little soft white
dove; my little innocent, tender lamb!'

"She hurried from the room.  The baron laughed again, and, taking me
familiarly by the arm led me to his own set of apartments for the
promised smoke.  He ensconced me in an armchair, placed cigars of
every description, and a Turkish pipe ready to my hand and a little
table on which stood cut glass flasks and beakers in tempting array.

"After I had selected my cigar with some precautions, I glanced at
him over a careless remark, and was startled to see a sudden
alteration in his whole look and attitude.

"'You will forgive me, Marshfield,' he said, as he caught my eye,
speaking with spasmodic politeness.  'It is more than probable that I
shall have to set out upon this chase I spoke of to-night, and I must
now go and change my clothes, that I may be ready to start at any
moment.  This is the hour when it is most likely these hell-beasts
are to be got at.  You have all you want, I hope,' interrupting an
outbreak of ferocity by an effort after his former courtesy.

"It was curious to watch the man of the world struggling with the
primitive man.

"'But, baron,' said I, 'I do not at all see the fun of sticking at
home like this.  You know my passion for witnessing everything new,
strange, and outlandish.  You will surely not refuse me such an
opportunity for observation as a midnight wolf-raid.  I will do my
best not to be in the way if you will take me with you.'

"At first it seemed as if he had some difficulty in realizing the
drift of my words, he was so engrossed by some inner thought.  But as
I repeated them, he gave vent to a loud cachinnation.

"'By heaven!  I like your spirit,' he exclaimed, clapping me strongly
on the shoulder.  'Of course you shall come.  You shall,' he
repeated, 'and I promise you a sight, a hunt such as you never heard
or dreamt of--you will be able to tell them in England the sort of
thing we can do here in that line--such wolves are rare quarry,' he
added, looking slyly at me, 'and I have a new plan for getting at
them.'"


"There was a long pause, and then there rose in the stillness the
unearthly howling of the baron's hounds, a cheerful sound which only
their owner's somewhat loud converse of the evening had kept from
becoming excessively obtrusive.

"'Hark at them--the beauties!' cried he, showing his short, strong
teeth, pointed like a dog's, in a wide grin of anticipative delight.
'They have been kept on pretty short commons, poor things!  They are
hungry.  By the way, Marshfield, you can sit tight to a horse, I
trust?  If you were to roll off, you know, these splendid fellows
they would chop you up in a second.  They would chop you up,' he
repeated unctuously, 'snap, crunch, gobble, and there would be an end
of you!'

"'If I could not ride a decent horse without being thrown,' I
retorted, a little stung by his manner, 'after my recent three
months' torture with the Guard Cossacks, I should indeed be a
hopeless subject.  Do not think of frightening me from the exploit,
but say frankly if my company would be displeasing.'

"'Tut!' he said, waving his hand impatiently, 'it is your affair.  I
have warned you.  Go and get ready if you want to come.  Time
presses.'

"I was determined to be of the fray; my blood was up.  I have hinted
that the baron's Tokay had stirred it.

"I went to my room and hurriedly donned clothes more suitable for
rough nightwork.  My last care was to slip into my pockets a brace of
double-barrelled pistols which formed part of my travelling kit.

"When I returned I found the baron already booted and spurred; this
without metaphor.  He was stretched full length on the divan, and did
not speak as I came in, or even look at me.  Chewing an unlit cigar,
with eyes fixed on the ceiling, he was evidently following some
absorbing train of ideas.

"The silence was profound; time went by; it grew oppressive; at
length, wearied out, I fell, over my chibouque, into a doze filled
with puzzling visions, out of which I was awakened with a start.  My
companion had sprung up, very lightly, to his feet.  In his throat
was an odd, half-suppressed cry, gruesome to hear.  He stood on
tiptoe, with eyes fixed, as though looking through the wall, and I
distinctly saw his ears point in the intensity of his listening.

"After a moment, with hasty, noiseless energy, and without the
slightest ceremony, he blew the lamps out, drew back the heavy
curtains and threw the tall window wide open.

"A rush of icy air, and the bright rays of the moon--gibbous, I
remember, in her third quarter--filled the room.  Outside, the mist
had condensed, and the view was unrestricted over the white plains at
the foot of the hill.

"The baron stood motionless in the open window, callous to the cold
in which, after a minute, I could hardly keep my teeth from
chattering, his head bent forward, still listening.  I listened too,
with 'all my ears,' but could not catch a sound; indeed the silence
over the great expanse of snow might have been called awful; even the
dogs were mute.

"Presently, far, far away, came a faint tinkle of bells; so faint, at
first, that I thought it was but fancy, then distincter.  It was even
more eerie than the silence I thought, though I knew it could come
but from some passing sleigh.  All at once that ceased, and again my
duller senses could perceive nothing, though I saw by my host's
craning neck that he was more on the alert than ever.  But at last I
too heard once more, this time not bells, but as it were the tread of
horses muffled by the snow, intermittent and dull yet drawing nearer.
And then in the inner silence of the great house it seemed to me I
caught the noise of closing doors; but here the hounds, as if
suddenly becoming alive to some disturbance, raised the same fearsome
concert of yells and barks with which they had greeted my arrival,
and listening became useless.

"I had risen to my feet.  My host, turning from the windows, seized
my shoulder with a fierce grip, and bade me 'hold my noise;' for a
second or two I stood motionless under his iron talons, then he
released me with an exultant whisper:--

"'Now for our chase!' and made for the door with a spring.  Hastily
gulping down a mouthful of arrack from one of the bottles on the
table, I followed him, and, guided by the sound of his footsteps
before me, groped my way through passages black as Erebus.

"After a time, which seemed a long one, a small door was flung open
in front, and I saw Kossowski glide into the moonlit courtyard and
cross the square.  When I too came out he was disappearing into the
gaping darkness of the open stable door, and there I overtook him.

"A man who seemed to have been sleeping in a corner jumped up at our
entrance, and led out a horse ready saddled.  In obedience to a gruff
order from his master, as the latter mounted, he then brought forward
another which he had evidently thought to ride himself and held the
stirrup for me.

"We came delicately forth, and the Cossack hurriedly barred the great
door behind us--I caught a glimpse of his worn, scarred face by the
moonlight, as he peeped after us for a second before shutting himself
in; it was stricken with terror.

"The baron trotted briskly toward the kennels from whence there was
now issuing a truly infernal clangour, and, as my steed followed suit
of his own accord, I could see how he proceeded dexterously to unbolt
the gates without dismounting, while the beasts within dashed
themselves against them and tore the ground in their fury of
impatience.

"He smiled, as he swung back the barriers at last, and his 'beauties'
came forth.  Seven or eight monstrous brutes, hounds of a kind
unknown to me; fulvous and sleek of coat, tall on their legs,
square-headed, long-tailed, deep-chested; with terrible jaws
slobbering in eagerness.  They leapt around and up at us, much to our
horses' distaste.  Kossowski, still smiling, lashed at them
unsparingly with his hunting whip, and they responded, not with yells
of pain, but with snarls of fury.

"Managing his restless steed and his cruel whip with consummate ease,
my host drove the unruly crew before him, out of the precincts, then
halted and bent down from his saddle to examine some slight prints in
the snow which led, not the way I had come, but toward what seemed
another avenue.  In a second or two the hounds were gathered round
this spot, their great snake-like tails quivering, nose to earth,
yelping with excitement.  I had some ado to manage my horse, and my
eyesight was far from being as keen as the baron's, but I had then no
doubt he had come already upon wolf-tracks, and I shuddered mentally,
thinking of the sleigh-bells.

"Suddenly Kossowski raised himself from his strained position; under
his low fur cap his face, with its fixed smile, looked scarcely human
in the white light; and then we broke into a hand canter just as the
hounds dashed, in a compact body, along the trail.

"But we had not gone more than a few hundred yards before they began
to falter, then straggled, stopped, and ran back and about with
dismal cries.  It was clear to me they had lost the scent.  My
companion reined in his horse, and mine, luckily a well-trained
brute, halted of himself.

"We had reached a bend in a broad avenue of firs and larches, and
just where we stood, and where the hounds ever returned and met nose
to nose in frantic conclave, the snow was trampled and soiled, and a
little further on planed in a great sweep, as if by a turning sleigh.
Beyond was a double-furrowed track of skates and regular hoof-prints
leading far away.

"Before I had time to reflect upon the bearing of this unexpected
interruption, Kossowski, as if suddenly possessed by a devil, fell
upon the hounds with his whip, flogging them upon the new track,
uttering the while the most savage cries I have ever heard issue from
human throat.  The disappointed beasts were nothing loth to seize
upon another trail; after a second of hesitation they had understood,
and were off upon it at a tearing pace, and we after them at the best
speed of our horses.

"Some unformed idea that we were going to escort, or rescue,
benighted travellers flickered dimly in my mind as I galloped through
the night air; but when I managed to approach my companion and called
out to him for explanation, he only turned half round and grinned at
me.

"Before us lay now the white plain, scintillating under the high
moon's rays.  That light is deceptive; I could be sure of nothing
upon the wide expanse, but of the dark, leaping figures of the hounds
already spread out in a straggling line, some right ahead, others
just in front of us.  In a short time also the icy wind, cutting my
face mercilessly as we increased our pace, well-nigh blinded me with
tears of cold.

"I can hardly realize how long this pursuit after an unseen prey
lasted; I can only remember that I was getting rather faint with
fatigue, and ignominiously held on to my pommel, when all of a sudden
the black outline of a sleigh merged into sight in front of us.

"I rubbed my smarting eyes with my benumbed hand; we were gaining
upon it second by second; two of those hell-hounds of the baron's
were already within a few leaps of it.

"Soon I was able to make out two figures, one standing up and urging
the horses on with whip and voice, the other clinging to the back
seat and looking toward us in an attitude of terror.  A great fear
crept into my half frozen brain--were we not bringing deadly danger,
instead of help to these travellers?  Great God! did the baron mean
to use them as a bait for his new method of wolf-hunting?

"I would have turned upon Kossowski with a cry of expostulation or
warning, but he, urging on his hounds, as he galloped on their flank,
howling and gesticulating like a veritable Hun, passed me by like a
flash, and all at once I knew."


Marshfield paused for a moment and sent his pale smile round upon his
listeners, who now showed no signs of sleepiness; he knocked the ash
from his cigar, twisted the latter round in his mouth, and added
dryly:--


"And I confess it seemed to me a little strong, even for a baron in
the Carpathians.  The travellers were our quarry.  But the reason why
the Lord of Yany had turned man-hunter I was yet to learn.  Just then
I had to direct my energies to frustrating his plans.  I used my
spurs mercilessly.  Whilst I drew up even with him I saw the two
figures in the sleigh change places; he who had hitherto driven now
faced back, while his companion took the reins; there was the pale
blue sheen of a revolver barrel under the moonlight, followed by a
yellow flash, and the nearest hound rolled over in the snow.

"With an oath the baron twisted round in his saddle to call up and
urge on the remainder.  My horse had taken fright at the report and
dashed irresistibly forward, bringing me at once almost level with
the fugitives, and the next instant the revolver was turned
menacingly toward me.  There was no time to explain; my pistol was
already drawn, and as another of the brutes bounded up, almost under
my horse's feet, I loosed it upon him--I must have let off both
barrels at once, for the weapon flew out of my hand, but the hound's
back was broken.  I presume the traveller understood; at any rate he
did not fire at me.

"In moments of intense excitement like these, strangely enough, the
mind is extraordinarily open to impressions.  I shall never forget
that man's countenance, in the sledge, as he stood upright and defied
us in his mortal danger; it was young, very handsome, the features
not distorted, but set into a sort of desperate, stony calm, and I
knew it, beyond all doubt, for that of an Englishman.  And then I saw
his companion--it was the baron's wife.

"It takes a long time to say all this; it only required an instant to
see it.  The loud explosion of my pistol had hardly ceased to ring
before the baron, with a fearful imprecation, was upon me.  First he
lashed at me with his whip as we tore along side by side, and then I
saw him wind the reins round his off-arm and bend over, and I felt
his angry fingers close tightly on my right foot.  The next instant I
should have been lifted out of my saddle, but there came another shot
from the sledge.  The baron's horse plunged and stumbled, and the
baron, hanging on to my foot with a fierce grip, was wrenched from
his seat.  His horse, however, was up again immediately, and I was
released, and then I caught a confused glimpse of the frightened and
wounded animal galloping wildly away to the right, leaving a black
track of blood behind him in the snow, his master, entangled in the
reins, running with incredible swiftness by his side and endeavouring
to vault back into the saddle.

"And now came to pass a terrible thing which, in his savage plans, my
host had doubtless never anticipated.

"One of the hounds that had during this short check recovered lost
ground, coming across this hot trail of blood, turned away from his
course, and with a joyous yell darted after the running man.  In
another instant the remainder of the pack were upon the new scent.

"As soon as I could stop my horse, I tried to turn him in the
direction the new chase had taken, but just then, through the night
air, over the receding sound of the horse's scamper and the sobbing
of the pack in full cry, there came a long scream, and after that a
sickening silence.  And I knew that somewhere yonder, under the
beautiful moonlight, the Baron Kossowski was being devoured by his
starving dogs.

"I looked round, with the sweat on my face, vaguely, for some human
being to share the horror of the moment, and I saw, gliding away, far
away, in the white distance, the black silhouette of the sledge."

"Well?" said we, in divers tones of impatience, curiosity, or horror,
according to our divers temperaments, as the speaker uncrossed his
legs and gazed at us in mild triumph, with all the air of having said
his say, and satisfactorily proved his point.

"Well," repeated he, "what more do you want to know?  It will
interest you but slightly, I am sure, to hear how I found my way back
to the Hof; or how I told as much as I deemed prudent of the
evening's gruesome work to the baron's servants, who, by the way, to
my amazement, displayed the profoundest and most unmistakable sorrow
at the tidings, and sallied forth (at their head the Cossack who had
seen us depart) to seek for his remains.  Excuse the unpleasantness
of the remark; I fear the dogs must have left very little of him; he
had dieted them so carefully.  However, since it was to have been a
case of 'chop, crunch, and gobble,' as the baron had it, I preferred
that that particular fate should have overtaken him than me--or, for
that matter, either of these two country people of ours in the sledge.

"Nor am I going to inflict upon you," continued Marshfield, after
draining his glass, "a full account of my impressions when I found
myself once more in that immense, deserted, and stricken house, so
luxuriously prepared for the mistress who had fled from it; how I
philosophized over all this, according to my wont; the conjectures I
made as to the first acts of the drama, the untold sufferings my
country-woman must have endured from the moment her husband first
grew jealous till she determined on this desperate step; as to how
and when she had met her lover, how they communicated, and how the
baron had discovered the intended flitting in time to concoct his
characteristic revenge.

"One thing you may be sure of, I had no mind to remain at Yany an
hour longer than necessary.  I even contrived to get well clear of
the neighbourhood before the lady's absence was discovered.  Luckily
for me--or I might have been taxed with connivance; though indeed the
simple household did not seem to know what suspicion was, and
accepted my account with childlike credence--very typical, and very
convenient to me at the same time."

"But how do you know," said one of us, "that the man was her
lover?--he might have been her brother or some other relative?"

"That," said Marshfield, with his little flat laugh, "I happen to
have ascertained--and, curiously enough, only a few weeks ago.  It
was at the play, between the acts, from my comfortable seat (first
row of the pit), I was looking leisurely round the house when I
caught sight of a woman, in a box, close by, whose head was turned
from me, and who presented the somewhat unusual spectacle of a young
neck and shoulders of the most exquisite contour--and perfectly gray
hair; and not dull gray, but rather of a pleasing tint--like frosted
silver.  This aroused my curiosity.  I brought my glasses to a focus
on her, and waited patiently till she turned round.  Then I
recognized the Baroness Kossowski, and I no longer wondered at the
young hair being white.

"Yet she looked placid and happy; strangely so, it seemed to me,
under the sudden reviving in my memory of such scenes as I have now
described.  But presently I understood further; beside her, in close
attendance, was the man of the sledge, a handsome fellow, with much
of a military air about him.

"During the course of the evening, as I watched, I saw a friend of
mine come into the box, and at the end I slipped out into the passage
to catch him as he came out.

"'Who is the woman with the white hair?' I asked.  Then, in the
fragmentary style approved of by ultra-fashionable young men--this
earnest-languid mode of speech presents curious similarities in all
languages--he told me: 'Most charming couple in London--awfully
pretty, wasn't she?  _He_ had been in the Guards--_attaché_ at Vienna
once--they adored each other.  White hair, devilish queer, wasn't it?
Suited her, somehow.  And then she had been married to a Russian, or
something, somewhere in the wilds, and their names were--'  But do
you know," said Marshfield, interrupting himself, "I think I had
better let you find that out for yourselves, if you care."




II

A MAN AND SOME OTHERS

STEPHEN CRANE


I

Dark mesquit spread from horizon to horizon.  There was no house or
horseman from which a mind could evolve a city or a crowd.  The world
was declared to be a desert and unpeopled.  Sometimes, however, on
days when no heat-mist arose, a blue shape, dun, of the substance of
a specter's veil, appeared in the southwest, and a pondering
sheep-herder might remember that there were mountains.

In the silence of these plains the sudden and childish banging of a
tin pan could have made an iron-nerved man leap into the air.  The
sky was ever flawless; the manoeuvring of clouds was an unknown
pageant; but at times a sheep-herder could see, miles away, the long,
white streamers of dust rising from the feet of another's flock, and
the interest became intense.

Bill was arduously cooking his dinner, bending over the fire and
toiling like a blacksmith.  A movement, a flash of strange colour,
perhaps, off in the bushes, caused him suddenly to turn his head.
Presently he arose, and, shading his eyes with his hand, stood
motionless and gazing.  He perceived at last a Mexican sheep-herder
winding through the brush toward his camp.

"Hello!" shouted Bill.

The Mexican made no answer, but came steadily forward until he was
within some twenty yards.  There he paused, and, folding his arms,
drew himself up in the manner affected by the villain in the play.
His serape muffled the lower part of his face, and his great sombrero
shaded his brow.  Being unexpected and also silent, he had something
of the quality of an apparition; moreover, it was clearly his
intention to be mystic and sinister.

The American's pipe, sticking carelessly in the corner of his mouth,
was twisted until the wrong side was uppermost, and he held his
frying-pan poised in the air.  He surveyed with evident surprise this
apparition in the mesquit.  "Hell, José!" he said; "what's the
matter?"

The Mexican spoke with the solemnity of funeral tellings: "Beel, you
mus' geet off range.  We want you geet off range.  We no like.
Un'erstan'?  We no like."

"What you talking about?" said Bill.  "No like what?"

"We no like you here.  Un'erstan'?  Too mooch.  You mus' geet out.
We no like.  Un'erstan'?"

"Understand?  No: I don't know what the blazes you're gittin' at."
Bill's eyes wavered in bewilderment, and his jaw fell.  "I must git
out?  I must git off the range?  What you givin' us?"

The Mexican unfolded his serape with his small yellow hand.  Upon his
face was then to be seen a smile that was gently, almost caressingly,
murderous.  "Beel," he said, "git out!"

Bill's arm dropped until the frying-pan was at his knee.  Finally he
turned again toward the fire.  "Go on, you dog-gone little yaller
rat!" he said over his shoulder.  "You fellers can't chase me off
this range.  I got as much right here as anybody."

"Beel," answered the other in a vibrant tone, thrusting his head
forward and moving one foot, "you geet out or we keel you."

"Who will?" said Bill.

"I--and the others."  The Mexican tapped his breast gracefully.

Bill reflected for a time, and then he said: "You ain't got no manner
of license to warn me off'n this range, and I won't move a rod.
Understand?  I've got rights, and I suppose if I don't see 'em
through, no one is likely to give me a good hand and help me lick you
fellers, since I'm the only white man in half a day's ride.  Now,
look: if you fellers try to rush this camp, I'm goin' to plug about
fifty per cent. of the gentlemen present, sure.  I'm goin' in fur
trouble, an' I'll git a lot of you.  'Nuther thing: if I was a fine
valuable caballero like you, I'd stay in the rear till the shootin'
was done, because I'm goin' to make a particular p'int of shootin'
you through the chest."  He grinned affably, and made a gesture of
dismissal.

As for the Mexican, he waved his hands in a consummate expression of
indifference.  "Oh, all right," he said.  Then, in a tone of deep
menace and glee, he added: "We will keel you eef you no geet.  They
have decide."

"They have, have they?" said Bill.  "Well, you tell them to go to the
devil!"



II

As his Mexican friend tripped blithely away, Bill turned with a
thoughtful face to his frying-pan and his fire.  After dinner he drew
his revolver from its scarred old holster, and examined every part of
it.  It was the revolver that had dealt death to the foreman, and it
had also been in free fights in which it had dealt death to several
or none.  Bill loved it because its allegiance was more than that of
man, horse, or dog.  It questioned neither social nor moral position;
it obeyed alike the saint and the assassin.  It was the claw of the
eagle, the tooth of the lion, the poison of the snake; and when he
swept it from its holster, this minion smote where he listed, even to
the battering of a far penny.  Wherefore it was his dearest
possession, and was not to be exchanged in southwestern Texas for a
handful of rubies.

During the afternoon he moved through his monotony of work and
leisure with the same air of deep meditation.  The smoke of his
supper time fire was curling across the shadowy sea of mesquit when
the instinct of the plainsman warned him that the stillness, the
desolation, was again invaded.  He saw a motionless horseman in black
outline against the pallid sky.  The silhouette displayed serape and
sombrero, and even the Mexican spurs as large as pies.  When this
black figure began to move toward the camp, Bill's hand dropped to
his revolver.

The horseman approached until Bill was enabled to see pronounced
American features, and a skin too red to grow on a Mexican face.
Bill released his grip on his revolver.

"Hello!" called the horseman.

"Hello!" answered Bill.

The horseman cantered forward.  "Good evening," he said, as he again
drew rein.

"Good evenin'," answered Bill, without committing himself by too much
courtesy.

For a moment the two men scanned each other in a way that is not
ill-mannered on the plains, where one is in danger of meeting
horse-thieves or tourists.

Bill saw a type which did not belong in the mesquit.  The young
fellow had invested in some Mexican trappings of an expensive kind.
Bill's eyes searched the outfit for some sign of craft, but there was
none.  Even with his local regalia, it was clear that the young man
was of a far, black northern city.  He had discarded the enormous
stirrups of his Mexican saddle; he used the small English stirrup,
and his feet were thrust forward until the steel tightly gripped his
ankles.  As Bill's eyes travelled over the stranger, they lighted
suddenly upon the stirrups and the thrust feet, and immediately he
smiled in a friendly way.  No dark purpose could dwell in the
innocent heart of a man who rode thus on the plains.

As for the stranger, he saw a tattered individual with a tangle of
hair and beard, and with a complexion turned brick-colour from the
sun and whiskey.  He saw a pair of eyes that at first looked at him
as the wolf looks at the wolf, and then became childlike, almost
timid, in their glance.  Here was evidently a man who had often
stormed the iron walls of the city of success, and who now sometimes
valued himself as the rabbit values his prowess.

The stranger smiled genially, and sprang from his horse.  "Well, sir,
I suppose you will let me camp here with you to-night?"

"Eh?" said Bill.

"I suppose you will let me camp here with you to-night?"

Bill for a time seemed too astonished for words.

"Well," he answered, scowling in inhospitable annoyance, "well, I
don't believe this here is a good place to camp to-night, Mister."

The stranger turned quickly from his saddle-girth.

"What?" he said in surprise.  "You don't want me here?  You don't
want me to camp here?"

Bill's feet scuffled awkwardly, and he looked steadily at a
cactus-plant.  "Well, you see, Mister," he said, "I'd like your
company well enough, but--you see, some of these here greasers are
goin' to chase me off the range to-night; and while I might like a
man's company all right, I couldn't let him in for no such game when
he ain't got nothin' to do with the trouble."

"Going to chase you off the range?" cried the stranger.

"Well, they said they were goin' to do it," said Bill.

"And--great heavens!--will they kill you, do you think?"

"Don't know.  Can't tell till afterward.  You see, they take some
feller that's alone like me, and then they rush his camp when he
ain't quite ready for 'em, and ginerally plug 'im with a sawed-off
shot-gun load before he has a chance to git at 'em.  They lay around
and wait for their chance, and it comes soon enough.  Of course a
feller alone like me has got to let up watching some time.  Maybe
they ketch 'im asleep.  Maybe the feller gits tired waiting, and goes
out in broad day, and kills two or three just to make the whole crowd
pile on him and settle the thing.  I heard of a case like that once.
It's awful hard on a man's mind--to git a gang after him."

"And so they're going to rush your camp tonight?" cried the stranger.
"How do you know?  Who told you?"

"Feller come and told me."

"And what are you going to do?  Fight?"

"Don't see nothin' else to do," answered Bill, gloomily, still
staring at the cactus-plant.

There was a silence.  Finally the stranger burst out in an amazed
cry.  "Well, I never heard of such a thing in my life!  How many of
them are there?"

"Eight," answered Bill.  "And now look-a-here; you ain't got no
manner of business foolin' around here just now, and you might better
lope off before dark.  I don't ask no help in this here row.  I know
your happening along here just now don't give me no call on you, and
you'd better hit the trail."

"Well, why in the name of wonder don't you go get the sheriff?" cried
the stranger.

"Oh, hell!" said Bill.



III

Long, smouldering clouds spread in the western sky, and to the east
silver mists lay on the purple gloom of the wilderness.

Finally, when the great moon climbed the heavens and cast its ghastly
radiance upon the bushes, it made a new and more brilliant crimson of
the campfire, where the flames capered merrily through its mesquit
branches, filling the silence with the fire chorus, an ancient melody
which surely bears a message of the inconsequence of individual
tragedy--a message that is in the boom of the sea, the shiver of the
wind through the grass-blades, the silken clash of hemlock boughs.

No figures moved in the rosy space of the camp, and the search of the
moonbeams failed to disclose a living thing in the bushes.  There was
no owl-faced clock to chant the weariness of the long silence that
brooded upon the plain.

The dew gave the darkness under the mesquit a velvet quality that
made air seem nearer to water, and no eye could have seen through it
the black things that moved like monster lizards toward the camp.
The branches, the leaves, that are fain to cry out when death
approaches in the wilds, were frustrated by these mystic bodies
gliding with the finesse of the escaping serpent.  They crept forward
to the last point where assuredly no frantic attempt of the fire
could discover them, and there they paused to locate the prey.  A
romance relates the tale of the black cell hidden deep in the earth,
where, upon entering, one sees only the little eyes of snakes fixing
him in menaces.  If a man could have approached a certain spot in the
bushes, he would not have found it romantically necessary to have his
hair rise.  There would have been sufficient expression of horror in
the feeling of the death-hand at the nape of his neck and in his
rubber knee-joints.

Two of the bodies finally moved toward each other until for each
there grew out of the darkness a face placidly smiling with tender
dreams of assassination.  "The fool is asleep by the fire, God be
praised!" The lips of the other widened in a grin of affectionate
appreciation of the fool and his plight.  There was some signalling
in the gloom and then began a series of subtle rustlings, interjected
often with pauses, during which no sound arose but the sound of faint
breathing.

A bush stood like a rock in the stream of firelight, sending its long
shadow backward.  With painful caution the little company travelled
along this shadow, and finally arrived at the rear of the bush.
Through its branches they surveyed for a moment of comfortable
satisfaction a form in a gray blanket extended on the ground near the
fire.  The smile of joyful anticipation fled quickly, to give place
to a quiet air of business.  Two men lifted shot-guns with much of
the barrels gone, and sighting these weapons through the branches,
pulled trigger together.

The noise of the explosions roared over the lonely mesquit as if
these guns wished to inform the entire world; and as the grey smoke
fled, the dodging company back of the bush saw the blanketed form
twitching.  Whereupon they burst out in chorus in a laugh, and arose
as merry as a lot of banqueters.  They gleefully gestured
congratulations, and strode bravely into the light of the fire.

Then suddenly a new laugh rang from some unknown spot in the
darkness.  It was a fearsome laugh of ridicule, hatred, ferocity.  It
might have been demoniac.  It smote them motionless in their gleeful
prowl, as the stern voice from the sky smites the legendary
malefactor.  They might have been a weird group in wax, the light of
the dying fire on their yellow faces, and shining athwart their eyes
turned toward the darkness whence might come the unknown and the
terrible.

The thing in the grey blanket no longer twitched; but if the knives
in their hands had been thrust toward it, each knife was now drawn
back, and its owner's elbow was thrown upward, as if he expected
death from the clouds.

This laugh had so chained their reason that for a moment they had no
wit to flee.  They were prisoners to their terror.  Then suddenly the
belated decision arrived, and with bubbling cries they turned to run;
but at that instant there was a long flash of red in the darkness,
and with the report one of the men shouted a bitter shout, spun once,
and tumbled headlong.  The thick bushes failed to impede the route of
the others.

The silence returned to the wilderness.  The tired flames faintly
illumined the blanketed thing and the flung corpse of the marauder,
and sang the fire chorus, the ancient melody which bears the message
of the inconsequence of human tragedy.



IV

"Now you are worse off than ever," said the young man, dry-voiced and
awed.

"No, I ain't," said Bill, rebelliously.  "I'm one ahead."

After reflection, the stranger remarked, "Well, there's seven more."

They were cautiously and slowly approaching the camp.  The sun was
flaring its first warming rays over the gray wilderness.  Upreared
twigs, prominent branches, shone with golden light, while the shadows
under the mesquit were heavily blue.

Suddenly the stranger uttered a frightened cry.  He had arrived at a
point whence he had, through openings in the thicket, a clear view of
a dead face.

"Gosh!" said Bill, who at the next instant had seen the thing; "I
thought at first it was that there José.  That would have been queer,
after what I told 'im yesterday."

They continued their way, the stranger wincing in his walk, and Bill
exhibiting considerable curiosity.

The yellow beams of the new sun were touching the grim hues of the
dead Mexican's face, and creating there an inhuman effect, which made
his countenance more like a mask of dulled brass.  One hand, grown
curiously thinner, had been flung out regardlessly to a cactus bush.

Bill walked forward and stood looking respectfully at the body.  "I
know that feller; his name is Miguel.  He----"

The stranger's nerves might have been in that condition when there is
no backbone to the body, only a long groove.  "Good heavens!" he
exclaimed, much agitated; "don't speak that way!"

"What way?" said Bill.  "I only said his name was Miguel."

After a pause the stranger said:

"Oh, I know; but--"  He waved his hand.  "Lower your voice, or
something.  I don't know.  This part of the business rattles me,
don't you see?"

"Oh, all right," replied Bill, bowing to the other's mysterious mood.
But in a moment he burst out violently and loud in the most
extraordinary profanity, the oaths winging from him as the sparks go
from the funnel.

He had been examining the contents of the bundled gray blanket, and
he had brought forth, among other things, his frying-pan.  It was now
only a rim with a handle; the Mexican volley had centred upon it.  A
Mexican shot-gun of the abbreviated description is ordinarily loaded
with flatirons, stove-lids, lead pipe, old horseshoes, sections of
chain, window weights, railroad sleepers and spikes, dumbbells, and
any other junk which may be at hand.  When one of these loads
encounters a man vitally, it is likely to make an impression upon
him, and a cooking-utensil may be supposed to subside before such an
assault of curiosities.

Bill held high his desecrated frying-pan, turning it this way and
that way.  He swore until he happened to note the absence of the
stranger.  A moment later he saw him leading his horse from the
bushes.  In silence and sullenly the young man went about saddling
the animal.  Bill said, "Well, goin' to pull out?"

The stranger's hands fumbled uncertainly at the throat-latch.  Once
he exclaimed irritably, blaming the buckle for the trembling of his
fingers.  Once he turned to look at the dead face with the light of
the morning sun upon it.  At last he cried, "Oh, I know the whole
thing was all square enough--couldn't be squarer--but--somehow or
other, that man there takes the heart out of me."  He turned his
troubled face for another look.  "He seems to be all the time calling
me a--he makes me feel like a murderer."

"But," said Bill, puzzling, "you didn't shoot him, Mister; I shot
him."

"I know; but I feel that way, somehow.  I can't get rid of it."

Bill considered for a time; then he said diffidently, "Mister, you'r
a' eddycated man, ain't you?"

"What?"

"You're what they call a'--a' eddycated man, ain't you?"

The young man, perplexed, evidently had a question upon his lips,
when there was a roar of guns, bright flashes, and in the air such
hooting and whistling as would come from a swift flock of
steamboilers.  The stranger's horse gave a mighty, convulsive spring,
snorting wildly in its sudden anguish, fell upon its knees, scrambled
afoot again, and was away in the uncanny death-run known to men who
have seen the finish of brave horses.

"This comes from discussin' things," cried Bill, angrily.

He had thrown himself flat on the ground facing the thicket whence
had come the firing.  He could see the smoke winding over the
bush-tops.  He lifted his revolver, and the weapon came slowly up
from the ground and poised like the glittering crest of a snake.
Somewhere on his face there was a kind of smile, cynical, wicked,
deadly, of a ferocity which at the same time had brought a deep flush
to his face, and had caused two upright lines to glow in his eyes.

"Hello, José!" he called, amiable for satire's sake.  "Got your old
blunderbusses loaded up again yet?"

The stillness had returned to the plain.  The sun's brilliant rays
swept over the sea of mesquit, painting the far mists of the west
with faint rosy light, and high in the air some great bird fled
toward the south.

"You come out here," called Bill, again addressing the landscape,
"and I'll give you some shootin' lessons.  That ain't the way to
shoot."  Receiving no reply, he began to invent epithets and yell
them at the thicket.  He was something of a master of insult, and,
moreover, he dived into his memory to bring forth imprecations
tarnished with age, unused since fluent Bowery days.  The occupation
amused him, and sometimes he laughed so that it was uncomfortable for
his chest to be against the ground.

Finally the stranger, prostrate near him, said wearily, "Oh, they've
gone."

"Don't you believe it," replied Bill, sobering swiftly.  "They're
there yet--every man of 'em."

"How do you know?"

"Because I do.  They won't shake us so soon.  Don't put your head up,
or they'll get you, sure."

Bill's eyes, meanwhile, had not wavered from their scrutiny of the
thicket in front.  "They're there, all right; don't you forget it.
Now you listen."  So he called out: "José!  Ojo, José!  Speak up,
_hombre_!  I want have talk.  Speak up, you yaller cuss, you!"

Whereupon a mocking voice from off in the bushes said, "Senor?"

"There," said Bill to his ally; "didn't I tell you?  The whole
batch."  Again he lifted his voice.  "José--look--ain't you gittin'
kinder tired?  You better go home, you fellers, and git some rest."

The answer was a sudden furious chatter of Spanish, eloquent with
hatred, calling down upon Bill all the calamities which life holds.
It was as if some one had suddenly enraged a cageful of wildcats.
The spirits of all the revenges which they had imagined were loosened
at this time, and filled the air.

"They're in a holler," said Bill, chuckling, "or there'd be shootin'."

Presently he began to grow angry.  His hidden enemies called him nine
kinds of coward, a man who could fight only in the dark, a baby who
would run from the shadows of such noble Mexican gentlemen, a dog
that sneaked.  They described the affair of the previous night, and
informed him of the base advantage he had taken of their friend.  In
fact, they in all sincerity endowed him with every quality which he
no less earnestly believed them to possess.  One could have seen the
phrases bite him as he lay there on the ground fingering his revolver.



V

It is sometimes taught that men do the furious and desperate thing
from an emotion that is as even and placid as the thoughts of a
village clergyman on Sunday afternoon.  Usually, however, it is to be
believed that a panther is at the time born in the heart, and that
the subject does not resemble a man picking mulberries.

"B' G--!" said Bill, speaking as from a throat filled with dust,
"I'll go after 'em in a minute."

"Don't you budge an inch!" cried the stranger, sternly.  "Don't you
budge!"

"Well," said Bill, glaring at the bushes--"well."

"Put your head down!" suddenly screamed the stranger, in white alarm.
As the guns roared, Bill uttered a loud grunt, and for a moment
leaned panting on his elbow, while his arm shook like a twig.  Then
he upreared like a great and bloody spirit of vengeance, his face
lighted with the blaze of his last passion.  The Mexicans came
swiftly and in silence.

The lightning action of the next few moments was of the fabric of
dreams to the stranger.  The muscular struggle may not be real to the
drowning man.  His mind may be fixed on the far, straight shadows
back of the stars, and the terror of them.  And so the fight, and his
part in it, had to the stranger only the quality of a picture half
drawn.  The rush of feet, the spatter of shots, the cries, the
swollen faces seen like masks on the smoke, resembled a happening of
the night.

And yet afterward certain lines, forms, lived out so strongly from
the incoherence that they were always in his memory.

He killed a man, and the thought went swiftly by him, like a feather
on a gale, that it was easy to kill a man.

Moreover, he suddenly felt for Bill, this grimy sheep-herder, some
deep form of idolatry.  Bill was dying, and the dignity of last
defeat, this superiority of him who stands in his grave, was in the
pose of the lost sheep-herder.


The stranger sat on the ground idly mopping the sweat and
powder-stain from his brow.  He wore the gentle idiotic smile of an
aged beggar as he watched three Mexicans limping and staggering in
the distance.  He noted at this time that one who still possessed a
serape had from it none of the grandeur of the cloaked Spaniard, but
that against the sky the silhouette resembled a cornucopia of
childhood's Christmas.

They turned to look at him, and he lifted his weary arm to menace
them with his revolver.  They stood for a moment banded together, and
hooted curses at him.

Finally he arose, and, walking some paces, stooped to loosen Bill's
gray hands from a throat.  Swaying as if slightly drunk, he stood
looking down into the still face.

Struck suddenly with a thought, he went about with dulled eyes on the
ground, until he plucked his gaudy blanket from where it lay dirty
from trampling feet.  He dusted it carefully, and then returned and
laid it over Bill's form.  There he again stood motionless, his mouth
just agape and the same stupid glance in his eyes, when all at once
he made a gesture of fright and looked wildly about him.

He had almost reached the thicket when he stopped, smitten with
alarm.  A body contorted, with one arm stiff in the air, lay in his
path.  Slowly and warily he moved around it, and in a moment the
bushes nodding and whispering, their leaf-faces turned toward the
scene behind him, swung and swung again into stillness and the peace
of the wilderness.




III

THE OUTLAWS

SELMA LAGERLÖF


A peasant who had murdered a monk took to the woods and was made an
outlaw.  He found there before him in the wilderness another outlaw,
a fisherman from the outer-most islands, who had been accused of
stealing a herring net.  They joined together, lived in a cave, set
snares, sharpened darts, baked bread on a granite rock and guarded
one another's lives.  The peasant never left the woods, but the
fisherman, who had not committed such an abominable crime, sometimes
loaded game on his shoulders and stole down among men.  There he got
in exchange for black-cocks, and long-eared hares and fine-limbed red
deer, milk and butter, arrow-heads and clothes.  These helped the
outlaws to sustain life.

The cave where they lived was dug in the side of a hill.  Broad
stones and thorny-sloe-bushes hid the entrance.  Above it stood a
thick growing pine-tree.  At its roots was the vent-hole of the cave.
The rising smoke filtered through the tree's thick branches and
vanished into space.  The men used to go to and from their
dwelling-place, wading in the mountain stream, which ran down the
hill.  No one looked for their tracks under the merry, bubbling water.

At first they were hunted like wild beasts.  The peasants gathered as
if for a chase of bear or wolf.  The wood was surrounded by men with
bows and arrows.  Men with spears went through it and left no dark
crevice, no bushy thicket unexplored.  While the noisy battue hunted
through the wood, the outlaws lay in their dark hole, listening
breathlessly, panting with terror.  The fisherman held out a whole
day, but he who had murdered was driven by unbearable fear out into
the open, where he could see his enemy.  He was seen and hunted, but
it seemed to him seven times better than to lie still in helpless
inactivity.  He fled from his pursuers, slid down precipices, sprang
over streams, climbed up perpendicular mountain walls.  All latent
strength and dexterity in him was called forth by the excitement of
danger.  His body became elastic like a steel spring, his foot made
no false step, his hand never lost its hold, eye and ear were twice
as sharp as usual.  He understood what the leaves whispered and the
rocks warned.  When he had climbed up a precipice, he turned toward
his pursuers, sending them gibes in biting rhyme.  When the whistling
darts whizzed by him, he caught them, swift as lightning, and hurled
them down on his enemies.  As he forced his way through whipping
branches, something within him sang a song of triumph.

The bald mountain ridge ran through the wood and alone on its summit
stood a lofty fir.  The red-brown trunk was bare, but in the
branching top rocked an eagle's nest.  The fugitive was now so
audaciously bold that he climbed up there, while his pursuers looked
for him on the wooded slopes.  There he sat twisting the young
eaglets' necks, while the hunt passed by far below him.  The male and
female eagle, longing for revenge, swooped down on the ravisher.
They fluttered before his face, they struck with their beaks at his
eyes, they beat him with their wings and tore with their claws
bleeding weals in his weather-beaten skin.  Laughing, he fought with
them.  Standing upright in the shaking nest, he cut at them with his
sharp knife and forgot in the pleasure of the play his danger and his
pursuers.  When he found time to look for them, they had gone by to
some other part of the forest.  No one had thought to look for their
prey on the bald mountain-ridge.  No one had raised his eyes to the
clouds to see him practising boyish tricks and sleep-walking feats
while his life was in the greatest danger.

The man trembled when he found that he was saved.  With shaking hands
he caught at a support, giddy he measured the height to which he had
climbed.  And moaning with the fear of falling, afraid of the birds,
afraid of being seen, afraid of everything, he slid down the trunk.
He laid himself down on the ground, so as not to be seen, and dragged
himself forward over the rocks until the underbrush covered him.
There he hid himself under the young pine-tree's tangled branches.
Weak and powerless, he sank down on the moss.  A single man could
have captured him.

* * * * *

Tord was the fisherman's name.  He was not more than sixteen years
old, but strong and bold.  He had already lived a year in the woods.

The peasant's name was Berg, with the surname Rese.  He was the
tallest and the strongest man in the whole district, and moreover
handsome and well-built.  He was broad in the shoulders and slender
in the waist.  His hands were as well shaped as if he had never done
any hard work.  His hair was brown and his skin fair.  After he had
been some time in the woods he acquired in all ways a more formidable
appearance.  His eyes became piercing, his eyebrows grew bushy, and
the muscles which knitted them lay finger thick above his nose.  It
showed now more plainly than before how the upper part of his
athlete's brow projected over the lower.  His lips closed more firmly
than of old, his whole face was thinner, the hollows at the temples
grew very deep, and his powerful jaw was much more prominent.  His
body was less well filled out but his muscles were as hard as steel.
His hair grew suddenly grey.

Young Tord could never weary of looking at this man.  He had never
before seen anything so beautiful and powerful.  In his imagination
he stood high as the forest, strong as the sea.  He served him as a
master and worshipped him as a god.  It was a matter of course that
Tord should carry the hunting spears, drag home the game, fetch the
water and build the fire.  Berg Rese accepted all his services, but
almost never gave him a friendly word.  He despised him because he
was a thief.

The outlaws did not lead a robber's or brigand's life: they supported
themselves by hunting and fishing.  If Berg Rese had not murdered a
holy man, the peasants would soon have ceased to pursue him and have
left him in peace in the mountains.  But they feared great disaster
to the district, because he who had raised his hand against the
servant of God was still unpunished.  When Tord came down to the
valley with game, they offered him riches and pardon for his own
crime if he would show them the way to Berg Rese's hole, so that they
might take him while he slept.  But the boy had always refused; and
if anyone tried to sneak after him up to the wood, he led him so
cleverly astray that he gave up the pursuit.

Once Berg asked him if the peasants had not tried to tempt him to
betray him, and when he heard what they offered him as a reward, he
said scornfully that Tord had been foolish not to accept such a
proposal.

Then Tord looked at him with a glance, the like of which Berg Rese
had never before seen.  Never had any beautiful woman in his youth,
never had his wife or child looked so at him.  "You are my lord, my
elected master," said the glance.  "Know that you may strike me and
abuse me as you will, I am faithful notwithstanding."

After that Berg Rese paid more attention to the boy and noticed that
he was bold to act but timid to speak.  He had no fear of death.
When the ponds were first frozen, or when the bogs were most
dangerous in the spring, when the quagmires were hidden under richly
flowering grasses and cloudberry, he took his way over them by
choice.  He seemed to feel the need of exposing himself to danger as
a compensation for the storms and terrors of the ocean, which he had
no longer to meet.  At night he was afraid in the woods, and even in
the middle of the day the darkest thickets or the wide-stretching
roots of a fallen pine could frighten him.  But when Berg Rese asked
him about it, he was too shy even to answer.

Tord did not sleep near the fire, far in in the cave, on the bed
which was made soft with moss and warm with skins, but every night,
when Berg had fallen asleep, he crept out to the entrance and lay
there on a rock.  Berg discovered this, and although he well
understood the reason, he asked what it meant.  Tord would not
explain.  To escape any more questions, he did not lie at the door
for two nights, but then he returned to his post.

One night, when the drifting snow whirled about the forest tops and
drove into the thickest underbrush, the driving snowflakes found
their way into the outlaws' cave.  Tord, who lay just inside the
entrance, was, when he waked in the morning, covered by a melting
snowdrift.  A few days later he fell ill.  His lungs wheezed, and
when they were expanded to take in air, he felt excruciating pain.
He kept up as long as his strength held out, but when one evening he
leaned down to blow the fire, he fell over and remained lying.

Berg Rese came to him and told him to go to his bed.  Tord moaned
with pain and could not raise himself.  Berg then thrust his arms
under him and carried him there.  But he felt as if he had got hold
of a slimy snake; he had a taste in the mouth as if he had eaten the
unholy horseflesh, it was so odious to him to touch the miserable
thief.

He laid his own big bearskin over him and gave him water, more he
could not do.  Nor was it anything dangerous.  Tord was soon well
again.  But through Berg's being obliged to do his tasks and to be
his servant, they had come nearer to one another.  Tord dared to talk
to him when he sat in the cave in the evening and cut arrow shafts.

"You are of a good race, Berg," said Tord.  "Your kinsmen are the
richest in the valley.  Your ancestors have served with kings and
fought in their castles."

"They have often fought with bands of rebels and done the kings great
injury," replied Berg Rese.

"Your ancestors gave great feasts at Christmas, and so did you, when
you were at home.  Hundreds of men and women could find a place to
sit in your big house, which was already built before Saint Olof
first gave the baptism here in Viken.  You owned old silver vessels
and great drinking-horns, which passed from man to man, filled with
mead."

Again Berg Rese had to look at the boy.  He sat up with his legs
hanging out of the bed and his head resting on his hands, with which
he at the same time held back the wild masses of hair which would
fall over his eyes.  His face had become pale and delicate from the
ravages of sickness.  In his eyes fever still burned.  He smiled at
the pictures he conjured up: at the adorned house, at the silver
vessels, at the guests in gala array and at Berg Rese, sitting in the
seat of honour in the hall of his ancestors.  The peasant thought
that no one had ever looked at him with such shining, admiring eyes,
or thought him so magnificent, arrayed in his festival clothes, as
that boy thought him in the torn skin dress.

He was both touched and provoked.  That miserable thief had no right
to admire him.

"Were there no feasts in your house?" he asked.

Tord laughed.  "Out there on the rocks with father and mother!
Father is a wrecker and mother is a witch.  No one will come to us."

"Is your mother a witch?"

"She is," answered Tord, quite untroubled.  "In stormy weather she
rides out on a sea to meet the ships over which the waves are
washing, and those who are carried overboard are hers."

"What does she do with them?" asked Berg.

"Oh, a witch always needs corpses.  She makes ointments out of them,
or perhaps she eats them.  On moonlight nights she sits in the surf,
where it is whitest, and the spray dashes over her.  They say that
she sits and searches for shipwrecked children's fingers and eyes."

"That is awful," said Berg.

The boy answered with infinite assurance: "That would be awful in
others, but not in witches.  They have to do so."

Berg Rese found that he had here come upon a new way of regarding the
world and things.

"Do thieves have to steal, as witches have to use witchcraft?" he
asked sharply.

"Yes, of course," answered the boy; "everyone has to do what he is
destined to do."  But then he added, with a cautious smile: "There
are thieves also who have never stolen."

"Say out what you mean," said Berg.

The boy continued with his mysterious smile, proud at being an
unsolvable riddle: "It is like speaking of birds who do not fly to
talk of thieves who do not steal."

Berg Rese pretended to be stupid in order to find out what he wanted.
"No one can be called a thief without having stolen," he said.

"No; but," said the boy, and pressed his lips together as if to keep
in the words, "but if someone had a father who stole," he hinted
after a while.

"One inherits money and lands," replied Berg Rese, "but no one bears
the name of thief if he has not himself earned it."

Tord laughed quietly.  "But if somebody has a mother who begs and
prays him to take his father's crime on him.  But if such a one
cheats the hangman and escapes to the woods.  But if someone is made
an outlaw for a fish-net which he has never seen."

Berg Rese struck the stone table with his clenched fist.  He was
angry.  This fair young man had thrown away his whole life.  He could
never win love, nor riches, nor esteem after that.  The wretched
striving for food and clothes was all which was left him.  And the
fool had let him, Berg Rese, go on despising one who was innocent.
He rebuked him with stern words, but Tord was not even as afraid as a
sick child is of its mother, when she chides it because it has caught
cold by wading in the spring brooks.

* * * * *

On one of the broad, wooded mountains lay a dark tarn.  It was
square, with as straight shores and as sharp corners as if it had
been cut by the hand of man.  On three sides it was surrounded by
steep cliffs, on which pines clung with roots as thick as a man's
arm.  Down by the pool, where the earth had been gradually washed
away, their roots stood up out of the water, bare and crooked and
wonderfully twisted about one another.  It was like an infinite
number of serpents which had wanted all at the same time to crawl up
out of the pool but had got entangled in one another and been held
fast.  Or it was like a mass of blackened skeletons of drowned giants
which the pool wanted to throw up on the land.  Arms and legs writhed
about one another, the long fingers dug deep into the very cliff to
get a hold, the mighty ribs formed arches, which held up primeval
trees.  It had happened, however, that the iron arms, the steel-like
fingers with which the pines held themselves fast, had given way, and
a pine had been borne by a mighty north wind from the top of the
cliff down into the pool.  It had burrowed deep down into the muddy
bottom with its top and now stood there.  The smaller fish had a good
place of refuge among its branches, but the roots stuck up above the
water like a many-armed monster and contributed to make the pool
awful and terrifying.

On the tarn's fourth side the cliff sank down.  There a little
foaming stream carried away its waters.  Before this stream could
find the only possible way, it had tried to get out between stones
and tufts, and had by so doing made a little world of islands, some
no bigger than a little hillock, others covered with trees.

Here where the encircling cliffs did not shut out all the sun, leafy
trees flourished.  Here stood thirsty, gray-green alders and
smooth-leaved willows.  The birch-tree grew there as it does
everywhere where it is trying to crowd out the pine woods, and the
wild cherry and the mountain ash, those two which edge the forest
pastures, filling them with fragrance and adorning them with beauty.

Here at the outlet there was a forest of reeds as high as a man,
which made the sunlight fall green on the water just as it falls on
the moss in the real forest.  Among the reeds there were open places;
small, round pools, and water-lilies were floating there.  The tall
stalks looked down with mild seriousness on those sensitive beauties,
who discontentedly shut their white petals and yellow stamens in a
hard, leather-like sheath as soon as the sun ceased to show itself.

One sunshiny day the outlaws came to this tarn to fish.  They waded
out to a couple of big stones in the midst of the reed forest and sat
there and threw out bait for the big, green-striped pickerel that lay
and slept near the surface of the water.

These men, who were always wandering in the woods and the mountains,
had, without their knowing it themselves, come under nature's rule as
much as the plants and the animals.  When the sun shone, they were
open-hearted and brave, but in the evening, as soon as the sun had
disappeared, they became silent; and the night, which seemed to them
much greater and more powerful than the day, made them anxious and
helpless.  Now the green light, which slanted in between the rushes
and coloured the water with brown and dark-green streaked with gold,
affected their mood until they were ready for any miracle.  Every
outlook was shut off.  Sometimes the reeds rocked in an imperceptible
wind, their stalks rustled, and the long, ribbon-like leaves
fluttered against their faces.  They sat in grey skins on the grey
stones.  The shadows in the skins repeated the shadows of the
weather-beaten, mossy stone.  Each saw his companion in his silence
and immovability change into a stone image.  But in among the rushes
swam mighty fishes with rainbow-coloured backs.  When the men threw
out their hooks and saw the circles spreading among the reeds, it
seemed as if the motion grew stronger and stronger, until they
perceived that it was not caused only by their cast.  A sea-nymph,
half human, half a shining fish, lay and slept on the surface of the
water.  She lay on her back with her whole body under water.  The
waves so nearly covered her that they had not noticed her before.  It
was her breathing that caused the motion of the waves.  But there was
nothing strange in her lying there, and when the next instant she was
gone, they were not sure that she had not been only an illusion.

The green light entered through the eyes into the brain like a gentle
intoxication.  The men sat and stared with dulled thoughts, seeing
visions among the reeds, of which they did not dare to tell one
another.  Their catch was poor.  The day was devoted to dreams and
apparitions.

The stroke of oars was heard among the rushes, and they started up as
from sleep.  The next moment a flat-bottomed boat appeared, heavy,
hollowed out with no skill and with oars as small as sticks.  A young
girl, who had been picking water-lilies, rowed it.  She had
dark-brown hair, gathered in great braids, and big dark eyes;
otherwise she was strangely pale.  But her paleness toned to pink and
not to grey.  Her cheeks had no higher colour than the rest of her
face, the lips had hardly enough.  She wore a white linen shirt and a
leather belt with a gold buckle.  Her skirt was blue with a red hem.
She rowed by the outlaws without seeing them.  They kept breathlessly
still, but not for fear of being seen, but only to be able to really
see her.  As soon as she had gone they were as if changed from stone
images to living beings.  Smiling, they looked at one another.

"She was white like the water-lilies," said one.  "Her eyes were as
dark as the water there under the pine-roots."

They were so excited that they wanted to laugh, really laugh as no
one had ever laughed by that pool, till the cliffs thundered with
echoes and the roots of the pines loosened with fright.

"Did you think she was pretty?" asked Berg Rese.

"Oh, I do not know, I saw her for such a short time.  Perhaps she
was."

"I do not believe you dared to look at her.  You thought that it was
a mermaid."

And they were again shaken by the same extravagant merriment.

* * * * *

Tord had once as a child seen a drowned man.  He had found the body
on the shore on a summer day and had not been at all afraid, but at
night he had dreamed terrible dreams.  He saw a sea, where every wave
rolled a dead man to his feet.  He saw, too, that all the islands
were covered with drowned men, who were dead and belonged to the sea,
but who still could speak and move and threaten him with withered
white hands.

It was so with him now.  The girl whom he had seen among the rushes
came back in his dreams.  He met her out in the open pool, where the
sunlight fell even greener than among the rushes, and he had time to
see that she was beautiful.  He dreamed that he had crept up on the
big pine root in the middle of the dark tarn, but the pine swayed and
rocked so that sometimes he was quite under water.  Then she came
forward on the little islands.  She stood under the red mountain
ashes and laughed at him.  In the last dream-vision he had come so
far that she kissed him.  It was already morning, and he heard that
Berg Rese had got up, but he obstinately shut his eyes to be able to
go on with his dream.  When he awoke, he was as though dizzy and
stunned by what had happened to him in the night.  He thought much
more now of the girl than he had done the day before.

Toward night he happened to ask Berg Rese if he knew her name.

Berg looked at him inquiringly.  "Perhaps it is best for you to hear
it," he said.  "She is Unn.  We are cousins."

Tord then knew that it was for that pale girl's sake Berg Rese
wandered an outlaw in forest and mountain.  Tord tried to remember
what he knew of her.  Unn was the daughter of a rich peasant.  Her
mother was dead, so that she managed her father's house.  This she
liked, for she was fond of her own way and she had no wish to be
married.

Unn and Berg Rese were the children of brothers, and it had been long
said that Berg preferred to sit with Unn and her maids and jest with
them than to work on his own lands.  When the great Christmas feast
was celebrated at his house, his wife had invited a monk from
Draksmark, for she wanted him to remonstrate with Berg, because he
was forgetting her for another woman.  This monk was hateful to Berg
and to many on account of his appearance.  He was very fat and quite
white.  The ring of hair about his bald head, the eyebrows above his
watery eyes, his face, his hands and his whole cloak, everything was
white.  Many found it hard to endure his looks.

At the banquet table, in the hearing of all the guests, this monk now
said, for he was fearless and thought that his words would have more
effect if they were heard by many, "People are in the habit of saying
that the cuckoo is the worst of birds because he does not rear his
young in his own nest, but here sits a man who does not provide for
his home and his children, but seeks his pleasure with a strange
woman.  Him will I call the worst of men."  Unn then rose up.  "That,
Berg, is said to you and me," she said.  "Never have I been so
insulted, and my father is not here either."  She had wished to go,
but Berg sprang after her.  "Do not move!" she said.  "I will never
see you again."  He caught up with her in the hall and asked her what
he should do to make her stay.  She had answered with flashing eyes
that he must know that best himself.  Then Berg went in and killed
the monk.

Berg and Tord were busy with the same thoughts, for after a while
Berg said: "You should have seen her, Unn, when the white monk fell.
The mistress of the house gathered the small children about her and
cursed her.  She turned their faces toward her, that they might
forever remember her who had made their father a murderer.  But Unn
stood calm and so beautiful that the men trembled.  She thanked me
for the deed and told me to fly to the woods.  She bade me not to be
robber, and not to use the knife until I could do it for an equally
just cause."

"Your deed had been to her honour," said Tord.

Berg Rese noticed again what had astonished him before in the boy.
He was like a heathen, worse than a heathen; he never condemned what
was wrong.  He felt no responsibility.  That which must be, was.  He
knew of God and Christ and the saints, but only by name, as one knows
the gods of foreign lands.  The ghosts of the rocks were his gods.
His mother, wise in witchcraft, had taught him to believe in the
spirits of the dead.

Then Berg Rese undertook a task which was as foolish as to twist a
rope about his own neck.  He set before those ignorant eyes the great
God, the Lord of justice, the Avenger of misdeeds, who casts the
wicked into places of everlasting torment.  And he taught him to love
Christ and his mother and the holy men and women, who with lifted
hands kneeled before God's throne to avert the wrath of the great
Avenger from the hosts of sinners.  He taught him all that men do to
appease God's wrath.  He showed him the crowds of pilgrims making
pilgrimages to holy places, the flight of self-torturing penitents
and monks from a worldly life.

As he spoke, the boy became more eager and more pale, his eyes grew
large as if for terrible visions.  Berg Rese wished to stop, but
thoughts streamed to him, and he went on speaking.  The night sank
down over them, the black forest night, when the owls hoot.  God came
so near to them that they saw his throne darken the stars, and the
chastising angels sank down to the tops of the trees.  And under them
the fires of Hell flamed up to the earth's crust, eagerly licking
that shaking place of refuge for the sorrowing races of men.

* * * * *

The autumn had come with a heavy storm.  Tord went alone in the woods
to see after the snares and traps.  Berg Rese sat at home to mend his
clothes.  Tord's way led in a broad path up a wooded height.

Every gust carried the dry leaves in a rustling whirl up the path.
Time after time Tord thought that someone went behind him.  He often
looked round.  Sometimes he stopped to listen, but he understood that
it was the leaves and the wind, and went on.  As soon as he started
on again, he heard someone come dancing on silken foot up the slope.
Small feet came tripping.  Elves and fairies played behind him.  When
he turned round, there was no one, always no one.  He shook his fists
at the rustling leaves and went on.

They did not grow silent for that, but they took another tone.  Then
began to hiss and to pant behind him.  A big viper came gliding.  Its
tongue dripping venom hung far out of its mouth, and its bright body
shone against the withered leaves.  Beside the snake pattered a wolf,
a big, gaunt monster, who was ready to seize fast in his throat when
the snake had twisted about his feet and bitten Him in the heel.
Sometimes they were both silent, as if to approach him unperceived,
but they soon betrayed themselves by hissing and panting, and
sometimes the wolf's claws rang against a stone.  Involuntarily Tord
walked quicker and quicker, but the creatures hastened after him.
When he felt that they were only two steps distant and were preparing
to strike, he turned.  There was nothing there, and he had known it
the whole time.

He sat down on a stone to rest.  Then the dry leaves played about his
feet as if to amuse him.  All the leaves of the forest were there:
small, light yellow birch leaves, red speckled mountain ash, the
elm's dry, dark-brown leaves, the aspen's tough light red, and the
willow's yellow green.  Transformed and withered, scarred and torn
were they, and much unlike the downy, light green, delicately shaped
leaves which a few months ago had rolled out of their buds.

"Sinners," said the boy, "sinners, nothing is pure in God's eyes.
The flame of his wrath has already reached you."

When he resumed his wandering, he saw the forest under him bend
before the storm like a heaving sea, but in the path it was calm.
But he heard what he did not feel.  The woods were full of voices.

He heard whisperings, wailing songs, coarse threats, thundering
oaths.  There were laughter and laments, there was the noise of many
people.  That which hounded and pursued, which rustled and hissed,
which seemed to be something and still was nothing, gave him wild
thoughts.  He felt again the anguish of death, as when he lay on the
floor in his den and the peasants hunted him through the wood.  He
heard again the crashing of branches, the people's heavy tread, the
ring of weapons, the resounding cries, the wild, bloodthirsty noise,
which followed the crowd.

But it was not only that which he heard in the storm.  There was
something else, something still more terrible, voices which he could
not interpret, a confusion of voices, which seemed to him to speak in
foreign tongues.  He had heard mightier storms than this whistle
through the rigging, but never before had he heard the wind play on
such a many-voiced harp.  Each tree had its own voice; the pine did
not murmur like the aspen nor the poplar like the mountain ash.
Every hole had its note, every cliff's sounding echo its own ring.
And the noise of the brooks and the cry of foxes mingled with the
marvellous forest storm.  But all that he could interpret; there were
other strange sounds.  It was those which made him begin to scream
and scoff and groan in emulation with the storm.

He had always been afraid when he was alone in the darkness of the
forest.  He liked the open sea and the bare rocks.  Spirits and
phantoms crept about among the trees.

Suddenly he heard who it was who spoke in the storm.  It was God, the
great Avenger, the God of justice.  He was hunting him for the sake
of his comrade.  He demanded that he should deliver up the murderer
to His vengeance.

Then Tord began to speak in the midst of the storm.  He told God what
he had wished to do, but had not been able.  He had wished to speak
to Berg Rese and to beg him to make his peace with God, but he had
been too shy.  Bashfulness had made him dumb.  "When I heard that the
earth was ruled by a just God," he cried, "I understood that he was a
lost man.  I have lain and wept for my friend many long nights.  I
knew that God would find him out, wherever he might hide.  But I
could not speak, nor teach him to understand.  I was speechless,
because I loved him so much.  Ask not that I shall speak to him, ask
not that the sea shall rise up against the mountain."

He was silent, and in the storm the deep voice, which had been the
voice of God for him, ceased.  It was suddenly calm, with a sharp sun
and a splashing as of oars and a gentle rustle as of stiff rushes.
These sounds brought Unn's image before him.  The outlaw cannot have
anything, not riches, nor women, nor the esteem of men.  If he should
betray Berg, he would be taken under the protection of the law.  But
Unn must love Berg, after what he had done for her.  There was no way
out of it all.

When the storm increased, he heard again steps behind him and
sometimes a breathless panting.  Now he did not dare to look back,
for he knew that the white monk went behind him.  He came from the
feast at Berg Rese's house, drenched with blood, with a gaping
axe-wound in his forehead.  And he whispered: "Denounce him, betray
him, save his soul.  Leave his body to the pyre, that his soul may be
spared.  Leave him to the slow torture of the rack, that his soul may
have time to repent."

Tord ran.  All this fright of what was nothing in itself grew, when
it so continually played on the soul, to an unspeakable terror.  He
wished to escape from it all.  As he began to run, again thundered
that deep, terrible voice which was God's.  God himself hunted him
with alarms, that he should give up the murderer.  Berg Rese's crime
seemed more detestable than ever to him.  An unarmed man had been
murdered, a man of God pierced with shining steel.  It was like a
defiance of the Lord of the world.  And the murderer dared to live!
He rejoiced in the sun's light and in the fruits of the earth as if
the Almighty's arm were too short to reach him.

He stopped, clenched his fists and howled out a threat.  Then he ran
like a madman from the wood down to the valley.

* * * * *

Tord hardly needed to tell his errand; instantly ten peasants were
ready to follow him.  It was decided that Tord should go alone up to
the cave, so that Berg's suspicions should not be aroused.  But where
he went he should scatter peas, so that the peasants could find the
way.

When Tord came to the cave, the outlaw sat on the stone bench and
sewed.  The fire gave hardly any light, and the work seemed to go
badly.  The boy's heart swelled with pity.  The splendid Berg Rese
seemed to him poor and unhappy.  And the only thing he possessed, his
life, should be taken from him.  Tord began to weep.

"What is it?" asked Berg.  "Are you ill?  Have you been frightened?"

Then for the first time Tord spoke of his fear.  "It was terrible in
the wood.  I heard ghosts and saw spectres.  I saw white monks."

"'Sdeath, boy!"

"They crowded round me all the way up Broad mountain.  I ran, but
they followed after and sang.  Can I never be rid of the sound?  What
have I to do with them?  I think that they could go to one who needed
it more."

"Are you mad to-night, Tord?"

Tord talked, hardly knowing what words he used.  He was free from all
shyness.  The words streamed from his lips.

"They are all white monks, white, pale as death.  They all have blood
on their cloaks.  They drag their hoods down over their brows, but
still the wound shines from under; the big, red, gaping wound from
the blow of the axe."

"The big, red, gaping wound from the blow of the axe?"

"Is it I who perhaps have struck it?  Why shall I see it?"

"The saints only know, Tord," said Berg Rese, pale and with terrible
earnestness, "what it means that you see a wound from an axe.  I
killed the monk with a couple of knife-thrusts."

Tord stood trembling before Berg and wrung his hands.  "They demand
you of me!  They want to force me to betray you!"

"Who?  The monks?"

"They, yes, the monks.  They show me visions.  They show me her, Unn.
They show me the shining, sunny sea.  They show me the fisherman's
camping-ground, where there is dancing and merry-making.  I close my
eyes, but still I see.  'Leave me in peace,' I say.  'My friend has
murdered, but he is not bad.  Let me be, and I will talk to him, so
that he repents and atones.  He shall confess his sin and go to
Christ's grave.  We will both go together to the places which are so
holy that all sin is taken away from him who draws near them.'"

"What do the monks answer?" asked Berg.  "They want to have me saved.
They want to have me on the rack and wheel."

"Shall I betray my dearest friend, I ask them," continued Tord.  "He
is my world.  He has saved me from the bear that had his paw on my
throat.  We have been cold together and suffered every want together.
He has spread his bearskin over me when I was sick.  I have carried
wood and water for him; I have watched over him while he slept; I
have fooled his enemies.  Why do they think that I am one who will
betray a friend?  My friend will soon of his own accord go to the
priest and confess, then we will go together to the land of
atonement."

Berg listened earnestly, his eyes sharply searching Tord's face.
"You shall go to the priest and tell him the truth," he said.  "You
need to be among people."

"Does that help me if I go alone?  For your sin, Death and all his
spectres follow me.  Do you not see how I shudder at you?  You have
lifted your hand against God himself.  No crime is like yours.  I
think that I must rejoice when I see you on rack and wheel.  It is
well for him who can receive his punishment in this world and escapes
the wrath to come.  Why did you tell me of the just God?  You compel
me to betray you.  Save me from that sin.  Go to the priest."  And he
fell on his knees before Berg.

The murderer laid his hand on his head and looked at him.  He was
measuring his sin against his friend's anguish, and it grew big and
terrible before his soul.  He saw himself at variance with the Will
which rules the world.  Repentance entered his heart.

"Woe to me that I have done what I have done," he said.  "That which
awaits me is too hard to meet voluntarily.  If I give myself up to
the priests, they will torture me for hours; they will roast me with
slow fires.  And is not this life of misery, which we lead in fear
and want, penance enough?  Have I not lost lands and home?  Do I not
live parted from friends and everything which makes a man's
happiness?  What more is required?"

When he spoke so, Tord sprang up wild with terror.  "Can you repent?"
he cried.  "Can my words move your heart?  Then come instantly!  How
could I believe that!  Let us escape!  There is still time."

Berg Rese sprang up, he too.  "You have done it, then----"

"Yes, yes, yes!  I have betrayed you!  But come quickly!  Come, as
you can repent!  They will let us go.  We shall escape them!"

The murderer bent down to the floor, where the battle-axe of his
ancestors lay at his feet.  "You son of a thief!" he said, hissing
out the words, "I have trusted you and loved you."

But when Tord saw him bend for the axe, he knew that it was now a
question of his own life.  He snatched his own axe from his belt and
struck at Berg before he had time to raise himself.  The edge cut
through the whistling air and sank in the bent head.  Berg Rese fell
head foremost to the floor, his body rolled after.  Blood and brains
spouted out, the axe fell from the wound.  In the matted hair Tord
saw a big, red, gaping hole from the blow of an axe.

The peasants came rushing in.  They rejoiced and praised the deed.

"You will win by this," they said to Tord.

Tord looked down at his hands as if he saw there the fetters with
which he had been dragged forward to kill him he loved.  They were
forged from nothing.  Of the rushes' green light, of the play of the
shadows, of the song of the storm, of the rustling of the leaves, of
dreams were they created.  And he said aloud: "God is great."

But again the old thought came to him.  He fell on his knees beside
the body and put his arm under his head.

"Do him no harm," he said.  "He repents; he is going to the Holy
Sepulchre.  He is not dead, he is not a prisoner.  We were just ready
to go when he fell.  The white monk did not want him to repent, but
God, the God of justice, loves repentance."

He lay beside the body, talked to it, wept and begged the dead man to
awake.  The peasants arranged a bier.  They wished to carry the
peasant's body down to his house.  They had respect for the dead and
spoke softly in his presence.  When they lifted him up on the bier,
Tord rose, shook the hair back from his face, and said with a voice
which shook with sobs,--

"Say to Unn, who made Berg Rese a murderer, that he was killed by
Tord the fisherman, whose father is a wrecker and whose mother is a
witch, because he taught him that the foundation of the world is
justice."




IV

THE PRINCESS BOB AND HER FRIENDS*

BRET HARTE

*Reprinted by permission of, and by special arrangement with Houghton
Mifflin Co.


She was a Klamath Indian.  Her title was, I think, a compromise
between her claim as daughter of a chief and gratitude to her
earliest white protector, whose name, after the Indian fashion, she
had adopted.  "Bob" Walker had taken her from the breast of her dead
mother at a time when the sincere volunteer soldiery of the
California frontier were impressed with the belief that extermination
was the manifest destiny of the Indian race.  He had with difficulty
restrained the noble zeal of his compatriots long enough to convince
them that the exemption of one Indian baby would not invalidate this
theory.  And he took her to his home,--a pastoral clearing on the
banks of the Salmon River,--where she was cared for after a frontier
fashion.

Before she was nine years old, she had exhausted the scant kindliness
of the thin, overworked Mrs. Walker.  As a playfellow of the young
Walkers she was unreliable; as a nurse for the baby she was
inefficient.  She lost the former in the trackless depths of a
redwood forest; she basely abandoned the latter in an extemporized
cradle, hanging like a chrysalis to a convenient bough.  She lied and
she stole,--two unpardonable sins in a frontier community, where
truth was a necessity and provisions were the only property.  Worse
than this, the outskirts of the clearing were sometimes haunted by
blanketed tatterdemalions with whom she had mysterious confidences.
Mr. Walker more than once regretted his indiscreet humanity; but she
presently relieved him of responsibility, and possibly of
blood-guiltiness, by disappearing entirely.

When she reappeared, it was at the adjacent village of Logport, in
the capacity of housemaid to a trader's wife, who, joining some
little culture to considerable conscientiousness, attempted to
instruct her charge.  But the Princess proved an unsatisfactory pupil
to even so liberal a teacher.  She accepted the alphabet with great
good-humour, but always as a pleasing and recurring novelty, in which
all interest expired at the completion of each lesson.  She found a
thousand uses for her books and writing materials other than those
known to civilized children.  She made a curious necklace of bits of
slate-pencil, she constructed a miniature canoe from the pasteboard
covers of her primer, she bent her pens into fish-hooks, and tattooed
the faces of her younger companions with blue ink.  Religious
instruction she received as good-humouredly, and learned to pronounce
the name of the Deity with a cheerful familiarity that shocked her
preceptress.  Nor could her reverence be reached through analogy; she
knew nothing of the Great Spirit, and professed entire ignorance of
the Happy Hunting-Grounds.  Yet she attended divine service
regularly, and as regularly asked for a hymn-book; and it was only
through the discovery that she had collected twenty-five of these
volumes and had hidden them behind the woodpile, that her connection
with the First Baptist Church of Logport ceased.  She would
occasionally abandon these civilized and Christian privileges, and
disappear from her home, returning after several days of absence with
an odour of bark and fish, and a peace-offering to her mistress in
the shape of venison or game.

To add to her troubles, she was now fourteen, and, according to the
laws of her race, a woman.  I do not think the most romantic fancy
would have called her pretty.  Her complexion defied most of those
ambiguous similes through which poets unconsciously apologize for any
deviation from the Caucasian standard.  It was not wine nor amber
coloured; if anything, it was smoky.  Her face was tatooed with red
and white lines on one cheek, as if a fine-toothed comb had been
drawn from cheek-bone to jaw, and, but for the good-humour that
beamed from her small berry-like eyes and shone in her white teeth,
would have been repulsive.  She was short and stout.  In her scant
drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque, and her
more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly
scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, in moments
of contemplation.

I think I have already shown enough to indicate the incongruity of
her existence with even the low standard of civilization that
obtained at Logport in the year 1860.  It needed but one more fact to
prove the far-sighted political sagacity and prophetic ethics of
those sincere advocates of extermination to whose virtues I have done
but scant justice in the beginning of this article.  This fact was
presently furnished by the Princess.  After one of her periodical
disappearances--this time unusually prolonged--she astonished Logport
by returning with a half-breed baby of a week old in her arms.  That
night a meeting of the hard-featured serious matrons of Logport was
held at Mrs. Brown's.  The immediate banishment of the Princess was
demanded.  Soft-hearted Mrs. Brown endeavoured vainly to get a
mitigation or suspension of the sentence.  But, as on a former
occasion, the Princess took matters into her own hands.  A few
mornings afterwards a wicker cradle containing an Indian baby was
found hanging on the handle of the door of the First Baptist Church.
It was the Parthian arrow of the flying Princess.  From that day
Logport knew her no more.

It had been a bright clear day on the upland, so clear that the
ramparts of Fort Jackson and the flagstaff were plainly visible
twelve miles away from the long curving peninsula that stretched a
bared white arm around the peaceful waters of Logport Bay.  It had
been a clear day upon the seashore, albeit the air was filled with
the flying spume and shifting sand of a straggling beach whose low
dunes were dragged down by the long surges of the Pacific and thrown
up again by the tumultuous tradewinds.  But the sun had gone down in
a bank of fleecy fog that was beginning to roll in upon the beach.
Gradually the headland at the entrance of the harbour and the
lighthouse disappeared, then the willow fringe that marked the line
of Salmon River vanished, and the ocean was gone.  A few sails still
gleamed on the waters of the bay; but the advancing fog wiped them
out one by one, crept across the steel-blue expanse, swallowed up the
white mills and single spire of Logport, and, joining with
reinforcements from the marshes, moved solemnly upon the hills.  Ten
minutes more and the landscape was utterly blotted out;
simultaneously the wind died away, and a death-like silence stole
over sea and shore.  The faint clang, high overhead, of unseen brent,
the nearer call of invisible plover, the lap and wash of
undistinguishable waters, and the monotonous roll of the vanished
ocean, were the only sounds.  As night deepened, the far-off booming
of the fog-bell on the headland at intervals stirred the thick air.

Hard by the shore of the bay, and half hidden by a drifting
sand-hill, stood a low nondescript structure, to whose composition
sea and shore had equally contributed.  It was built partly of logs
and partly of driftwood and tarred canvas.  Joined to one end of the
main building--the ordinary log-cabin of the settler--was the
half-round pilot-house of some wrecked steamer, while the other gable
terminated in half of a broken whaleboat.  Nailed against the boat
were the dried skins of wild animals, and scattered about lay the
flotsam and jetsam of many years' gathering,--bamboo crates, casks,
hatches, blocks, oars, boxes, part of a whale's vertebræ, and the
blades of swordfish.  Drawn up on the beach of a little cove before
the house lay a canoe.  As the night thickened and the fog grew more
dense, these details grew imperceptible, and only the windows of the
pilot-house, lit up by a roaring fire within the hut, gleamed redly
through the mist.

By this fire, beneath a ship's lamp that swung from the roof, two
figures were seated, a man and a woman.  The man, broad-shouldered
and heavily bearded, stretched his listless powerful length beyond a
broken bamboo chair, with his eyes fixed on the fire.  The woman
couched cross-legged upon the broad earthen hearth, with her eyes
blinkingly fixed on her companion.  They were small, black, round,
berry-like eyes, and as the firelight shone upon her smoky face, with
its one striped cheek of gorgeous brilliancy, it was plainly the
Princess Bob and no other.

Not a word was spoken.  They had been sitting thus for more than an
hour, and there was about their attitude a suggestion that silence
was habitual.  Once or twice the man rose and walked up and down the
narrow room, or gazed absently from the windows of the pilot-house,
but never by look or sign betrayed the slightest consciousness of his
companion.  At such times the Princess from her nest by the fire
followed him with eyes of canine expectancy and wistfulness.  But he
would as inevitably return to his contemplation of the fire, and the
Princess to her blinking watchfulness of his face.

They had sat there silent and undisturbed for many an evening in fair
weather and foul.  They had spent many a day in the sunshine and
storm, gathering the unclaimed spoil of sea and shore.  They had kept
these mute relations, varied only by the incidents of the hunt or
meagre household duties, for three years, ever since the man,
wandering moodily over the lonely sands, had fallen upon the
half-starved woman lying in the little hollow where she had crawled
to die.  It had seemed as if they would never be disturbed, until
now, when the Princess started, and, with the instinct of her race,
bent her ear to the ground.

The wind had risen and was rattling the tarred canvas.  But in
another moment there plainly came from without the hut the sound of
voices.  Then followed a rap at the door; then another rap; and then,
before they could rise to their feet, the door was flung briskly open.

"I beg your pardon," said a pleasant but somewhat decided contralto
voice, "but I don't think you heard me knock.  Ah, I see you did not.
May I come in?"

There was no reply.  Had the battered figurehead of the Goddess of
Liberty, which lay deeply embedded in the sand on the beach, suddenly
appeared at the door demanding admittance, the occupants of the cabin
could not have been more speechlessly and hopelessly astonished than
at the form which stood in the open doorway.

It was that of a slim, shapely, elegantly dressed young woman.  A
scarlet-lined silken hood was half thrown back from the shining mass
of the black hair that covered her small head; from her pretty
shoulders drooped a fur cloak, only restrained by a cord and tassel
in her small gloved hand.  Around her full throat was a double
necklace of large white beads, that by some cunning feminine trick
relieved with its infantile suggestion the strong decision of her
lower face.

"Did you say yes?  Ah, thank you.  We may come in, Barker."  (Here a
shadow in a blue army overcoat followed her into the cabin, touched
its cap respectfully, and then stood silent and erect against the
wall.)  "Don't disturb yourself in the least, I beg.  What a
distressingly unpleasant night!  Is this your usual climate?"

Half graciously, half absently overlooking the still embarrassed
silence of the group, she went on: "We started from the fort over
three hours ago,--three hours ago, wasn't it, Barker?" (the erect
Barker touched his cap)--"to go to Captain Emmons's quarters on
Indian Island,--I think you call it Indian Island, don't you?" (she
was appealing to the awe-stricken Princess),--"and we got into the
fog and lost our way; that is, Barker lost his way" (Barker touched
his cap deprecatingly), "and goodness knows where we didn't wander to
until we mistook your light for the lighthouse and pulled up here.
No, no, pray keep your seat, do!  Really I must insist."

Nothing could exceed the languid grace of the latter part of this
speech,--nothing except the easy unconsciousness with which she
glided by the offered chair of her stammering, embarrassed host and
stood beside the open hearth.

"Barker will tell you," she continued, warming her feet by the fire,
"that I am Miss Portfire, daughter of Major Portfire, commanding the
post.  Ah, excuse me, child!"  (She had accidentally trodden upon the
bare yellow toes of the Princess.)  "Really, I did not know you were
there.  I am very near-sighted."  (In confirmation of her statement,
she put to her eyes a dainty double eyeglass that dangled from her
neck.)  "It's a shocking thing to be near-sighted, isn't it?"

If the shamefaced uneasy man to whom this remark was addressed could
have found words to utter the thought that even in his confusion
struggled uppermost in his mind, he would, looking at the bold, dark
eyes that questioned, have denied the fact.  But he only stammered,
"Yes."  The next moment, however, Miss Portfire had apparently
forgotten him and was examining the Princess through her glass.

"And what is your name, child?"

The Princess, beatified by the eyes and eyeglass, showed all her
white teeth at once, and softly scratched her leg.

"Bob."

"Bob?  What a singular name!"

Miss Portfire's host here hastened to explain the origin of the
Princess's title.

"Then you are Bob."  (Eyeglass.)

"No, my name is Grey,--John Grey."  And he actually achieved a bow
where awkwardness was rather the air of imperfectly recalling a
forgotten habit.

"Grey?--ah, let me see.  Yes, certainly.  You are Mr. Grey the
recluse, the hermit, the philosopher, and all that sort of thing.
Why, certainly; Dr. Jones, our surgeon, has told me all about you.
Dear me, how interesting a rencontre!  Lived all alone here for
seven--was it seven years?--yes, I remember now.  Existed quite _au
naturel_, one might say.  How odd!  Not that I know anything about
that sort of thing, you know.  I've lived always among people, and am
really quite a stranger, I assure you.  But honestly, Mr.--I beg your
pardon--Mr. Grey, how do you like it?"

She had quietly taken his chair and thrown her cloak and hood over
its back, and was now thoughtfully removing her gloves.  Whatever
were the arguments,--and they were doubtless many and
profound,--whatever the experience,--and it was doubtless hard and
satisfying enough,--by which this unfortunate man had justified his
life for the last seven years, somehow they suddenly became trivial
and terribly ridiculous before this simple but practical question.

"Well, you shall tell me all about it after you have given me
something to eat.  We will have time enough; Barker cannot find his
way back in this fog to-night.  Now don't put yourselves to any
trouble on my account.  Barker will assist."

Barker came forward.  Glad to escape the scrutiny of his guest, the
hermit gave a few rapid directions to the Princess in her native
tongue, and disappeared in the shed.  Left a moment alone, Miss
Portfire took a quick, half-audible, feminine inventory of the cabin.
"Books, guns, skins, _one_ chair, _one_ bed, no pictures, and no
looking-glass!"  She took a book from the swinging shelf and resumed
her seat by the fire as the Princess re-entered with fresh fuel.  But
while kneeling on the hearth the Princess chanced to look up and met
Miss Portfire's dark eyes over the edge of her book.

"Bob!"

The Princess showed her teeth.

"Listen.  Would you like to have fine clothes, rings, and beads like
these, to have your hair nicely combed and put up so?  Would you?"

The Princess nodded violently.

"Would you like to live with me and have them?  Answer quickly.
Don't look round for him.  Speak for yourself.  Would you?  Hush;
never mind now."

The hermit re-entered, and the Princess, blinking, retreated into the
shadow of the whaleboat shed, from which she did not emerge even when
the homely repast of cold venison, ship biscuit, and tea was served.
Miss Portfire noticed her absence: "You really must not let me
interfere with your usual simple ways.  Do you know this is
exceedingly interesting to me, so pastoral and patriarchal and all
that sort of thing.  I must insist upon the Princess coming back;
really, I must."

But the Princess was not to be found in the shed, and Miss Portfire,
who the next minute seemed to have forgotten all about her, took her
place in the single chair before an extemporized table.  Barker stood
behind her, and the hermit leaned against the fireplace.  Miss
Portfire's appetite did not come up to her protestations.  For the
first time in seven years it occurred to the hermit that his ordinary
victual might be improved.  He stammered out something to that effect.

"I have eaten better, and worse," said Miss Portfire, quietly.

"But I thought you--that is, you said----"

"I spent a year in the hospitals, when father was on the Potomac,"
returned Miss Portfire, composedly.  After a pause she continued:
"You remember after the second Bull Run--  But, dear me!  I beg your
pardon; of course, you know nothing about the war and all that sort
of thing, and don't care."  (She put up her eyeglass and quietly
surveyed his broad muscular figure against the chimney.)  "Or,
perhaps, your prejudices--  But then, as a hermit you know you have
no politics, of course.  Please don't let me bore you."

To have been strictly consistent, the hermit should have exhibited no
interest in this topic.  Perhaps it was owing to some quality in the
narrator, but he was constrained to beg her to continue in such
phrases as his unfamiliar lips could command.  So that little by
little Miss Portfire yielded up incident and personal observation of
contest then raging; with the same half-abstracted, half-unconcerned
air that seemed habitual to her, she told the stories of privation,
of suffering, of endurance, and of sacrifice.  With the same
assumption of timid deference that concealed her great self-control,
she talked of principles and rights.  Apparently without enthusiasm
and without effort, of which his morbid nature would have been
suspicious, she sang the great American Iliad in a way that stirred
the depths of her solitary auditor to its massive foundations.  Then
she stopped and asked quietly, "Where is Bob?"

The hermit started.  He would look for her.  But Bob, for some
reason, was not forthcoming.  Search was made within and without the
hut, but in vain.  For the first time that evening Miss Portfire
showed some anxiety.  "Go," she said to Barker, "and find her.  She
_must_ be found; stay, give me your overcoat, I'll go myself."  She
threw the overcoat over her shoulders and stepped out into the night.
In the thick veil of fog that seemed suddenly to inwrap her, she
stood for a moment irresolute, and then walked toward the beach,
guided by the low wash of waters on the sand.  She had not taken many
steps before she stumbled over some dark crouching object.  Reaching
down her hand she felt the coarse wiry mane of the Princess.

"Bob!"

There was no reply.

"Bob.  I've been looking for you, come."

"Go 'way."

"Nonsense, Bob.  I want you to stay with me to-night, come."

"Injin squaw no good for waugee woman.  Go 'way."

"Listen, Bob.  You are daughter of a chief: so am I.  Your father had
many warriors: so has mine.  It is good that you stay with me.  Come."

The Princess chuckled and suffered herself to be lifted up.  A few
moments later they re-entered the hut hand in hand.

With the first red streaks of dawn the next day the erect Barker
touched his cap at the door of the hut.  Beside him stood the hermit,
also just risen from his blanketed nest in the sand.  Forth from the
hut, fresh as the morning air, stepped Miss Portfire, leading the
Princess by the hand.  Hand in hand also they walked to the shore,
and when the Princess had been safely bestowed in the stern sheets,
Miss Portfire turned and held out her own to her late host.

"I shall take the best of care of her, of course.  You will come and
see her often.  I should ask you to come and see me, but you are a
hermit, you know, and all that sort of thing.  But if it's the
correct anchorite thing, and can be done, my father will be glad to
requite you for this night's hospitality.  But don't do anything on
my account that interferes with your simple habits.  Good-bye."

She handed him a card, which he took mechanically.

"Good-bye."

The sail was hoisted, and the boat shoved off.  As the fresh morning
breeze caught the white canvas it seemed to bow a parting salutation.
There was a rosy flush of promise on the water, and as the light
craft darted forward toward the ascending sun, it seemed for a moment
uplifted in its glory.


Miss Portfire kept her word.  If thoughtful care and intelligent
kindness could regenerate the Princess, her future was secure.  And
it really seemed as if she were for the first time inclined to heed
the lessons of civilization and profit by her new condition.  An
agreeable change was first noticed in her appearance.  Her lawless
hair was caught in a net, and no longer strayed over her low
forehead.  Her unstable bust was stayed and upheld by French corsets;
her plantigrade shuffle was limited by heeled boots.  Her dresses
were neat and clean, and she wore a double necklace of glass beads.
With this physical improvement there also seemed some moral
awakening.  She no longer stole nor lied.  With the possession of
personal property came a respect for that of others.  With increased
dependence on the word of those about her came a thoughtful
consideration of her own.  Intellectually she was still feeble,
although she grappled sturdily with the simple lessons which Miss
Portfire set before her.  But her zeal and simple vanity outran her
discretion, and she would often sit for hours with an open book
before her, which she could not read.  She was a favourite with the
officers at the fort, from the Major, who shared his daughter's
prejudices and often yielded to her powerful self-will, to the
subalterns, who liked her none the less that their natural enemies,
the frontier volunteers, had declared war against her helpless
sisterhood.  The only restraint put upon her was the limitation of
her liberty to the enclosure of the fort and parade; and only once
did she break this parole, and was stopped by the sentry as she
stepped into a boat at the landing.

The recluse did not avail himself of Miss Portfire's invitation.  But
after the departure of the Princess he spent less of his time in the
hut, and was more frequently seen in the distant marshes of Eel River
and on the upland hills.  A feverish restlessness, quite opposed to
his usual phlegm, led him into singular freaks strangely inconsistent
with his usual habits and reputation.  The purser of the occasional
steamer which stopped at Logport with the mails reported to have been
boarded, just inside the bar, by a strange bearded man, who asked for
a newspaper containing the last war telegrams.  He tore his red shirt
into narrow strips, and spent two days with his needle over the
pieces and the tattered remnant of his only white garment; and a few
days afterward the fishermen on the bay were surprised to see what,
on nearer approach, proved to be a rude imitation of the national
flag floating from a spar above the hut.

One evening, as the fog began to drift over the sand-hills, the
recluse sat alone in his hut.  The fire was dying unheeded on the
hearth, for he had been sitting there for a long time, completely
absorbed in the blurred pages of an old newspaper.  Presently he
arose, and, refolding it,--an operation of great care and delicacy in
its tattered condition,--placed it under the blankets of his bed.  He
resumed his seat by the fire, but soon began drumming with his
fingers on the arm of his chair.  Eventually this assumed the time
and accent of some air.  Then he began to whistle softly and
hesitatingly, as if trying to recall a forgotten tune.  Finally this
took shape in a rude resemblance, not unlike that which his flag bore
to the national standard, to Yankee Doodle.  Suddenly he stopped.

There was an unmistakable rapping at the door.  The blood which had
at first rushed to his face now forsook it and settled slowly around
his heart.  He tried to rise, but could not.  Then the door was flung
open, and a figure with a scarlet-lined hood and fur mantle stood on
the threshold.  With a mighty effort he took one stride to the door.
The next moment he saw the wide mouth and white teeth of the
Princess, and was greeted by a kiss that felt like a baptism.

To tear the hood and mantle from her figure in the sudden fury that
seized him, and to fiercely demand the reason of this masquerade, was
his only return to her greeting.  "Why are you here?  Did you steal
these garments?" he again demanded in her guttural language, as he
shook her roughly by the arm.  The Princess hung her head.  "Did
you?" he screamed, as he reached wildly for his rifle.

"I did."

His hold relaxed, and he staggered back against the wall.  The
Princess began to whimper.  Between her sobs, she was trying to
explain that the Major and his daughter were going away, and that
they wanted to send her to the Reservation; but he cut her short.
"Take off those things!"  The Princess tremblingly obeyed.  He rolled
them up, placed them in the canoe she had just left, and then leaped
into the frail craft.  She would have followed, but with a great oath
he threw her from him, and with one stroke of his paddle swept out
into the fog, and was gone.

"Jessamy," said the Major, a few days after, as he sat at dinner with
his daughter, "I think I can tell you something to match the
mysterious disappearance and return of your wardrobe.  Your crazy
friend, the recluse, has enlisted this morning in the Fourth
Artillery.  He's a splendid-looking animal, and there's the right
stuff for a soldier in him, if I'm not mistaken.  He's in earnest
too, for he enlists in the regiment ordered back to Washington.
Bless me, child, another goblet broken; you'll ruin the mess in
glassware, at this rate!"

"Have you heard anything more of the Princess, papa?"

"Nothing, but perhaps it's as well that she has gone.  These cursed
settlers are at their old complaints again about what they call
'Indian depredations,' and I have just received orders from
headquarters to keep the settlement clear of all vagabond aborigines.
I am afraid, my dear, that a strict construction of the term would
include your _protégée_."

The time for the departure of the Fourth Artillery had come.  The
night before was thick and foggy.  At one o'clock, a shot on the
ramparts called out the guard and roused the sleeping garrison.  The
new sentry, Private Grey, had challenged a dusky figure creeping on
the glacis, and, receiving no answer, had fired.  The guard sent out
presently returned, bearing a lifeless figure in their arms.  The new
sentry's zeal, joined with an ex-frontiersman's aim, was fatal.

They laid the helpless, ragged form before the guard-house door, and
then saw for the first time that it was the Princess.  Presently she
opened her eyes.  They fell upon the agonized face of her innocent
slayer, but haply without intelligence or reproach.

"Georgy!" she whispered.

"Bob!"

"All's same now.  Me get plenty well soon.  Me make no more fuss.  Me
go to Reservation."

Then she stopped, a tremor ran through her limbs, and she lay still.
She had gone to the Reservation.  Not that devised by the wisdom of
man, but that one set apart from the foundations of the world for the
wisest as well as the meanest of His creatures.




V

THE THREE STRANGERS*

THOMAS HARDY

*Reprinted from "Wessex Tales" by permission of Harper and Brothers.


Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an
appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries, may be
reckoned the high, grassy, and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as
they are indifferently called, that fill a large area of certain
counties in the south and south-west.  If any mark of human
occupation is met with hereon it usually takes the form of the
solitary cottage of some shepherd.

Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may
possibly be standing there now.  In spite of its loneliness, however,
the spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five miles from a
county town.  Yet, what of that?  Five miles of irregular upland,
during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows, rains,
and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or a
Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less
repellant tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who
"conceive and meditate of pleasant things."

Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some
starved fragment of ancient hedge, is usually taken advantage of in
the erection of these forlorn dwellings.  But, in the present case,
such a kind of shelter had been disregarded.  Higher Crowstairs, as
the house was called, stood quite detached and undefended.  The only
reason for its precise situation seemed to be the crossing of two
footpaths at right angles hard by, which may have crossed there and
thus for a good five hundred years.  The house was thus exposed to
the elements on all sides.  But, though the wind up here blew
unmistakably when it did blow, and the rain hit hard whenever it
fell, the various weathers of the winter season were not quite so
formidable on the coomb as they were imagined to be by dwellers on
low ground.  The raw rimes were not so pernicious as in the hollows,
and the frosts were scarcely so severe.  When the shepherd and his
family who tenanted the house were pitied for their sufferings from
the exposure, they said that upon the whole they were less
inconvenienced by "wuzzes and flames" (hoarses and phlegms) than when
they had lived by the stream of a snug neighbouring valley.

The night of March 28, 182-, was precisely one of the nights that
were wont to call forth these expressions of commiseration.  The
level rainstorm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the clothyard
shafts of Senlac and Crécy.  Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no
shelter stood with their buttocks to the wind; while the tails of
little birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside
out like umbrellas.  The gable-end of the cottage was stained with
wet, and the eaves-droppings flapped against the wall.  Yet never was
commiseration for the shepherd more misplaced.  For that cheerful
rustic was entertaining a large party in glorification of the
christening of his second girl.

The guests had arrived before the rain began to fall, and they were
all now assembled in the chief or living-room of the dwelling.  A
glance into the apartment at eight o'clock on this eventful evening
would have resulted in the opinion that it was as cosy and
comfortable a nook as could be wished for in boisterous weather.  The
calling of its inhabitant was proclaimed by a number of
highly-polished sheep-crooks without stems that were hung
ornamentally over the fireplace, the curl of each shining crook
varying from the antiquated type engraved in the patriarchal pictures
of old family Bibles to the most approved fashion of the last local
sheep-fair.  The room was lighted by half-a-dozen candles, having
wicks only a trifle smaller than the grease which enveloped them, in
candlesticks that were never used but at high-days, holy-days, and
family feasts.  The lights were scattered about the room, two of them
standing on the chimneypiece.  This position of candles was in itself
significant.  Candles on the chimneypiece always meant a party.

On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a
fire of thorns, that crackled "like the laughter of the fool."

Nineteen persons were gathered here.  Of these, five women, wearing
gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls shy
and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake
the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher, a
neighbouring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the
settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative
_pourparlers_ on a life-companionship, sat beneath the
corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved
restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot
where she was.  Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more
prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions.  Absolute
confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease, while the
finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity,
was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression or trait
denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge their
minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever--which nowadays so
generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes
of the social scale.

Shepherd Fennel had married well, his wife being a dairyman's
daughter from the valley below, who brought fifty guineas in her
pocket--and kept them there, till they should be required for
ministering to the needs of a coming family.  This frugal woman had
been somewhat exercised as to the character that should be given to
the gathering.  A sit-still party had its advantages; but an
undisturbed position of ease in chairs and settles was apt to lead on
the men to such an unconscionable deal of toping that they would
sometimes fairly drink the house dry.  A dancing-party was the
alternative; but this, while avoiding the foregoing objection on the
score of good drink, had a counterbalancing disadvantage in the
matter of good victuals, the ravenous appetites engendered by the
exercise causing immense havoc in the buttery.  Shepherdess Fennel
fell back upon the intermediate plan of mingling short dances with
short periods of talk and singing, so as to hinder any ungovernable
rage in either.  But this scheme was entirely confined to her own
gentle mind: the shepherd himself was in the mood to exhibit the most
reckless phases of hospitality.

The fiddler was a boy of those parts, about twelve years of age, who
had a wonderful dexterity in jigs and reels, though his fingers were
so small and short as to necessitate a constant shifting for the high
notes, from which he scrambled back to the first position with sounds
not of unmixed purity of tone.  At seven the shrill tweedle-dee of
this youngster had begun, accompanied by a booming ground-bass from
Elijah New, the parish-clerk, who had thoughtfully brought with him
his favourite musical instrument, the serpent.  Dancing was
instantaneous, Mrs. Fennel privately enjoining the players on no
account to let the dance exceed the length of a quarter of an hour.

But Elijah and the boy, in the excitement of their position, quite
forgot the injunction.  Moreover, Oliver Giles, a man of seventeen,
one of the dancers, who was enamoured of his partner, a fair girl of
thirty-three rolling years, had recklessly handed a new crown-piece
to the musicians, as a bribe to keep going as long as they had muscle
and wind.  Mrs. Fennel, seeing the steam begin to generate on the
countenances of her guests, crossed over and touched the fiddler's
elbow and put her hand on the serpent's mouth.  But they took no
notice, and fearing she might lose her character of genial hostess if
she were to interfere too markedly, she retired and sat down
helpless.  And so the dance whizzed on with cumulative fury, the
performers moving in their planet-like courses, direct and
retrograde, from apogee to perigee, till the hand of the well-kicked
clock at the bottom of the room had travelled over the circumference
of an hour.

While those cheerful events were in course of enactment within
Fennel's pastoral dwelling, an incident having considerable bearing
on the party had occurred in the gloomy night without.  Mrs. Fennel's
concern about the growing fierceness of the dance corresponded in
point of time with the ascent of a human figure to the solitary hill
of Higher Crowstairs from the direction of the distant town.  This
personage strode on through the rain without a pause, following the
little-worn path which, further on in its course, skirted the
shepherd's cottage.

It was nearly the time of full moon, and on this account, though the
sky was lined with a uniform sheet of dripping cloud, ordinary
objects out-of-doors were readily visible.  The sad wan light
revealed the lonely pedestrian to be a man of supple frame; his gait
suggested that he had somewhat passed the period of perfect and
instinctive agility, though not so far as to be otherwise than rapid
of motion when occasion required.  In point of fact he might have
been about forty years of age.  He appeared tall, but a recruiting
sergeant, or other person accustomed to the judging of men's heights
by the eye, would have discerned that this was chiefly owing to his
gauntness, and that he was not more than five feet eight or nine.

Notwithstanding the regularity of his tread, there was caution in it,
as in that of one who mentally feels his way; and despite the fact
that it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort that he
wore, there was something about him which suggested that he naturally
belonged to the black-coated tribes of men.  His clothes were of
fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not
the mud-accustomed bearing of hobnailed and fustianed peasantry.

By the time that he had arrived abreast of the shepherd's premises
the rain came down, or rather came along, with yet more determined
violence.  The outskirts of the little homestead partially broke the
force of wind and rain, and this induced him to stand still.  The
most salient of the shepherd's domestic erections was an empty sty at
the forward corner of his hedgeless garden, for in these latitudes
the principle of masking the homelier features of your establishment
by a conventional frontage was unknown.  The traveller's eye was
attracted to this small building by the pallid shine of the wet
slates that covered it.  He turned aside, and, finding it empty,
stood under the pent-roof for shelter.

While he stood, the boom of the serpent within, and the lesser
strains of the fiddler, reached the spot as an accompaniment to the
surging hiss of the flying rain on the sod, its louder beating on the
cabbage-leaves of the garden, on the eight or ten beehives just
discernible by the path, and its dripping from the eaves into a row
of buckets and pans that had been placed under the walls of the
cottage.  For at Higher Crowstairs, as at all such elevated
domiciles, the grand difficulty of housekeeping was an insufficiency
of water; and a casual rainfall was utilized by turning out, as
catchers, every utensil that the house contained.  Some queer stories
might be told of the contrivances for economy in suds and dish-waters
that are absolutely necessitated in upland habitations during the
droughts of summer.  But at this season there were no such
exigencies: a mere acceptance of what the skies bestowed was
sufficient for an abundant store.

At last the notes of the serpent ceased and the house was silent.
This cessation of activity aroused the solitary pedestrian from the
reverie into which he had lapsed, and, emerging from the shed, with
an apparently new intention, he walked up the path to the house-door.
Arrived here, his first act was to kneel down on a large stone beside
the row of vessels, and to drink a copious draught from one of them.
Having quenched his thirst, he rose and lifted his hand to knock, but
paused with his eye upon the panel.  Since the dark surface of the
wood revealed absolutely nothing, it was evident that he must be
mentally looking through the door, as if he wished to measure thereby
all the possibilities that a house of this sort might include, and
how they might bear upon the question of his entry.

In his indecision he turned and surveyed the scene around.  Not a
soul was anywhere visible.  The garden-path stretched downward from
his feet, gleaming like the track of a snail; the roof of the little
well (mostly dry), the well cover, the top rail of the garden-gate,
were varnished with the same dull liquid glaze; while, far away in
the vale, a faint whiteness of more than usual extent showed that the
rivers were high in the meads.  Beyond all this winked a few bleared
lamplights through the beating drops, lights that denoted the
situation of the county-town from which he had appeared to come.  The
absence of all notes of life in that direction seemed to clinch his
intentions, and he knocked at the door.

Within, a desultory chat had taken the place of movement and musical
sound.  The hedge-carpenter was suggesting a song to the company,
which nobody just then was inclined to undertake, so that the knock
afforded a not unwelcome diversion.

"Walk in!" said the shepherd promptly.

The latch clicked upward, and out of the night our pedestrian
appeared upon the door-mat.  The shepherd arose, snuffed two of the
nearest candles, and turned to look at him.

Their light disclosed that the stranger was dark in complexion, and
not unprepossessing as to feature.  His hat, which for a moment he
did not remove, hung low over his eyes, without concealing that they
were large, open, and determined, moving with a flash rather than a
glance round the room.  He seemed pleased with the survey, and,
baring his shaggy head, said, in a rich deep voice, "The rain is so
heavy, friends, that I ask leave to come in and rest awhile."

"To be sure, stranger," said the shepherd.  "And faith, you've been
lucky in choosing your time, for we are having a bit of a fling for a
glad cause--though to be sure a man could hardly wish that glad cause
to happen more than once a year."

"Nor less," spoke up a woman.  "For 'tis best to get your family over
and done with, as soon as you can, so as to be all the earlier out of
the fag o't."

"And what may be this glad cause?" asked the stranger.

"A birth and christening," said the shepherd.

The stranger hoped his host might not be made unhappy either by too
many or too few of such episodes, and being invited by a gesture to a
pull at the mug, he readily acquiesced.  His manner, which before
entering had been so dubious, was now altogether that of a careless
and candid man.

"Late to be traipsing athwart this coomb--hey?" said the engaged man
of fifty.

"Late it is, master, as you say.--I'll take a seat in the
chimney-corner, if you have nothing to urge against it, ma'am; for I
am a little moist on the side that was next the rain."

Mrs. Shepherd Fennel assented, and made room for the self-invited
comer, who, having got completely inside the chimney-corner,
stretched out his legs and his arms with the expansiveness of a
person quite at home.

"Yes, I am rather thin in the vamp," he said freely, seeing that the
eyes of Shepherd's wife fell upon his boots, "and I am not
well-fitted, either.  I have had some rough times lately, and have
been forced to pick up what I can get in the way of wearing, but I
must find a suit better fit for working-days when I reach home."

"One of hereabouts?" she inquired.

"Not quite that--further up the country."

"I thought so.  And so am I; and by your tongue you come from my
neighbourhood."

"But you would hardly have heard of me," he said quickly.  "My time
would be long before yours, ma'am, you see."

This testimony to the youthfulness of his hostess had the effect of
stopping her cross-examination.

"There is only one thing more wanted to make me happy," continued the
newcomer.  "And that is a little baccy, which I am sorry to say I am
out of."

"I'll fill your pipe," said the shepherd.

"I must ask you to lend me a pipe likewise."

"A smoker, and no pipe about ye?"

"I have dropped it somewhere on the road."

The shepherd filled and handed him a new clay pipe, saying, as he did
so, "Hand me your baccy-box--I'll fill that too, now I am about it."

The man went through the movement of searching his pockets.

"Lost that too?" said his entertainer, with some surprise.

"I am afraid so," said the man with some confusion.  "Give it to me
in a screw of paper."  Lighting his pipe at the candle with a suction
that drew the whole flame into the bowl, he resettled himself in the
corner, and bent his looks upon the faint steam from his damp legs,
as if he wished to say no more.

Meanwhile the general body of guests had been taking little notice of
this visitor by reason of an absorbing discussion in which they were
engaged with the band about a time for the next dance.  The matter
being settled, they were about to stand up when an interruption came
in the shape of another knock at the door.

At sound of the same the man in the chimney-corner took up the poker
and began stirring the fire as if doing it thoroughly were the one
aim of his existence; and a second time the shepherd said "Walk in!"
In a moment another man stood upon the straw-woven door-mat.  He too
was a stranger.

This individual was one of a type radically different from the first.
There was more of the commonplace in his manner, and a certain jovial
cosmopolitanism sat upon his features.  He was several years older
than the first arrival, his hair being slightly frosted, his eyebrows
bristly, and his whiskers cut back from his cheeks.  His face was
rather full and flabby, and yet it was not altogether a face without
power.  A few grog-blossoms marked the neighbourhood of his nose.  He
flung back his long drab greatcoat, revealing that beneath it he wore
a suit of cinder-grey shade throughout, large heavy seals, of some
metal or other that would take a polish, dangling from his fob as his
only personal ornament.  Shaking the water-drops from his low-crowned
glazed hat, he said, "I must ask for a few minutes' shelter,
comrades, or I shall be wetted to my skin before I get to
Casterbridge."

"Make yerself at home, master," said the shepherd, perhaps a trifle
less heartily than on the first occasion.  Not that Fennel had the
least tinge of niggardliness in his composition; but the room was far
from large, spare chairs were not numerous, and damp companions were
not altogether comfortable at close quarters for the women and girls
in their bright-coloured gowns.

However, the second comer, after taking off his greatcoat, and
hanging his hat on a nail in one of the ceiling-beams as if he had
been specially invited to put it there, advanced and sat down at the
table.  This had been pushed so closely into the chimney-corner, to
give all available room to the dancers, that its inner edge grazed
the elbow of the man who had ensconced himself by the fire; and thus
the two strangers were brought into close companionship.  They nodded
to each other by way of breaking the ice of unacquaintance, and the
first stranger handed his neighbour the large mug--a huge vessel of
brown ware, having its upper edge worn away like a threshold by the
rub of whole genealogies of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all
flesh, and bearing the following inscription burnt upon its rotund
side in yellow letters:--

  THERE iS NO FUN
  UNTiLL i CUM.

The other man, nothing loth, raised the mug to his lips, and drank
on, and on, and on--till a curious blueness overspread the
countenance of the shepherd's wife, who had regarded with no little
surprise the first stranger's free offer to the second of what did
not belong to him to dispense.

"I knew it!" said the toper to the shepherd with much satisfaction.
"When I walked up your garden afore coming in, and saw the hives all
of a row, I said to myself, 'Where there's bees there's honey, and
where there's honey there's mead.'  But mead of such a truly
comfortable sort as this I really didn't expect to meet in my older
days."  He took yet another pull at the mug, till it assumed an
ominous horizontality.

"Glad you enjoy it!" said the shepherd warmly.

"It is goodish mead," assented Mrs. Fennel with an absence of
enthusiasm, which seemed to say that it was possible to buy praise
for one's cellar at too heavy a price.  "It is trouble enough to
make--and really I hardly think we shall make any more.  For honey
sells well, and we can make shift with a drop o' small mead and
metheglin for common use from the comb-washings."

"Oh, but you'll never have the heart!" reproachfully cried the
stranger in cinder-grey, after taking up the mug a third time and
setting it down empty.  "I love mead, when 'tis old like this, as I
love to go to church o' Sundays, or to relieve the needy any day of
the week."

"Ha, ha, ha!" said the man in the chimney-corner, who, in spite of
the taciturnity induced by the pipe of tobacco, could not or would
not refrain from this slight testimony to his comrade's humour.

Now the old mead of those days, brewed of the purest first-year or
maiden honey, four pounds to the gallon--with its due complement of
whites of eggs, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, rosemary, yeast, and
processes of working, bottling, and cellaring--tasted remarkably
strong; but it did not taste so strong as it actually was.  Hence,
presently, the stranger in cinder-grey at the table, moved by its
creeping influence, unbuttoned his waistcoat, threw himself back in
his chair, spread his legs, and made his presence felt in various
ways.

"Well, well, as I say," he resumed, "I am going to Casterbridge, and
to Casterbridge I must go.  I should have been almost there by this
time, but the rain drove me into ye; and I'm not sorry for it."

"You don't live in Casterbridge?" said the shepherd.

"Not as yet; though I shortly mean to move there."

"Going to set up in trade, perhaps?"

"No, no," said the shepherd's wife.  "It is easy to see that the
gentleman is rich, and don't want to work at anything."

The cinder-gray stranger paused, as if to consider whether he would
accept that definition of himself.  He presently rejected it by
answering, "Rich is not quite the word for me, dame.  I do work, and
I must work.  And even if I only get to Casterbridge by midnight I
must begin work there at eight tomorrow morning.  Yes, het or wet,
blow or snow, famine or sword, my day's work to-morrow must be done."

"Poor man!  Then, in spite o' seeming, you be worse off than we?"
replied the shepherd's wife.

"'Tis the nature of my trade, men and maidens.  'Tis the nature of my
trade more than my poverty....  But really and truly I must up and
off, or I shan't get a lodging in the town."  However, the speaker
did not move, and directly added, "There's time for one more draught
of friendship before I go; and I'd perform it at once if the mug were
not dry."

"Here's a mug o' small," said Mrs. Fennel.  "Small, we call it,
though to be sure 'tis only the first wash o' the combs."

"No," said the stranger disdainfully.  "I won't spoil your first
kindness by partaking o' your second."

"Certainly not," broke in Fennel.  "We don't increase and multiply
every day, and I'll fill the mug again."  He went away to the dark
place under the stairs where the barrel stood.  The shepherdess
followed him.

"Why should you do this?" she said reproachfully, as soon as they
were alone.  "He's emptied it once, though it held enough for ten
people; and now he's not contented wi' the small, but must needs call
for more o' the strong!  And a stranger unbeknown to any of us.  For
my part I don't like the look o' the man at all."

"But he's in the house, my honey; and 'tis a wet night, and a
christening.  Daze it, what's a cup of mead more or less? there'll be
plenty more next bee-burning."

"Very well--this time, then," she answered, looking wistfully at the
barrel.  "But what is the man's calling, and where is he one of, that
he should come in and join us like this?"

"I don't know.  I'll ask him again."

The catastrophe of having the mug drained dry at one pull by the
stranger in cinder-grey was effectually guarded against this time by
Mrs. Fennel.  She poured out his allowance in a small cup, keeping
the large one at a discreet distance from him.  When he had tossed
off his portion the shepherd renewed his inquiry about the stranger's
occupation.

The latter did not immediately reply, and the man in the
chimney-corner, with sudden demonstrativeness, said, "Anybody may
know my trade--I'm a wheelwright."

"A very good trade for these parts," said the shepherd.

"And anybody may know mine--if they've the sense to find it out,"
said the stranger in cinder-grey.

"You may generally tell what a man is by his claws," observed the
hedge-carpenter, looking at his hands.  "My fingers be as full of
thorns as an old pincushion is of pins."

The hands of the man in the chimney-corner instinctively sought the
shade, and he gazed into the fire as he resumed his pipe.  The man at
the table took up the hedge-carpenter's remark, and added smartly,
"True; but the oddity of my trade is that, instead of setting a mark
upon me, it sets a mark upon my customers."

No observation being offered by anybody in elucidation of this
enigma, the shepherd's wife once more called for a song.  The same
obstacles presented themselves as at the former time--one had no
voice, another had forgotten the first verse.  The stranger at the
table, whose soul had now risen to a good working temperature,
relieved the difficulty by exclaiming that, to start the company, he
would sing himself.  Thrusting one thumb into the arm-hole of his
waistcoat, he waved the other hand in the air, and, with an
extemporizing gaze at the shining sheep-crooks above the mantelpiece,
began:

      Oh my trade it is the rarest one,
                Simple shepherds all--
        My trade is a sight to see;
  For my customers I tie, and take them up on high,
        And waft 'em to a far countree.

The room was silent when he had finished the verse--with one
exception, that of the man in the chimney-corner, who, at the
singer's word, "Chorus!" joined him in a deep bass voice of musical
relish--

  And waft 'em to a far countree.

Oliver Giles, John Pitcher the dairyman, the parish-clerk, the
engaged man of fifty, the row of young women against the wall seemed
lost in thought not of the gayest kind.  The shepherd looked
meditatively on the ground, the shepherdess gazed keenly at the
singer, and with some suspicion; she was doubting whether this
stranger were merely singing an old song from recollection or was
composing one there and then for the occasion.  All were as perplexed
at the obscure revelation as the guests at Belshazzar's Feast, except
the man in the chimney-corner, who quietly said, "Second verse,
stranger," and smoked on.

The singer thoroughly moistened himself from his lips inward, and
went on with the next stanza as requested:--

      My tools are but common ones,
                    Simple shepherds all,
        My tools are no sight to see:
  A little hempen string, and a post whereon to swing,
        Are implements enough for me.

Shepherd Fennel glanced round.  There was no longer any doubt that
the stranger was answering his question rhythmically.  The guests one
and all started back with suppressed exclamations.  The young woman
engaged to the man of fifty fainted half-way, and would have
proceeded, but finding him wanting in alacrity for catching her she
sat down trembling.

"Oh, he's the--!" whispered the people in the background, mentioning
the name of an ominous public officer.  "He's come to do it.  'Tis to
be at Casterbridge gaol to-morrow--the man for sheep-stealing--the
poor clock-maker we heard of, who used to live away at Anglebury and
had no work to do--Timothy Sommers, whose family were a-starving, and
so he went out of Anglebury by the highroad, and took a sheep in open
daylight, defying the farmer and the farmer's wife and the farmer's
man, and every man jack among 'em.  He" (and they nodded toward the
stranger of the terrible trade) "is come from up the country to do it
because there's not enough to do in his own county-town, and he's got
the place here now our own county man's dead; he's going to live in
the same cottage under the prison wall."

The stranger in cinder-grey took no notice of this whispered string
of observations, but again wetted his lips.  Seeing that his friend
in the chimney-corner was the only one who reciprocated his joviality
in any way, he held out his cup toward that appreciative comrade, who
also held out his own.  They clinked together, the eyes of the rest
of the room hanging upon the singer's actions.  He parted his lips
for the third verse; but at that moment another knock was audible
upon the door.  This time the knock was faint and hesitating.

The company seemed scared; the shepherd looked with consternation
toward the entrance, and it was with some effort that he resisted his
alarmed wife's deprecatory glance, and uttered for the third time the
welcoming words, "Walk in!"

The door was gently opened, and another man stood upon the mat.  He,
like those who had preceded him, was a stranger.  This time it was a
short, small personage, of fair complexion, and dressed in a decent
suit of dark clothes.

"Can you tell me the way to--?" he began; when, gazing round the room
to observe the nature of the company amongst whom he had fallen, his
eyes lighted on the stranger in cinder-grey.  It was just at the
instant when the latter, who had thrown his mind into his song with
such a will that he scarcely heeded the interruption, silenced all
whispers and inquiries by bursting into his third verse:--

          To-morrow is my working day,
                    Simple shepherds all--
            To-morrow is a working day for me:
  For the farmer's sheep is slain, and the lad who did it ta'en,
            And on his soul may God ha' merc-y!

The stranger in the chimney-corner, waving cups with the singer so
heartily that his mead splashed over on the hearth, repeated in his
bass voice as before:--

  And on his soul may God ha' merc-y!

All this time the third stranger had been standing in the doorway.
Finding now that he did not come forward or go on speaking, the
guests particularly regarded him.  They noticed to their surprise
that he stood before them the picture of abject terror--his knees
trembling, his hand shaking so violently that the door-latch by which
he supported himself rattled audibly; his white lips were parted, and
his eyes fixed on the merry officer of justice in the middle of the
room.  A moment more and he had turned, closed the door, and fled.

"What a man can it be?" said the shepherd.

The rest, between the awfulness of their late discovery and the odd
conduct of this third visitor, looked as if they knew not what to
think, and said nothing.  Instinctively they withdrew further and
further from the grim gentleman in their midst, whom some of them
seemed to take for the Prince of Darkness himself, till they formed a
remote circle, an empty space of floor being left between them and
him--

    ----circulus, cujus centrum diabolus.

The room was so silent--though there were more than twenty people in
it--that nothing could be heard but the patter of the rain against
the window-shutters, accompanied by the occasional hiss of a stray
drop that fell down the chimney into the fire, and the steady puffing
of the man in the corner, who had now resumed his pipe of long clay.

The stillness was unexpectedly broken.  The distant sound of a gun
reverberated through the air--apparently from the direction of the
county-town.

"Be jiggered!" cried the stranger who had sung the song, jumping up.

"What does that mean?" asked several.

"A prisoner escaped from the gaol--that's what it means."

All listened.  The sound was repeated, and none of them spoke but the
man in the chimney-corner, who said quietly, "I've often been told
that in this county they fire a gun at such times; but I never heard
it till now."

"I wonder if it is my man?" murmured the personage in cinder-grey.

"Surely it is!" said the shepherd involuntarily.  "And surely we've
seen him!  That little man who looked in at the door by now, and
quivered like a leaf when he seed ye and heard your song!"

"His teeth chattered, and the breath went out of his body," said the
dairyman.

"And his heart seemed to sink within him like a stone," said Oliver
Giles.

"And he bolted as if he'd been shot at," said the hedge-carpenter.

"True--his teeth chattered, and his heart seemed to sink; and he
bolted as if he'd been shot at," slowly summed up the man in the
chimney-corner.

"I didn't notice it," remarked the grim songster.

"We were all a-wondering what made him run off in such a fright,"
faltered one of the women against the wall, "and now 'tis explained."

The firing of the alarm-gun went on at intervals, low and sullenly,
and their suspicions became a certainty.  The sinister gentleman in
cinder-grey roused himself.  "Is there a constable here?" he asked in
thick tones.  "If so, let him step forward."

The engaged man of fifty stepped quavering out of the corner, his
betrothed beginning to sob on the back of the chair.

"You are a sworn constable?"

"I be, sir."

"Then pursue the criminal at once, with assistance, and bring him
back here.  He can't have gone far."

"I will, sir, I will--when I've got my staff.  I'll go home and get
it, and come sharp here, and start in a body."

"Staff!--never mind your staff; the man'll be gone!"

"But I can't do nothing without my staff--can I, William, and John,
and Charles Jake?  No; for there's the king's royal crown a painted
on en in yaller and gold, and the lion and the unicorn, so as when I
raise en up and hit my prisoner, 'tis made a lawful blow thereby.  I
wouldn't 'tempt to take up a man without my staff--no, not I.  If I
hadn't the law to gie me courage, why, instead o' my taking up him he
might take up me!"

"Now, I'm a king's man myself, and can give you authority enough for
this," said the formidable person in cinder-grey.  "Now then, all of
ye, be ready.  Have ye any lanterns?"

"Yes--have ye any lanterns?--I demand it," said the constable.

"And the rest of you able-bodied----"

"Able-bodied men--yes--the rest of ye," said the constable.

"Have you some good stout staves and pitchforks----"

"Staves and pitchforks--in the name o' the law.  And take 'em in yer
hands and go in quest, and do as we in authority tell ye."

Thus aroused, the men prepared to give chase.  The evidence was,
indeed, though circumstantial, so convincing, that but little
argument was needed to show the shepherd's guests that after what
they had seen it would look very much like connivance if they did not
instantly pursue the unhappy third stranger, who could not as yet
have gone more than a few hundred yards over such uneven country.

A shepherd is always well provided with lanterns; and, lighting these
hastily, and with hurdle-staves in their hands, they poured out of
the door, taking a direction along the crest of the hill away from
the town, the rain having fortunately a little abated.

Disturbed by the noise, or possibly by unpleasant dreams of her
baptism, the child who had been christened began to cry heartbrokenly
in the room overhead.  These notes of grief came down through the
chinks of the floor to the ears of the women below, who jumped up one
by one, and seemed glad of the excuse to ascend and comfort the baby,
for the incidents of the last half hour greatly oppressed them.  Thus
in the space of two or three minutes the room on the ground floor was
deserted quite.

But it was not for long.  Hardly had the sound of footsteps died away
when a man returned round the corner of the house from the direction
the pursuers had taken.  Peeping in at the door, and seeing nobody
there, he entered leisurely.  It was the stranger of the
chimney-corner, who had gone out with the rest.  The motive of his
return was shown by his helping himself to a cut piece of
skimmer-cake that lay on a ledge beside where he had sat, and which
he had apparently forgotten to take with him.  He also poured out
half a cup more mead from the quantity that remained, ravenously
eating and drinking these as he stood.  He had not finished when
another figure came in just as quietly--the stranger in cinder-grey.

"Oh--you here?" said the latter smiling.  "I thought you had gone to
help in the capture."  And this speaker also revealed the object of
his return by looking solicitously round for the fascinating mug of
old mead.

"And I thought you had gone," said the other, continuing his
skimmer-cake with some effort.

"Well, on second thoughts, I felt there were enough without me," said
the first confidentially, "and such a night as it is, too.  Besides,
'tis the business o' the Government to take care of its
criminals--not mine."

"True; so it is.  And I felt as you did, that there were enough
without me."

"I don't want to break my limbs running over the humps and hollows of
this wild country."

"Nor I neither, between you and me."

"These shepherd-people are used to it--simple-minded souls, you know,
stirred up to anything in a moment.  They'll have him ready for me
before the morning, and no trouble to me at all."

"They'll have him, and we shall have saved ourselves all labour in
the matter."

"True, true.  Well, my way is to Casterbridge; and 'tis as much as my
legs will do to take me that far.  Going the same way?"

"No, I am sorry to say.  I have to get home over there" (he nodded
indefinitely to the right), "and I feel as you do, that it is quite
enough for my legs to do before bedtime."

The other had by this time finished the mead in the mug, after which,
shaking hands at the door, and wishing each other well, they went
their several ways.

In the meantime the company of pursuers had reached the end of the
hog's-back elevation which dominated this part of the coomb.  They
had decided on no particular plan of action; and, finding that the
man of the baleful trade was no longer in their company, they seemed
quite unable to form any such plan now.  They descended in all
directions down the hill, and straightway several of the party fell
into the snare set by Nature for all misguided midnight ramblers over
the lower cretaceous formation.  The "lynchets," or flint slopes,
which belted the escarpment at intervals of a dozen yards, took the
less cautious ones unawares, and losing their footing on the rubbly
steep they slid sharply downward, the lanterns rolling from their
hands to the bottom, and there lying on their sides till the horn was
scorched through.

When they had again gathered themselves together, the shepherd, as
the man who knew the country best, took the lead, and guided them
round these treacherous inclines.  The lanterns, which seemed rather
to dazzle their eyes and warn the fugitive than to assist them in the
exploration, were extinguished, due silence was observed; and in this
more rational order they plunged into the vale.  It was a grassy,
briary, moist channel, affording some shelter to any person who had
sought it; but the party perambulated it in vain, and ascended on the
other side.  Here they wandered apart, and after an interval closed
together again to report progress.  At the second time of closing in
they found themselves near a lonely oak, the single tree on this part
of the upland, probably sown there by a passing bird some hundred
years before.  And here, standing a little to one side of the trunk,
as motionless as the trunk itself, appeared the man they were in
quest of, his outline being well defined against the sky beyond.  The
band noiselessly drew up and faced him.

"Your money or your life!" said the constable sternly to the still
figure.

"No, no," whispered John Pitcher.  "'Tisn't our side ought to say
that.  That's the doctrine of vagabonds like him, and we be on the
side of the law."

"Well, well," replied the constable impatiently; "I must say
something, mustn't I? and if you had all the weight o' this
undertaking upon your mind, perhaps you'd say the wrong thing
too.--Prisoner at the bar, surrender, in the name of the Fath----the
Crown, I mane!"

The man under the tree seemed now to notice them for the first time,
and, giving them no opportunity whatever for exhibiting their
courage, he strolled slowly toward them.  He was, indeed, the little
man, the third stranger; but his trepidation had in a great measure
gone.

"Well, travellers," he said, "did I hear ye speak to me?"

"You did: you've got to come and be our prisoner at once," said the
constable.  "We arrest ye on the charge of not biding in Casterbridge
gaol in a decent proper manner to be hung to-morrow morning.
Neighbours, do your duty, and seize the culpet!"

On hearing the charge, the man seemed enlightened, and, saying not
another word, resigned himself with preternatural civility to the
search-party, who, with their staves in their hands, surrounded him
on all sides, and marched him back toward the shepherd's cottage.

It was eleven o'clock by the time they arrived.  The light shining
from the open door, a sound of men's voices within, proclaimed to
them as they approached the house that some new events had arisen in
their absence.  On entering they discovered the shepherd's
living-room to be invaded by two officers from Casterbridge gaol, and
a well-known magistrate who lived at the nearest country seat,
intelligence of the escape having become generally circulated.

"Gentlemen," said the constable, "I have brought back your man--not
without risk and danger; but every one must do his duty.  He is
inside this circle of able-bodied persons, who have lent me useful
aid considering their ignorance of Crown work.  Men, bring forward
your prisoner."  And the third stranger was led to the light.

"Who is this?" said one of the officials.

"The man," said the constable.

"Certainly not," said the other turnkey; and the first corroborated
his statement.

"But how can it be otherwise?" asked the constable.  "Or why was he
so terrified at sight o' the singing instrument of the law?"  Here he
related the strange behaviour of the third stranger on entering the
house.

"Can't understand it," said the officer coolly.  "All I know is that
it is not the condemned man.  He's quite a different character from
this one; a gauntish fellow, with dark hair and eyes, rather
good-looking, and with a musical bass voice that if you heard it once
you'd never mistake as long as you lived."

"Why, souls--'twas the man in the chimney-corner!"

"Hey--what?" said the magistrate, coming forward after inquiring
particulars from the shepherd in the background.  "Haven't you got
the man after all?"

"Well, sir," said the constable, "he's the man we were in search of,
that's true; and yet he's not the man we were in search of.  For the
man we were in search of was not the man we wanted, sir, if you
understand my everyday way; for 'twas the man in the chimney-corner."

"A pretty kettle of fish altogether!" said the magistrate.  "You had
better start for the other man at once."

The prisoner now spoke for the first time.  The mention of the man in
the chimney-corner seemed to have moved him as nothing else could do.
"Sir," he said, stepping forward to the magistrate, "take no more
trouble about me.  The time is come when I may as well speak.  I have
done nothing; my crime is that the condemned man is my brother.
Early this afternoon I left home at Anglebury to tramp it all the way
to Casterbridge gaol to bid him farewell.  I was benighted, and
called here to rest and ask the way.  When I opened the door I saw
before me the very man, my brother, that I thought to see in the
condemned cell at Casterbridge.  He was in this chimney-corner; and
jammed close to him, so that he could not have got out if he had
tried, was the executioner who'd come to take his life, singing a
song about it and not knowing that it was his victim who was close
by, joining in to save appearances.  My brother looked a glance of
agony at me, and I knew he meant, 'Don't reveal what you see; my life
depends on it.'  I was so terror-struck that I could hardly stand,
and, not knowing what I did, I turned and hurried away."

The narrator's manner and tone had the stamp of truth, and his story
made a great impression on all around.  "And do you know where your
brother is at the present time?" asked the magistrate.

"I do not.  I have never seen him since I closed this door."

"I can testify to that, for we've been between ye ever since," said
the constable.

"Where does he think to fly to?  What is his occupation?"

"He's a watch-and-clock-maker, sir."

"'A said 'a was a wheelwright--a wicked rogue," said the constable.

"The wheels o' clocks and watches he meant, no doubt," said Shepherd
Fennel.  "I thought his hands were palish for's trade."

"Well, it appears to me that nothing can be gained by retaining this
poor man in custody," said the magistrate; "your business lies with
the other, unquestionably."

And so the little man was released off-hand; but he looked nothing
the less sad on that account, it being beyond the power of magistrate
or constable to raze out the written troubles in his brain, for they
concerned another whom he regarded with more solicitude than himself.
When this was done, and the man had gone his way, the night was found
to be so far advanced that it was deemed useless to renew the search
before the next morning.

Next day, accordingly, the quest for the clever sheep-stealer became
general and keen, to all appearance at least.  But the intended
punishment was cruelly disproportioned to the transgression, and the
sympathy of a great many country folk in that district was strongly
on the side of the fugitive.  Moreover, his marvellous coolness and
daring under the unprecedented circumstances of the shepherd's party
won their admiration.  So that it may be questioned if all those who
ostensibly made themselves so busy in exploring woods and fields and
lanes were quite so thorough when it came to the private examination
of their own lofts and outhouses.  Stories were afloat of a
mysterious figure being occasionally seen in some old overgrown
trackway or other, remote from turnpike roads; but when a search was
instituted in any of these suspected quarters nobody was found.  Thus
the days and weeks passed without tidings.

In brief, the bass-voiced man of the chimney-corner was never
recaptured.  Some said that he went across the sea, others that he
did not, but buried himself in the depths of a populous city.  At any
rate, the gentleman in cinder-grey never did his morning's work at
Casterbridge, nor met anywhere at all, for business purposes, the
comrade with whom he had passed an hour of relaxation in the lonely
house on the coomb.

The grass has long been green on the graves of Shepherd Fennel and
his frugal wife; the guests who made up the christening party have
mainly followed their entertainers to the tomb; the baby in whose
honour they all had met is a matron in the sere and yellow leaf.  But
the arrival of the three strangers at the shepherd's that night, and
the details connected therewith, is a story as well known as ever in
the country about Higher Crowstairs.




VI

THE PASSING OF BLACK EAGLE

O. HENRY


For some months of a certain year a grim bandit infested the Texas
border along the Rio Grande.  Peculiarly striking to the optic nerve
was this notorious marauder.  His personality secured him the title
of "Black Eagle, the Terror of the Border."  Many fearsome tales are
of record concerning the doings of him and his followers.  Suddenly,
in the space of a single minute, Black Eagle vanished from the earth.
He was never heard of again.  His own band never even guessed the
mystery of his disappearance.  The border ranches and settlements
feared he would come again to ride and ravage the mesquite flats.  He
never will.  It is to disclose the fate of Black Eagle that this
narrative is written.

The initial movement of the story is furnished by the foot of a
bartender in St. Louis.  His discerning eye fell upon the form of
Chicken Ruggles as he pecked with avidity at the free lunch.  Chicken
was a "hobo."  He had a long nose like the bill of a fowl, an
inordinate appetite for poultry, and a habit of gratifying it without
expense, which accounts for the name given him by his fellow vagrants.

Physicians agree that the partaking of liquids at meal times is not a
healthy practice.  The hygiene of the saloon promulgates the
opposite.  Chicken had neglected to purchase a drink to accompany his
meal.  The bartender rounded the counter, caught the injudicious
diner by the ear with a lemon squeezer, led him to the door and
kicked him into the street.

Thus the mind of Chicken was brought to realize the signs of coming
winter.  The night was cold; the stars shone with unkindly
brilliancy; people were hurrying along the streets in two egotistic,
jostling streams.  Men had donned their overcoats, and Chicken knew
to an exact percentage the increased difficulty of coaxing dimes from
those buttoned-in vest pockets.  The time had come for his annual
exodus to the South.

A little boy, five or six years old, stood looking with covetous eyes
in a confectioner's window.  In one small hand he held an empty
two-ounce vial; in the other he grasped tightly something flat and
round, with a shining milled edge.  The scene presented a field of
operations commensurate to Chicken's talents and daring.  After
sweeping the horizon to make sure that no official tug was cruising
near, he insidiously accosted his prey.  The boy, having been early
taught by his household to regard altruistic advances with extreme
suspicion, received the overtures coldly.

Then Chicken knew that he must make one of those desperate,
nerve-shattering plunges into speculation that fortune sometimes
requires of those who would win her favour.  Five cents was his
capital, and this he must risk against the chance of winning what lay
within the close grasp of the youngster's chubby hand.  It was a
fearful lottery, Chicken knew.  But he must accomplish his end by
strategy, since he had a wholesome terror of plundering infants by
force.  Once, in a park, driven by hunger, he had committed an
onslaught upon a bottle of peptonized infant's food in the possession
of an occupant of a baby carriage.  The outraged infant had so
promptly opened its mouth and pressed the button that communicated
with the welkin that help arrived, and Chicken did his thirty days in
a snug coop.  Wherefore he was, as he said, "leary of kids."

Beginning artfully to question the boy concerning his choice of
sweets, he gradually drew out the information he wanted.  Mamma said
he was to ask the drug-store man for ten cents' worth of paregoric in
the bottle; he was to keep his hand shut tight over the dollar; he
must not stop to talk to anyone in the street; he must ask the
drug-store man to wrap up the change and put it in the pocket of his
trousers.  Indeed, they had pockets--two of them!  And he liked
chocolates cream best.

Chicken went into the store and turned plunger.  He invested his
entire capital in C.A.N.D.Y. stocks, simply to pave the way to the
greater risk following.

He gave the sweets to the youngster, and had the satisfaction of
perceiving that confidence was established.  After that it was easy
to obtain leadership of the expedition, to take the investment by the
hand and lead it to a nice drug store he knew of in the same block.
There Chicken, with a parental air, passed over the dollar and called
for the medicine, while the boy crunched his candy, glad to be
relieved of the responsibility of the purchase.  And then the
successful investor, searching his pockets, found an overcoat
button--the extent of his winter trousseau--and, wrapping it
carefully, placed the ostensible change in the pocket of confiding
juvenility.  Setting the youngster's face homeward, and patting him
benevolently on the back--for Chicken's heart was as soft as those of
his feathered namesakes--the speculator quit the market with a profit
of 1,700 per cent. on his invested capital.

Two hours later an Iron Mountain freight engine pulled out of the
railroad yards, Texas bound, with a string of empties.  In one of the
cattle cars, half buried in excelsior, Chicken lay at ease.  Beside
him in the nest was a quart bottle of very poor whiskey and a paper
bag of bread and cheese.  Mr. Ruggles, in his private car, was on his
trip south for the winter season.

For a week that car was trundled southward, shifted, laid over, and
manipulated after the manner of rolling stock, but Chicken stuck to
it, leaving it only at necessary times to satisfy his hunger and
thirst.  He knew it must go down to the cattle country, and San
Antonio, in the heart of it, was his goal.  There the air was
salubrious and mild; the people indulgent and long-suffering.  The
bartenders there would not kick him.  If he should eat too long or
too often at one place they would swear at him as if by rote and
without heat.  They swore so drawlingly, and they rarely paused short
of their full vocabulary, which was copious, so that Chicken had
often gulped a good meal during the process of the vituperative
prohibition.  The season there was always spring-like; the plazas
were pleasant at night, with music and gaiety; except during the
slight and infrequent cold snaps one could sleep comfortably
out-of-doors in case the interiors should develop inhospitality.

At Texarkana his car was switched to the I. and G. N.  Then still
southward it trailed until, at length, it crawled across the Colorado
bridge at Austin, and lined out, straight as an arrow, for the run to
San Antonio.

When the freight halted at that town Chicken was fast asleep.  In ten
minutes the train was off again for Laredo, the end of the road.
Those empty cattle cars were for distribution along the line at
points from which the ranches shipped their stock.

When Chicken awoke his car was stationary.  Looking out between the
slats he saw it was a bright, moonlit night.  Scrambling out, he saw
his car with three others abandoned on a little siding in a wild and
lonesome country.  A cattle pen and chute stood on one side of the
track.  The railroad bisected a vast, dim ocean of prairie, in the
midst of which Chicken, with his futile rolling stock, was as
completely stranded as was Robinson with his land-locked boat.

A white post stood near the rails.  Going up to it, Chicken read the
letters at the top, S.A.90.  Laredo was nearly as far to the south.
He was almost a hundred miles from any town.  Coyotes began to yelp
in the mysterious sea around him.  Chicken felt lonesome.  He had
lived in Boston without an education, in Chicago without nerve, in
Philadelphia without a sleeping place, in New York without a pull,
and in Pittsburgh sober, and yet he had never felt so lonely as now.

Suddenly through the intense silence, he heard the whicker of a
horse.  The sound came from the side of the track toward the east,
and Chicken began to explore timorously in that direction.  He
stepped high along the mat of curly mesquite grass, for he was afraid
of everything there might be in this wilderness--snakes, rats,
brigands, centipedes, mirages, cowboys, fandangoes, tarantulas,
tamales--he had read of them in the story papers.  Rounding a clump
of prickly pear that reared high its fantastic and menacing array of
rounded heads, he was struck to shivering terror by a snort and a
thunderous plunge, as the horse, himself startled, bounded away some
fifty yards, and then resumed his grazing.  But here was the one
thing in the desert that Chicken did not fear.  He had been reared on
a farm; he had handled horses, understood them, and could ride.

Approaching slowly and speaking soothingly, he followed the animal,
which, after its first flight seemed gentle enough, and secured the
end of the twenty-foot lariat that dragged after him in the grass.
It required him but a few moments to contrive the rope into an
ingenious nose-bridle, after the style of the Mexican _borsal_.  In
another he was upon the horse's back and off at a splendid lope,
giving the animal free choice of direction.  "He will take me
somewhere," said Chicken to himself.

It would have been a thing of joy, that untrammelled gallop over the
moonlit prairie, even to Chicken, who loathed exertion, but that his
mood was not for it.  His head ached; a growing thirst was upon him;
the "somewhere" whither his lucky mount might convey him was full of
dismal peradventure.

And now he noted that the horse moved to a definite goal.  Where the
prairie lay smooth he kept his course straight as an arrow's toward
the east.  Deflected by hill or arroyo or impracticable spinous
brakes he quickly flowed again into the current, charted by his
unerring instinct.  At last, upon the side of a gentle rise, he
suddenly subsided to a complacent walk.  A stone's cast away stood a
little mott of coma trees; beneath it a jacal such as the Mexicans
erect--a one-room house of upright poles daubed with clay and roofed
with grass or tule reeds.  An experienced eye would have estimated
the spot as the headquarters of a small sheep ranch.  In the
moonlight the ground in the nearby corral showed pulverized to a
level smoothness by the hoofs of the sheep.  Everywhere was
carelessly distributed the paraphernalia of the place--ropes,
bridles, saddles, sheep pelts, wool sacks, feed troughs and camp
litter.  The barrel of drinking water stood in the end of the
two-horse wagon near the door.  The harness was piled, promiscuous,
upon the wagon tongue, soaking up the dew.

Chicken slipped to earth, and tied the horse to a tree.  He halloed
again and again, but the house remained quiet.  The door stood open,
and he entered cautiously.  The light was sufficient for him to see
that no one was at home.  He struck a match and lighted a lamp that
stood on a table.  The room was that of a bachelor ranchman who was
content with the necessaries of life.  Chicken rummaged intelligently
until he found what he had hardly dared hope for--a small, brown jug
that still contained something near a quart of his desire.

Half an hour later, Chicken--now a gamecock of hostile
aspect--emerged from the house with unsteady steps.  He had drawn
upon the absent ranchman's equipment to replace his own ragged
attire.  He wore a suit of coarse brown ducking, the coat being a
sort of rakish bolero, jaunty to a degree.  Boots he had donned, and
spurs that whirred with every lurching step.  Buckled around him was
a belt full of cartridges with a big six-shooter in each of its two
holsters.

Prowling about, he found blankets, a saddle and bridle with which he
caparisoned his steed.  Again mounting, he rode swiftly away, singing
a loud and tuneless song.


Bud King's band of desperadoes, outlaws and horse and cattle thieves
were in camp at a secluded spot on the bank of the Frio.  Their
depredations in the Rio Grande country, while no bolder than usual,
had been advertised more extensively, and Captain Kinney's company of
rangers had been ordered down to look after them.  Consequently, Bud
King, who was a wise general, instead of cutting out a hot trail for
the upholders of the law, as his men wished to do, retired for the
time to the prickly fastnesses of the Frio valley.

Though the move was a prudent one, and not incompatible with Bud's
well-known courage, it raised dissension among the members of the
band.  In fact, while they thus lay ingloriously _perdu_ in the
brush, the question of Bud King's fitness for the leadership was
argued, with closed doors, as it were, by his followers.  Never
before had Bud's skill or efficiency been brought to criticism; but
his glory was waning (and such is glory's fate) in the light of a
newer star.  The sentiment of the band was crystallising into the
opinion that Black Eagle could lead them with more lustre, profit,
and distinction.

This Black Eagle--sub-titled the "Terror of the Border"--had been a
member of the gang about three months.

One night while they were in camp on the San Miguel water-hole a
solitary horseman on the regulation fiery steed dashed in among them.
The new-comer was of a portentous and devastating aspect.  A
beak-like nose with a predatory curve projected above a mass of
bristling, blue-black whiskers.  His eye was cavernous and fierce.
He was spurred, sombreroed, booted, garnished with revolvers,
abundantly drunk, and very much unafraid.  Few people in the country
drained by the Rio Bravo would have cared thus to invade alone the
camp of Bud King.  But this fell bird swooped fearlessly upon them
and demanded to be fed.

Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited.  Even if your
enemy pass your way you must feed him before you shoot him.  You must
empty your larder into him before you empty your lead.  So the
stranger of undeclared intentions was set down to a mighty feast.

A talkative bird he was, full of most marvellous loud tales and
exploits, and speaking a language at times obscure but never
colourless.  He was a new sensation to Bud King's men, who rarely
encountered new types.  They hung, delighted, upon his vainglorious
boasting, the spicy strangeness of his lingo, his contemptuous
familiarity with life, the world, and remote places, and the
extravagant frankness with which he conveyed his sentiments.

To their guest the band of outlaws seemed to be nothing more than a
congregation of country bumpkins whom he was "stringing for grub"
just as he would have told his stories at the back door of a
farmhouse to wheedle a meal.  And, indeed, his ignorance was not
without excuse, for the "bad man" of the Southwest does not run to
extremes.  Those brigands might justly have been taken for a little
party of peaceable rustics assembled for a fish-fry or pecan
gathering.  Gentle of manner, slouching of gait, soft-voiced,
unpicturesquely clothed; not one of them presented to the eye any
witness of the desperate records they had earned.

For two days the glittering stranger within the camp was feasted.
Then, by common consent, he was invited to become a member of the
band.  He consented, presenting for enrollment the prodigious name of
"Captain Montressor."  This name was immediately overruled by the
band, and "Piggy" substituted as a compliment to the awful and
insatiate appetite of its owner.

Thus did the Texas border receive the most spectacular brigand that
ever rode its chaparral.

For the next three months Bud King conducted business as usual,
escaping encounters with law officers and being content with
reasonable profits.  The band ran off some very good companies of
horses from the ranges, and a few bunches of fine cattle which they
got safely across the Rio Grande and disposed of to fair advantage.
Often the band would ride into the little villages and Mexican
settlements, terrorising the inhabitants and plundering for the
provisions and ammunition they needed.  It was during these bloodless
raids that Piggy's ferocious aspect and frightful voice gained him a
renown more widespread and glorious than those other gentle-voiced
and sad-faced desperadoes could have acquired in a lifetime.

The Mexicans, most apt in nomenclature, first called him The Black
Eagle, and used to frighten the babes by threatening them with tales
of the dreadful robber who carried off little children in his great
beak.  Soon the name extended, and Black Eagle, the Terror of the
Border, became a recognized factor in exaggerated newspaper reports
and ranch gossip.

The country from the Nueces to the Rio Grande was a wild but fertile
stretch, given over to the sheep and cattle ranches.  Range was free;
the inhabitants were few; the law was mainly a letter and the pirates
met with little opposition until the flaunting and garish Piggy gave
the band undue advertisement.  Then McKinney's ranger company headed
for those precincts, and Bud King knew that it meant grim and sudden
war or else temporary retirement.  Regarding the risk to be
unnecessary, he drew off his band to an almost inaccessible spot on
the bank of the Frio.  Wherefore, as has been said, dissatisfaction
arose among the members, and impeachment proceedings against Bud were
premeditated, with Black Eagle in high favour for the succession.
Bud King was not unaware of the sentiment, and he called aside Cactus
Taylor, his trusted lieutenant, to discuss it.

"If the boys," said Bud, "ain't satisfied with me, I'm willin' to
step out.  They're buckin' against my way of handlin' 'em.  And
'specially because I concludes to hit the brush while Sam Kinney is
ridin' the line.  I saves 'em from bein' shot or sent up on a state
contract, and they up and says I'm no good."

"It ain't so much that," explained Cactus, "as it is they're plum
locoed about Piggy.  They want them whiskers and that nose of his to
split the wind at the head of the column."

"There's somethin' mighty seldom about Piggy," declared Bud,
musingly.  "I never yet see anything on the hoof that he exactly
grades up with.  He can shore holler a plenty, and he straddles a
hoss from where you laid the chunk.  But he ain't never been smoked
yet.  You know, Cactus, we ain't had a row since he's been with us.
Piggy's all right for skearin' the greaser kids and layin' waste a
crossroads store.  I reckon he's the finest canned oyster buccaneer
and cheese pirate that ever was, but how's his appetite for fightin'?
I've knowed some citizens you'd think was starvin' for trouble get a
bad case of dyspepsy the first dose of lead they had to take."

"He talks all spraddled out," said Cactus, "'bout the rookuses he's
been in.  He claims to have saw the elephant and hearn the owl."

"I know," replied Bud, using the cowpuncher's expressive phrase of
skepticism, "but it sounds to me!"

This conversation was held one night in camp while the other members
of the band--eight in number--were sprawling around the fire,
lingering over their supper.  When Bud and Cactus ceased talking they
heard Piggy's formidable voice holding forth to the others as usual
while he was engaged in checking, though never satisfying, his
ravening appetite.

"Wat's de use," he was saying, "of chasin' little red cowses and
hosses 'round for t'ousands of miles?  Dere ain't nuttin' in it.
Gallopin' t'rough dese bushes and briers, and gettin' a t'irst dat a
brewery couldn't put out, and missin' meals!  Say!  You know what I'd
do if I was main finger of dis bunch?  I'd stick up a train.  I'd
blow de express car and make hard dollars where you guys gets wind.
Youse makes me tired.  Dis sook-cow kind of cheap sport gives me a
pain."

Later on, a deputation waited on Bud.  They stood on one leg, chewed
mesquit twigs and circumlocuted, for they hated to hurt his feelings.
Bud foresaw their business, and made it easy for them.  Bigger risks
and larger profits was what they wanted.

The suggestion of Piggy's about holding up a train had fired their
imagination and increased their admiration for the dash and boldness
of the instigator.  They were such simple, artless, and custom-bound
bush-rangers that they had never before thought of extending their
habits beyond the running off of live-stock and the shooting of such
of their acquaintances as ventured to interfere.

Bud acted "on the level," agreeing to take a subordinate place in the
gang until Black Eagle should have been given a trial as leader.

After a great deal of consultation, studying of time-tables, and
discussion of the country's topography, the time and place for
carrying out their new enterprise was decided upon.  At that time
there was a feedstuff famine in Mexico and a cattle famine in certain
parts of the United States, and there was a brisk international
trade.  Much money was being shipped along the railroads that
connected the two republics.  It was agreed that the most promising
place for the contemplated robbery was at Espina, a little station on
the I. and G. N., about forty miles north of Laredo.  The train
stopped there one minute; the country around was wild and unsettled;
the station consisted of but one house in which the agent lived.

Black Eagle's band set out, riding by night.  Arriving in the
vicinity of Espina they rested their horses all day in a thicket a
few miles distant.

The train was due at Espina at 10.30 P.M.  They could rob the train
and be well over the Mexican border with their booty by daylight the
next morning.

To do Black Eagle justice, he exhibited no signs of flinching from
the responsible honours that had been conferred upon him.

He assigned his men to their respective posts with discretion, and
coached them carefully as to their duties.  On each side of the track
four of the band were to lie concealed in the chaparral.  Gotch-Ear
Rodgers was to stick up the station agent.  Bronco Charlie was to
remain with the horses, holding them in readiness.  At a spot where
it was calculated the engine would be when the train stopped, Bud
King was to lie hidden on one side, and Black Eagle himself on the
other.  The two would get the drop on the engineer and fireman, force
them to descend and proceed to the rear.  Then the express car would
be looted, and the escape made.  No one was to move until Black Eagle
gave the signal by firing his revolver.  The plan was perfect.

At ten minutes to train time every man was at his post, effectually
concealed by the thick chaparral that grew almost to the rails.  The
night was dark and lowering, with a fine drizzle falling from the
flying gulf clouds.  Black Eagle crouched behind a bush within five
yards of the track.  Two six-shooters were belted around him.
Occasionally he drew a large black bottle from his pocket and raised
it to his mouth.

A star appeared far down the track which soon waxed into the
headlight of the approaching train.  It came on with an increasing
roar; the engine bore down upon the ambushing desperadoes with a
glare and a shriek like some avenging monster come to deliver them to
justice.  Black Eagle flattened himself upon the ground.  The engine,
contrary to their calculations, instead of stopping between him and
Bud King's place of concealment, passed fully forty yards farther
before it came to a stand.

The bandit leader rose to his feet and peered around the bush.  His
men all lay quiet, awaiting the signal.  Immediately opposite Black
Eagle was a thing that drew his attention.  Instead of being a
regular passenger train it was a mixed one.  Before him stood a box
car, the door of which, by some means, had been left slightly open.
Black Eagle went up to it and pushed the door farther open.  An odour
came forth--a damp, rancid, familiar, musty, intoxicating, beloved
odour stirring strongly at old memories of happy days and travels.
Black Eagle sniffed at the witching smell as the returned wanderer
smells of the rose that twines his boyhood's cottage home.  Nostalgia
seized him.  He put his hand inside.  Excelsior--dry, springy, curly,
soft, enticing, covered the floor.  Outside the drizzle had turned to
a chilling rain.

The train bell clanged.  The bandit chief unbuckled his belt and cast
it, with its revolvers, upon the ground.  His spurs followed quickly,
and his broad sombrero.  Black Eagle was moulting.  The train started
with a rattling jerk.  The ex-Terror of the Border scrambled into the
box car and closed the door.  Stretched luxuriously upon the
excelsior, with the black bottle clasped closely to his breast, his
eyes closed, and a foolish, happy smile upon his terrible features
Chicken Ruggles started upon his return trip.

Undisturbed, with the band of desperate bandits lying motionless,
awaiting the signal to attack, the train pulled out from Espina.  As
its speed increased, and the black masses of chaparral went whizzing
past on either side, the express messenger, lighting his pipe, looked
through his window and remarked, feelingly:

"What a jim-dandy place for a hold-up!"




VII

NIÑO DIABLO*

W. H. HUDSON

*Reprinted from the volume, Tales of the Pampas, by permission of
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.


The wide pampas rough with long grass; a vast level disc now growing
dark, the horizon encircling it with a ring as faultless as that made
by a pebble dropped into smooth water; above it the clear sky of
June, wintry and pale, still showing in the west the saffron hues of
the afterglow tinged with vapoury violet and grey.  In the centre of
the disc a large low rancho thatched with yellow rushes, a few
stunted trees and cattle enclosures grouped about it; and dimly seen
in the shadows, cattle and sheep reposing.  At the gate stands
Gregory Gorostiaga, lord of house, lands and ruminating herds,
leisurely unsaddling his horse; for whatsoever Gregory does is done
leisurely.  Although no person is within earshot he talks much over
his task, now rebuking his restive animal, and now cursing his
benumbed fingers and the hard knots in his gear.  A curse falls
readily and not without a certain natural grace from Gregory's lips;
it is the oiled feather with which he touches every difficult knot
encountered in life.  From time to time he glances toward the open
kitchen door, from which issue the far-flaring light of the fire and
familiar voices, with savoury smells of cookery that come to his
nostrils like pleasant messengers.

The unsaddling over at last the freed horse gallops away, neighing
joyfully, to seek his fellows; but Gregory is not a four-footed thing
to hurry himself; and so, stepping slowly and pausing frequently to
look about him as if reluctant to quit the cold night air, he turns
toward the house.

The spacious kitchen was lighted by two or three wicks in cups of
melted fat, and by a great fire in the middle of the clay floor that
cast crowds of dancing shadows on the walls and filled the whole room
with grateful warmth.  On the walls were fastened many deers' heads,
and on their convenient prongs were hung bridles and lassos, ropes of
onions and garlic, bunches of dried herbs, and various other objects.
At the fire a piece of beef was roasting on a spit; and in a large
pot suspended by hook and chain from the smoke-blackened central
beam, boiled and bubbled an ocean of mutton broth, puffing out white
clouds of steam redolent of herbs and cummin-seed.  Close to the
fire, skimmer in hand, sat Magdalen, Gregory's fat and florid wife,
engaged in frying pies in a second smaller pot.  There also, on a
high, straight-backed chair, sat Ascension, her sister-in-law, a
wrinkled spinster; also, in a low rush-bottomed seat, her
mother-in-law, an ancient white-headed dame, staring vacantly into
the flames.  On the other side of the fire were Gregory's two eldest
daughters, occupied just now in serving _maté_ to their elders--that
harmless bitter decoction the sipping of which fills up all vacant
moments from dawn to bed-time--pretty dove-eyed girls of sixteen,
both also named Magdalen, but not after their mother nor because
confusion was loved by the family for its own sake; they were twins,
and born on the day sacred to Santa Magdalena.  Slumbering dogs and
cats were disposed about the floor, also four children.  The eldest,
a boy, sitting with legs outstretched before him, was cutting threads
from a slip of colt's hide looped over his great toe.  The two next,
boy and girl, were playing a simple game called nines, once known to
English children as nine men's morrice; the lines were rudely
scratched on the clay floor, and the men they played with were bits
of hardened clay, nine red and as many white.  The youngest, a girl
of five, sat on the floor nursing a kitten that purred contentedly on
her lap and drowsily winked its blue eyes at the fire; and as she
swayed herself from side to side she lisped out the old lullaby in
her baby voice:

  A-ro-ró mi niño
    A-ro-ró mi sol,
  A-ro-ró pedazos
    De mi corazon.


Gregory stood on the threshold surveying this domestic scene with
manifest pleasure.

"Papa mine, what have you brought me?" cried the child with the
kitten.

"Brought you, interested?  Stiff whiskers and cold hands to pinch
your dirty little cheeks.  How is your cold to-night, mother?"

"Yes, son, it is very cold to-night; we knew that before you came
in," replied the old dame testily as she drew her chair a little
closer to the fire.

"It is useless speaking to her," remarked Ascension.  "With her to be
out of temper is to be deaf."

"What has happened to put her out?" he asked.

"I can tell you, papa," cried one of the twins.  "She wouldn't let me
make your cigars to-day, and sat down out-of-doors to make them
herself.  It was after breakfast when the sun was warm."

"And of course she fell asleep," chimed in Ascension.

"Let me tell it, auntie!" exclaimed the other.  "And she fell asleep,
and in a moment Rosita's lamb came and ate up the whole of the
tobacco-leaf in her lap."

"It didn't!" cried Rosita, looking up from her game.  "I opened its
mouth and looked with all my eyes, and there was no tobacco-leaf in
it."

"That lamb! that lamb!" said Gregory slily.  "Is it to be wondered at
that we are turning grey before our time--all except Rosita!  Remind
me to-morrow, wife, to take it to the flock: or if it has grown fat
on all the tobacco-leaf, aprons and old shoes it has eaten----"

"Oh no, no, no!" screamed Rosita, starting up and throwing the game
into confusion, just when her little brother had made a row and was
in the act of seizing on one of her pieces in triumph.

"Hush, silly child, he will not harm your lamb," said the mother,
pausing from her task and raising eyes that were tearful with the
smoke of the fire and of the cigarette she held between her
good-humoured lips.  "And now, if these children have finished
speaking of their important affairs, tell me, Gregory, what news do
you bring?"

"They say," he returned, sitting down and taking the maté-cup from
his daughter's hand, "that the invading Indians bring seven hundred
lances, and that those that first opposed them were all slain.  Some
say they are now retreating with the cattle they have taken; while
others maintain that they are waiting to fight our men."

"Oh, my sons, my sons, what will happen to them!" cried Magdalen,
bursting into tears.

"Why do you cry, wife, before God gives you cause?" returned her
husband.  "Are not all men born to fight the infidel?  Our boys are
not alone--all their friends and neighbours are with them."

"Say not this to me, Gregory, for I am not a fool nor blind.  All
their friends indeed!  And this very day I have seen the Niño Diablo;
he galloped past the house, whistling like a partridge that knows no
care.  Why must my two sons be called away, while he, a youth without
occupation and with no mother to cry for him, remains behind?"

"You talk folly, Magdalen," replied her lord.  "Complain that the
ostrich and puma are more favoured than your sons, since no man calls
on them to serve the state; but mention not the Niño, for he is freer
than the wild things which Heaven has made, and fights not on this
side nor on that."

"Coward!  Miserable!" murmured the incensed mother.

Whereupon one of the twins flushed scarlet, and retorted, "He is not
a coward, mother!"

"And if not a coward why does he sit on the hearth among women and
old men in times like these?  Grieved am I to hear a daughter of mine
speak in defence of one who is a vagabond and a stealer of other
men's horses!"

The girl's eyes flashed angrily, but she answered not a word.

"Hold your tongue, woman, and accuse no man of crimes," spoke
Gregory.  "Let every Christian take proper care of his animals; and
as for the infidel's horses, he is a virtuous man that steals them.
The girl speaks truth; the Niño is no coward, but he fights not with
our weapons.  The web of the spider is coarse and ill-made compared
with the snare he spreads to entangle his prey."  Thus fixing his
eyes on the face of the girl who had spoken, he added: "therefore be
warned in season, my daughter, and fall not into the snare of the
Niño Diablo."

Again the girl blushed and hung her head.

At this moment a clatter of hoofs, the jangling of a bell, and shouts
of a traveller to the horses driven before him, came in at the open
door.  The dogs roused themselves, almost overturning the children in
their hurry to rush out; and up rose Gregory to find out who was
approaching with so much noise.

"I know, _papita_," cried one of the children.  "It is Uncle
Polycarp."

"You are right, child," said her father.  "Cousin Polycarp always
arrives at night, shouting to his animals like a troop of Indians."
And with that he went out to welcome his boisterous relative.

The traveller soon arrived, spurring his horse, scared at the light
and snorting loudly, to within two yards of the door.  In a few
minutes the saddle was thrown off, the fore feet of the bell-mare
fettered, and the horses allowed to wander away in quest of
pasturage; then the two men turned into the kitchen.

A short, burly man aged about fifty, wearing a soft hat thrust far
back on his head, with truculent greenish eyes beneath arched bushy
eyebrows, and a thick shapeless nose surmounting a bristly
moustache--such was Cousin Polycarp.  From neck to feet he was
covered with a blue cloth poncho, and on his heels he wore enormous
silver spurs that clanked and jangled over the floor like the fetters
of a convict.  After greeting the women and bestowing the avuncular
blessing on the children, who had clamoured for it as for some
inestimable boon--he sat down, and flinging back his poncho displayed
at his waist a huge silver-hilted knife and a heavy brass-barrelled
horse-pistol.

"Heaven be praised for its goodness, Cousin Magdalen," he said.
"What with pies and spices your kitchen is more fragrant than a
garden of flowers.  That's as it should be, for nothing but rum have
I tasted this bleak day.  And the boys are away fighting, Gregory
tells me.  Good!  When the eaglets have found out their wings let
them try their talons.  What, Cousin Magdalen, crying for the boys!
Would you have had them girls?"

"Yes, a thousand times," she replied, drying her wet eyes on her
apron.

"Ah, Magdalen, daughters can't be always young and sweet-tempered,
like your brace of pretty partridges yonder.  They grow old, Cousin
Magdalen--old and ugly and spiteful; and are more bitter and
worthless than the wild pumpkin.  But I speak not of those who are
present, for I would say nothing to offend my respected Cousin
Ascension, whom may God preserve, though she never married."

"Listen to me, Cousin Polycarp," returned the insulted dame so
pointedly alluded to.  "Say nothing to me nor of me, and I will also
hold my peace concerning you; for you know very well that if I were
disposed to open my lips I could say a thousand things."

"Enough, enough, you have already said them a thousand times," he
interrupted.  "I know all that, cousin; let us say no more."

"That is only what I ask," she retorted, "for I have never loved to
bandy words with you; and you know already, therefore I need not
recall it to your mind, that if I am single it is not because some
men whose names I could mention if I felt disposed--and they are the
names not of dead but of living men--would not have been glad to
marry me, but because I preferred my liberty and the goods I
inherited from my father; and I see not what advantage there is in
being the wife of one who is a brawler and a drunkard and spender of
other people's money, and I know not what besides."

"There it is!" said Polycarp, appealing to the fire.  "I knew that I
had thrust my foot into a red ant's nest--careless that I am!  But in
truth, Ascension, it was fortunate for you in those distant days you
mention that you hardened your heart against all lovers.  For wives,
like cattle that must be branded with their owner's mark, are first
of all taught submission to their husbands; and consider, cousin,
what tears! what sufferings!"  And having ended thus abruptly, he
planted his elbows on his knees and busied himself with the cigarette
he had been trying to roll up with his cold drunken fingers for the
last five minutes.

Ascension gave a nervous twitch at the red cotton kerchief on her
head, and cleared her throat with a sound "sharp and short like the
shrill swallow's cry," when----

"_Madre del Cielo_, how you frightened me!" screamed one of the
twins, giving a great start.

The cause of this sudden outcry was discovered in the presence of a
young man quietly seated on the bench at the girl's side.  He had not
been there a minute before, and no person had seen him enter the
room--what wonder that the girl was startled!  He was slender in form
and had small hands and feet, and oval olive face, smooth as a girl's
except for the incipient moustache on his lip.  In place of a hat he
wore only a scarlet ribbon bound about his head, to keep back the
glossy black hair that fell to his shoulders; and he was wrapped in a
white woollen Indian poncho, while his lower limbs were cased in
white coltskin coverings, shaped like stockings to his feet, with the
red tassels of his embroidered garters falling to the ankles.

"The Niño Diablo!" all cried in a breath, the children manifesting
the greatest joy at his appearance.  But old Gregory spoke with
affected anger.  "Why do you always drop on us in this treacherous
way, like rain through a leaky thatch?" he exclaimed.  "Keep these
strange arts for your visits in the infidel country; here we are all
Christians, and praise God on the threshold when we visit a
neighbour's house.  And now, Niño Diablo, what news of the Indians?"

"Nothing do I know and little do I concern myself about specks on the
horizon," returned the visitor with a light laugh.  And at once all
the children gathered round him, for the Niño they considered to
belong to them when he came, and not to their elders with their
solemn talk about Indian warfare and lost horses.  And now, now he
would finish that wonderful story, long in the telling, of the little
girl alone and lost in the great desert, and surrounded by all the
wild animals met to discuss what they should do with her.  It was a
grand story, even mother Magdalen listened, though she pretended all
the time to be thinking only of her pies--and the teller, like the
grand old historians of other days, put most eloquent speeches, all
made out of his own head, into the lips (and beaks) of the various
actors--puma, ostrich, deer, cavy, and the rest.

In the midst of this performance supper was announced, and all
gathered willingly round a dish of Magdalen's pies, filled with
minced meat, hard-boiled eggs chopped small, raisins, and plenty of
spice.  After the pies came roast beef; and, finally, great basins of
mutton broth fragrant with herbs and cummin-seed.  The rage of hunger
satisfied, each one said a prayer, the elders murmuring with bowed
heads, the children on their knees uplifting shrill voices.  Then
followed the concluding semi-religious ceremony of the day, when each
child in its turn asked a blessing of father, mother, grandmother,
uncle, aunt, and not omitting the stranger within the gates, even the
Niño Diablo of evil-sounding name.

The men drew forth their pouches, and began making their cigarettes,
when once more the children gathered round the story-teller, their
faces glowing with expectation.

"No, no," cried their mother.  "No more stories to-night--to bed, to
bed!"

"Oh, mother, mother!" cried Rosita pleadingly, and struggling to free
herself; for the good woman had dashed in among them to enforce
obedience.  "Oh, let me stay till the story ends!  The reed-cat has
said such things!  Oh, what will they do with the poor little girl?"

"And oh, mother mine!" drowsily sobbed her little sister; "the
armadillo that said--that said nothing because it had nothing to say,
and the partridge that whistled and said,--" and here she broke into
a prolonged wail.  The boys also added their voices until the hubbub
was no longer to be borne, and Gregory rose up in his wrath and
called on someone to lend him a big whip; only then they yielded, and
still sobbing and casting many a lingering look behind, were led from
the kitchen.

During this scene the Niño had been carrying on a whispered
conversation with the pretty Magdalen of his choice, heedless of the
uproar of which he had been the indirect cause; deaf also to the
bitter remarks of Ascension concerning some people who, having no
homes of their own, were fond of coming uninvited into other people's
houses, only to repay the hospitality extended to them by stealing
their silly daughters' affections, and teaching their children to
rebel against their authority.

But the noise and confusion had served to arouse Polycarp from a
drowsy fit; for like a boa constrictor, he had dined largely after
his long fast, and dinner had made him dull; bending toward his
cousin he whispered earnestly: "Who is this young stranger, Gregory?"

"In what corner of the earth have you been hiding to ask who the Niño
Diablo is?" returned the other.

"Must I know the history of every cat and dog?"

"The Niño is not cat nor dog, cousin, but a man among men, like a
falcon among birds.  When a child of six the Indians killed all his
relations and carried him into captivity.  After five years he
escaped out of their hands, and, guided by sun and stars and signs on
the earth, he found his way back to the Christian's country, bringing
many beautiful horses stolen from his captors; also the name of Niño
Diablo first given to him by the infidel.  We know him by no other."

"This is a good story; in truth I like it well--it pleases me
mightily," said Polycarp.  "And what more, cousin Gregory?"

"More than I can tell, cousin.  When he comes the dogs bark not--who
knows why? his tread is softer than the cat's; the untamed horse is
tame for him.  Always in the midst of dangers, yet no harm, no
scratch.  Why?  Because he stoops like the falcon, makes his stroke
and is gone--Heaven knows where!"

"What strange things are you telling me?  Wonderful!  And what more,
cousin Gregory?"

"He often goes into the Indian country, and lives freely with the
infidel, disguised, for they do not know him who was once their
captive.  They speak of the Niño Diablo to him, saying that when they
catch that thief they will flay him alive.  He listens to their
strange stories, then leaves them, taking their finest ponchos and
silver ornaments, and the flower of their horses."

"A brave youth, one after my own heart, cousin Gregory.  Heaven
defend and prosper him in all his journeys into the Indian territory!
Before we part I shall embrace him and offer him my friendship, which
is worth something.  More, tell me more, cousin Gregory?"

"These things I tell you to put you on your guard; look well to your
horses, cousin."

"What!" shouted the other, lifting himself up from his stooping
posture, and staring at his relation with astonishment and kindling
anger in his countenance.

The conversation had been carried on in a low tone, and the sudden
loud exclamation startled them all--all except the Niño, who
continued smoking and chatting pleasantly to the twins.

"Lightning and pestilence, what is this you say to me, Gregory
Gorostiaga!" continued Polycarp, violently slapping his thigh and
thrusting his hat farther back on his head.

"Prudence!" whispered Gregory.  "Say nothing to offend the Niño, he
never forgives an enemy--with horses."

"Talk not to me of prudence!" bawled the other.  "You hit me on the
apple of the eye and counsel me not to cry out.  What! have not I,
whom men call Polycarp of the South, wrestled with tigers in the
desert, and must I hold my peace because of a boy--even a boy devil?
Talk of what you like, cousin, and I am a meek man--meek as a sucking
babe; but touch not on my horses, for then I am a whirlwind, a
conflagration, a river flooded in winter, and all wrath and
destruction like an invasion of Indians!  Who can stand before me?
Ribs of steel are no protection!  Look at my knife; do you ask why
there are stains on the blade?  Listen: because it has gone straight
to the robber's heart!"  And with that he drew out his great knife
and flourished it wildly, and made stabs and slashes at an imaginary
foe suspended above the fire.

The pretty girls grew silent and pale and trembled like poplar
leaves; the old grandmother rose up, and clutching at her shawl
toddled hurriedly away, while Ascension uttered a snort of disdain.
But the Niño still talked and smiled, blowing thin smoke-clouds from
his lips, careless of that tempest of wrath gathering before him;
till, seeing the other so calm, the man of war returned his weapon to
its sheath, and glancing round and lowering his voice to a
conversational tone, informed his hearers that his name was Polycarp,
one known and feared by all men,--especially in the south; that he
disposed to live in peace and amity with the entire human race, and
he therefore considered it unreasonable of some men to follow him
about the world asking him to kill them.  "Perhaps," he concluded,
with a touch of irony, "they think I gain something by putting them
to death.  A mistake, good friends; I gain nothing by it!  I am not a
vulture and their bodies can be of no use to me."

Just after this sanguinary protest and disclaimer the Niño all at
once made a gesture as if to impose silence, and turning his face
toward the door, his nostrils dilating, and his eyes appearing to
grow large and luminous like those of a cat.

"What do you hear, Niño?" asked Gregory.

"I hear lapwings screaming," he replied.

"Only at a fox perhaps," said the other.  "But go to the door, Niño,
and listen."

"No need," he returned, dropping his hand, the light of a sudden
excitement passing from his face.  "'Tis only a single horseman
riding this way at a fast gallop."

Polycarp got up and went to the door, saying that when a man was
among robbers it behooved him to look well after his cattle.  Then he
came back and sat down again.  "Perhaps," he remarked, with a side
glance at the Niño, "a better plan would be to watch the thief.  A
lie, cousin Gregory; no lapwings are screaming; no single horseman
approaching at a fast gallop.  The night is serene, and earth as
silent as the sepulchre."

"Prudence!" whispered Gregory again.  "Ah, cousin, always playful
like a kitten; when will you grow old and wise?  Can you not see a
sleeping snake without turning aside to stir it up with your naked
foot?"

Strange to say, Polycarp made no reply.  A long experience in getting
up quarrels had taught him that these impassive men were, in truth,
often enough like venomous snakes, quick and deadly when roused.  He
became secret and watchful in his manner.

All now were intently listening.  Then said Gregory, "Tell us, Niño,
what voices, fine as the trumpet of the smallest fly, do you hear
coming from that great silence?  Has the mother skunk put her little
ones to sleep in their kennel and gone out to seek for the pipit's
nest?  Have fox and armadillo met to challenge each other to fresh
trials of strength and cunning?  What is the owl saying this moment
to his mistress in praise of her big green eyes?"

The young man smiled slightly but answered not; and for full five
minutes more all listened, then sounds of approaching hoofs became
audible.  Dogs began to bark, horses to snort in alarm, and Gregory
rose and went forth to receive the late night-wanderer.  Soon he
appeared, beating the angry barking dogs off with his whip, a
white-faced wild-haired man, furiously spurring his horse like a
person demented or flying from robbers.

"Ave Maria!" he shouted aloud; and when the answer was given in
suitable pious words, the scared-looking stranger drew near, and
bending down said, "Tell me, good friend, is one whom men call Niño
Diablo with you; for to this house I have been directed in my search
for him?"

"He is within, friend," answered Gregory.  "Follow me and you shall
see him with your own eyes.  Only first unsaddle, so that your horse
may roll before the sweat dries on him."

"How many horses have I ridden their last journey on this quest!"
said the stranger, hurriedly pulling off the saddle and rugs.  "But
tell me one thing more: is he well--no indisposition?  Has he met
with no accident--a broken bone, a sprained ankle?"

"Friend," said Gregory, "I have heard that once in past times the
moon met with an accident, but of the Niño no such thing has been
reported to me."

With this assurance the stranger followed his host into the kitchen,
made his salutation, and sat down by the fire.  He was about thirty
years old, a good-looking man, but his face was haggard, his eyes
bloodshot, his manner restless, and he appeared like one half-crazed
by some great calamity.  The hospitable Magdalen placed food before
him and pressed him to eat.  He complied, although reluctantly,
despatched his supper in a few moments, and murmured a prayer; then,
glancing curiously at the two men seated near him, he addressed
himself to the burly, well-armed, and dangerous-looking Polycarp.
"Friend," he said, his agitation increasing as he spoke, "four days
have I been seeking you, taking neither food nor rest, so great was
my need of your assistance.  You alone, after God, can help me.  Help
me in this strait, and half of all I possess in land and cattle and
gold shall be freely given to you, and the angels above will applaud
your deed!"

"Drunk or mad?" was the only reply vouchsafed to this appeal.

"Sir," said the stranger with dignity, "I have not tasted wine these
many days, nor has my great grief crazed me."

"Then what ails the man?" said Polycarp.  "Fear perhaps, for he is
white in the face like one who has seen the Indians."

"In truth I have seen them.  I was one of those unfortunates who
first opposed them, and most of the friends who were with me are now
food for wild dogs.  Where our houses stood there are only ashes and
a stain of blood on the ground.  Oh, friend, can you not guess why
you alone were in my thoughts when this trouble came to me--why I
have ridden day and night to find you?"

"Demons!" exclaimed Polycarp, "into what quagmires would this man
lead me?  Once for all I understand you not!  Leave me in peace,
strange man, or we shall quarrel."  And here he tapped his weapon
significantly.

At this juncture, Gregory, who took his time about everything,
thought proper to interpose.  "You are mistaken, friend," said he.
"The young man sitting on your right is the Niño Diablo, for whom you
inquired a little while ago."

A look of astonishment, followed by one of intense relief, came over
the stranger's face.  Turning to the young man he said, "My friend,
forgive me this mistake.  Grief has perhaps dimmed my sight; but
sometimes the iron blade and the blade of finest temper are not
easily distinguished by the eye.  When we try them we know which is
the brute metal, and cast it aside to take up the other, and trust
our life to it.  The words I have spoken were meant for you, and you
have heard them."

"What can I do for you, friend?" said the Niño.

"Oh, sir, the greatest service!  You can restore my lost wife to me.
The savages have taken her away into captivity.  What can I do to
save her--I who cannot make myself invisible, and fly like the wind,
and compass all things!"  And here he bowed his head, and covering
his face gave way to overmastering grief.

"Be comforted, friend," said the other, touching him lightly on the
arm.  "I will restore her to you."

"Oh, friend, how shall I thank you for these words!" cried the
unhappy man, seizing and pressing the Niño's hand.

"Tell me her name--describe her to me."

"Torcuata is her name--Torcuata de la Rosa.  She is one finger's
width taller than this young woman," indicating one of the twins who
was standing.  "But not dark; her cheeks are rosy--no, no, I forget,
they will be pale now, whiter than the grass plumes, with stains of
dark colour under the eyes.  Brown hair and blue eyes, but very deep
blue.  Look well, friend, lest you think them black and leave her to
perish."

"Never!" remarked Gregory, shaking his head.

"Enough--you have told me enough, friend," said the Niño, rolling up
a cigarette.

"Enough!" repeated the other, surprised.  "But you do not know; she
is my life; my life is in your hands.  How can I persuade you to be
with me?  Cattle I have.  I had gone to pay the herdsmen their wages
when the Indians came unexpectedly; and my house at La Chilca, on the
banks of the Langueyü, was burnt, and my wife taken away during my
absence.  Eight hundred head of cattle have escaped the savages, and
half of them shall be yours; and half of all I possess in money and
land."

"Cattle!" returned the Niño smiling, and holding a lighted stick to
his cigarette.  "I have enough to eat without molesting myself with
the care of cattle."


"But I told you that I had other things," said the stranger full of
distress.

The young man laughed, and rose from his seat.

"Listen to me," he said.  "I go now to follow the Indians--to mix
with them, perhaps.  They are retreating slowly, burdened with much
spoil.  In fifteen days go to the little town of Tandil, and wait for
me there.  As for land, if God has given so much of it to the ostrich
it is not a thing for a man to set a great value on."  Then he bent
down to whisper a few words in the ear of the girl at his side; and
immediately afterward, with a simple "good-night" to the others,
stepped lightly from the kitchen.  By another door the girl also
hurriedly left the room, to hide her tears from the watchful
censuring eyes of mother and aunt.

Then the stranger, recovering from his astonishment at the abrupt
ending of the conversation started up, and crying aloud, "Stay! stay
one moment--one word more!" rushed out after the young man.  At some
distance from the house he caught sight of the Niño, sitting
motionless on his horse, as if waiting to speak to him.

"This is what I have to say to you," spoke the Niño, bending down to
the other.  "Go back to Langueyü, and rebuild your house, and expect
me there with your wife in about thirty days.  When I bade you go to
the Tandil in fifteen days, I spoke only to mislead that man
Polycarp, who has an evil mind.  Can I ride a hundred leagues and
back in fifteen days?  Say no word of this to any man.  And fear not.
If I fail to return with your wife at the appointed time take some of
that money you have offered me, and bid a priest say a mass for my
soul's repose; for eye of man shall never see me again, and the brown
hawks will be complaining that there is no more flesh to be picked
from my bones."

During this brief colloquy, and afterward, when Gregory and his
women-folk went off to bed, leaving the stranger to sleep in his rugs
beside the kitchen fire, Polycarp, who had sworn a mighty oath not to
close his eyes that night, busied himself making his horses secure.
Driving them home, he tied them to the posts of the gate within
twenty-five yards of the kitchen door.  Then he sat down by the fire
and smoked and dozed, and cursed his dry mouth and drowsy eyes that
were so hard to keep open.  At intervals of about fifteen minutes he
would get up and go out to satisfy himself that his precious horses
were still safe.  At length in rising, some time after midnight, his
foot kicked against some loud-sounding metal object lying beside him
on the floor, which on examination proved to be a copper bell of a
peculiar shape, and curiously like the one fastened to the neck of
his bell-mare.  Bell in hand, he stepped to the door and put out his
head, and lo! his horses were no longer at the gate!  Eight horses:
seven iron-grey geldings, every one of them swift and sure-footed,
sound as the bell in his hand, and as like each other as seven
claret-coloured eggs in the tinamou's nest; and the eighth the gentle
piebald mare--the madrina his horses loved and would follow to the
world's end, now, alas! with a thief on her back!  Gone--gone!

He rushed out, uttering a succession of frantic howls and
imprecations; and finally, to wind up the performance, dashed the now
useless bell with all his energy against the gate, shattering it into
a hundred pieces.  Oh, that bell, how often and how often in how many
a wayside public-house had he boasted, in his cups and when sober, of
its mellow, far-reaching tone,--the sweet sound that assured him in
the silent watches of the night that his beloved steeds were safe!
Now he danced on the broken fragments, digging them into the earth
with his heel; now in his frenzy, he could have dug them up again to
grind them to powder with his teeth!

The children turned restlessly in bed, dreaming of the lost little
girl in the desert; and the stranger half awoke, muttering, "Courage,
O Torcuata--let not your heart break....  Soul of my life, he gives
you back to me--on my bosom, rosa fresca, rosa fresca!"  Then the
hands unclenched themselves again, and the muttering died away.  But
Gregory woke fully, and instantly divined the cause of the clamour.
"Magdalen!  Wife!" he said.  "Listen to Polycarp; the Niño has paid
him out for his insolence!  Oh, fool, I warned him, and he would not
listen!"  But Magdalen refused to wake; and so, hiding his head under
the coverlet, he made the bed shake with suppressed laughter, so
pleased was he at the clever trick played on his blustering cousin.
All at once his laughter ceased, and out popped his head again,
showing in the dim light a somewhat long and solemn face.  For he had
suddenly thought of his pretty daughter asleep in the adjoining room.
Asleep!  Wide awake, more likely, thinking of her sweet lover,
brushing the dews from the hoary pampas grass in his southward
flight, speeding away into the heart of the vast mysterious
wilderness.  Listening also to her uncle, the desperado,
apostrophising the midnight stars; while with his knife he excavates
two deep trenches, three yards long and intersecting each other at
right angles--a sacred symbol on which he intends, when finished, to
swear a most horrible vengeance.  "Perhaps," muttered Gregory, "the
Niño has still other pranks to play in this house."

When the stranger heard next morning what had happened he was better
able to understand the Niño's motive in giving him that caution
overnight; nor was he greatly put out, but thought it better that an
evil-minded man should lose his horses than that the Niño should set
out badly mounted on such an adventure.

"Let me not forget," said the robbed man, as he rode away on a horse
borrowed from his cousin, "to be at the Tandil this day fortnight,
with a sharp knife and a blunderbuss charged with a handful of powder
and not fewer than twenty-three slugs."

Terribly in earnest was Polycarp of the South!  He was there at the
appointed time, slugs and all; but the smooth-cheeked, mysterious,
child-devil came not; nor stranger still, did the scared-looking de
la Rosa come clattering in to look for his lost Torcuata.  At the end
of the fifteenth day de la Rosa was at Langueyü, seventy-five miles
from the Tandil, alone in his new rancho, which had just been rebuilt
with the aid of a few neighbours.  Through all that night he sat
alone by the fire, pondering many things.  If he could only recover
his lost wife, then he would bid a long farewell to that wild
frontier and take her across the great sea, and to that old
tree-shaded stone farm-house in Andalusia, which he had left a boy,
and where his aged parents still lived, thinking no more to see their
wandering son.  His resolution was taken; he would sell all he
possessed, all except a portion of land in the Langueyü with the
house he had just rebuilt; and to the Niño Diablo, the deliverer, he
would say, "Friend, though you despise the things that others value,
take this land and poor house for the sake of the girl Magdalen you
love; for then perhaps her parents will no longer deny her to you."

He was still thinking of these things when a dozen or twenty military
starlings--that cheerful scarlet-breasted songster of the lonely
pampas--alighted on the thatch outside, and warbling their gay,
careless winter-music told him that it was day.  And all day long, on
foot and on horseback, his thoughts were of his lost Torcuata; and
when evening once more drew near his heart was sick with suspense and
longing; and climbing the ladder placed against the gable of his
rancho he stood on the roof gazing westward into the blue distance.
The sun, crimson and large, sunk into the great green sea of grass,
and from all the plain rose the tender fluting notes of the
tinamou-partridges, bird answering bird.  "Oh, that I could pierce
the haze, with my vision," he murmured, "that I could see across a
hundred leagues of level plain, and look this moment on your sweet
face, Torcuata!"

And Torcuata was in truth a hundred leagues distant from him at that
moment; and if the miraculous sight he wished for had been given,
this was what he would have seen.  A wide barren plain scantily
clothed with yellow tufts of grass and thorny shrubs, and at its
southern extremity, shutting out the view of that side, a low range
of dune-like hills.  Over this level ground, toward the range, moves
a vast herd of cattle and horses--fifteen or twenty thousand
head--followed by a scattered horde of savages armed with their long
lances.  In a small compact body in the centre ride the captives,
women and children.  Just as the red orb touches the horizon the
hills are passed, and lo! a wide grassy valley beyond, with flocks
and herds pasturing, and scattered trees, and the blue gleam of water
from a chain of small lakes!  There full in sight is the Indian
settlement, the smoke rising peacefully up from the clustered huts.
At the sight of home the savages burst into loud cries of joy and
triumph, answered, as they drew near, with piercing screams of
welcome from the village population, chiefly composed of women,
children and old men.


It is past midnight; the young moon has set; the last fires are dying
down; the shouts and loud noise of excited talk and laughter have
ceased, and the weary warriors, after feasting on sweet mare's flesh
to repletion, have fallen asleep in their huts, or lying out-of-doors
on the ground.  Only the dogs are excited still and keep up an
incessant barking.  Even the captive women, huddled together in one
hut in the middle of the settlement, fatigued with their long rough
journey, have cried themselves to sleep at last.

At length one of the sad sleepers wakes, or half wakes, dreaming that
someone has called her name.  How could such a thing be?  Yet her own
name still seems ringing in her brain, and at length, fully awake,
she finds herself intently listening.  Again it
sounded--"Torcuata"--a voice fine as the pipe of a mosquito, yet so
sharp and distinct that it tingled in her ear.  She sat up and
listened again, and once more it sounded "Torcuata!"  "Who speaks?"
she returned in a fearful whisper.  The voice, still fine and small,
replied: "Come out from among the others until you touch the wall."
Trembling she obeyed, creeping out from among the sleepers until she
came into contact with the side of the hut.  Then the voice sounded
again, "Creep round the wall until you come to a small crack of light
on the other side."  Again she obeyed, and when she reached the line
of faint light it widened quickly to an aperture, through which a
shadowy arm was passed round her waist; and in a moment she was
lifted up and saw the stars above her, and at her feet dark forms of
men wrapped in their ponchos lying asleep.  But no one woke, no alarm
was given; and in a very few minutes she was mounted, man-fashion, on
a barebacked horse, speeding swiftly over the dim plains, with the
shadowy form of her mysterious deliverer some yards in advance,
driving before him a score or so of horses.  He had only spoken
half-a-dozen words to her since their escape from the hut but she
knew by those words that he was taking her to Langueyü.



END











End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Masterpieces of Adventure--Stories of
Desert Places, by Various

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