path: root/74759-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74759 ***





                      IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS

                      BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK

                          BOSTON AND NEW YORK

                       HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

                     The Riverside Press Cambridge

              COPYRIGHT, 1884, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

                  COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY MARY N. MURFREE

                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




                               CONTENTS.


                   DRIFTING DOWN LOST CREEK

                   A-PLAYIN' OF OLD SLEDGE AT THE SETTLEMINT

                   THE STAR IN THE VALLEY

                   ELECTIONEERIN' ON BIG INJUN MOUNTING

                   THE ROMANCE OF SUNRISE ROCK

                   THE DANCIN' PARTY AT HARRISON'S COVE

                   OVER ON THE T'OTHER MOUNTING

                   THE "HARNT" THAT WALKS CHILHOWEE




                      IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS.




                       DRIFTING DOWN LOST CREEK.


                                  I.

High above Lost Creek Valley towers a wilderness of pine. So dense is
this growth that it masks the mountain whence it springs. Even when
the Cumberland spurs, to the east, are gaunt and bare in the wintry
wind, their deciduous forests denuded, their crags unveiled and grimly
beetling, Pine Mountain remains a sombre, changeless mystery; its
clifty heights are hidden, its chasms and abysses lurk unseen. Whether
the skies are blue, or gray, the dark, austere line of its summit
limits the horizon. It stands against the west like a barrier. It
seemed to Cynthia Ware that nothing which went beyond this barrier ever
came back again. One by one the days passed over it, and in splendid
apotheosis, in purple and crimson and gold, they were received into
the heavens, and returned no more. She beheld love go hence, and
many a hope. Even Lost Creek itself, meandering for miles between the
ranges, suddenly sinks into the earth, tunnels an unknown channel
beneath the mountain, and is never seen again. She often watched the
floating leaves, a nettle here and there, the broken wing of a moth,
and wondered whither these trifles were borne, on the elegiac current.
She came to fancy that her life was like them, worthless in itself and
without a mission; drifting down Lost Creek, to vanish vaguely in the
mountains.

Yet her life had not always been thus destitute of pleasure and
purpose. There was a time--and she remembered it well--when she found
no analogies in Lost Creek. Then she saw only a stream gayly dandering
down the valley, with the laurel and the pawpaw close in to its banks,
and the kildeer's nest in the sand.

Before it takes that desperate plunge into the unexplored caverns of
the mountain, Lost Creek lends its aid to divers jobs of very prosaic
work. Further up the valley it turns a mill-wheel, and on Mondays it
is wont to assist in the family wash. A fire of pine-knots, kindled
beside it on a flat rock, would twine long, lucent white flames about
the huge kettle in which the clothes were boiled. Through the steam the
distant landscape flickered, ethereal, dream-like. The garments, laid
across a bench and beaten white with a wooden paddle, would flutter
hilariously in the wind. Deep in some willowy tangle the water-thrush
might sing. Ever and anon from the heights above vibrated the clinking
of a hand-hammer and the clanking of a sledge. This iterative sound
used to pulse like a lyric in Cynthia's heart. But her mother, one day,
took up her testimony against it.

"I do declar', it sets me plumb catawampus ter hev ter listen ter them
blacksmiths, up yander ter thar shop, at thar everlastin' chink-chank
an' chink-chank, considerin' the tales I hearn 'bout 'em, when I war
down ter the quiltin' at M'ria's house in the Cove."

She paused to prod the boiling clothes with a long stick. She was a
tall woman, fifty years of age, perhaps, but seeming much older. So
gaunt she was, so toothless, haggard, and disheveled, that but for
her lazy step and languid interest she might have suggested one of
Macbeth's witches, as she hovered about the great cauldron.

"They 'lowed down yander ter M'ria's house ez this hyar Evander Price
hev kem ter be the headin'est, no 'count critter in the kentry! They
'lowed ez he hev been a-foolin' round Pete Blenkins's forge, a-workin'
fur him ez a striker, till he thinks hisself ez good a blacksmith ez
Pete, an' better. An' all of a suddenty this same 'Vander Price riz up
an' made a consarn ter bake bread in, sech ez hed never been seen in
the mountings afore. They 'lowed down ter M'ria's ez they dunno what
he patterned arter. The Evil One must hev revealed the contrivance ter
him. But they say it did cook bread in less 'n haffen the time that the
reg'lar oven takes; leastwise his granny's bread, 'kase his mother air
a toler'ble sensible woman, an' would tech no sech foolish fixin'. But
his granny 'lowed ez she didn't hev long ter live, nohow, an' mought ez
well please the chil'ren whilst she war spared. So she resked a batch
o' her salt-risin' bread on the consarn, an' she do say it riz like all
possessed, an' eat toler'ble short. An' that banged critter 'Vander
war so proud o' his contrivance that he showed it ter everybody ez kem
by the shop. An' when two valley men rid by, an' one o' thar beastis
cast a shoe, 'Vander hed ter take out his contraption fur them ter gape
over, too. An' they ups an' says they hed seen the like afore a-many
a time; sech ovens war common in the valley towns. An' when they fund
out ez 'Vander hed never hearn on sech, but jes' got the idee out 'n
his own foolishness, they jes' stared at one another. They tole the
boy ez he oughter take hisself an' his peartness in workin' in iron
down yander ter some o' the valley towns, whar he'd find out what other
folks hed been doin' in metal, an' git a good hank on his knack fur
new notions. But 'Vander, he clung ter the mountings. They 'lowed down
yander at M'ria's quiltin' ez 'Vander fairly tuk ter the woods with
grief through other folks hevin' made sech contraptions ez his'n, afore
he war born."

The girl stopped short in her work of pounding the clothes, and,
leaning the paddle on the bench, looked up toward the forge with her
luminous brown eyes full of grave compassion. Her calico sun-bonnet
was thrust half off her head. Its cavernous recesses made a background
of many shades of brown for her auburn hair, which was of a brilliant,
rich tint, highly esteemed of late years in civilization, but in the
mountains still accounted a capital defect. There was nothing as gayly
colored in all the woods, except perhaps a red-bird, that carried his
tufted topknot so bravely through shade and sheen that he might have
been the transmigrated spirit of an Indian, still roaming in the old
hunting-ground. The beech shadows, delicately green, imparted a more
ethereal fairness to her fair face, and her sombre brown homespun dress
heightened the effect by contrast. Her mother noted an unwonted flush
upon her cheek, and recommenced with a deep, astute purpose.

"They 'lowed down yander in the Cove, ter M'ria's quiltin', ez this
hyar 'Vander Price hev kem ter be mighty difficult, sence he hev been
so gin over ter pride in his oven an' sech. They 'lowed ez even Pete
Blenkins air fairly afeard o' him. Pete hisself hev always been knowed
ez a powerful evil man, an' what 'twixt drink an' deviltry mos' folks
hev been keerful ter gin him elbow-room. But this hyar 'Vander Price
hectors round an' jaws back so sharp ez Pete hev got ter be truly
mealy-mouthed where 'Vander be. They 'lowed down yander at M'ria's
quiltin' ez one day Pete an' 'Vander bed a piece o' iron a-twixt 'em on
the anvil, an' Pete would tap, same ez common, with the hand-hammer on
the hot metal ter show Vander whar ter strike with the sledge. An' Pete
got toler'ble bouncin', an' kep' faultin' Vander,--jes' like he use ter
quar'l with his t'other striker, till the man would bide with him no
more. All at wunst 'Vander hefted the sledge, an' gin Pete the ch'ice
ter take it on his skull-bone, or show more manners. An' Pete showed
'em."

There was a long pause. Lost Creek sounded some broken minor chords,
as it dashed against the rocks on its headlong way. The wild grapes
were blooming. Their fragrance, so delicate yet so pervasive, suggested
some exquisite unseen presence--the dryads were surely abroad! The
beech-trees stretched down their silver branches and green shadows.
Through rifts in the foliage shimmered glimpses of a vast array of
sunny parallel mountains, converging and converging, till they seemed
to meet far away in one long, level line, so ideally blue that it
looked less like earth than heaven. The pine-knots flamed and glistered
under the great wash-kettle. A tree-toad was persistently calling
for rain, in the dry distance. The girl, gravely impassive, beat the
clothes with the heavy paddle. Her mother shortly ceased to prod the
white heaps in the boiling water, and presently took up the thread of
her discourse.

"An' 'Vander hev got ter be a mighty suddint man. I hearn tell, when
I war down ter M'ria's house ter the quiltin', ez how in that sorter
fight an' scrimmage they hed at the mill, las' month, he war powerful
ill-conducted. Nobody hed thought of hevin' much of a fight,--thar hed
been jes' a few licks passed a-twixt the men thar; but the fust finger
ez war laid on this boy, he jes' lit out an' fit like a catamount.
Right an' lef' he lay about him with his fists, an' he drawed his
huntin' knife on some of 'em. The men at the mill war in no wise
pleased with him."

"'Pears-like ter me ez 'Vander air a peaceable boy enough, ef he ain't
jawed at, an' air lef' be," drawled Cynthia.

Her mother was embarrassed for a moment. Then, with a look both sly
and wise, she made an admission,--a qualified admission. "Waal,
wimmen--ef--ef--ef they air young an' toler'ble hard-headed _yit_, air
likely ter jaw _some_, ennyhow. An' a gal oughtn't ter marry a man ez
hev sot his heart on bein' lef' in peace. He's apt ter be a mighty sour
an' disapp'inted critter."

This sudden turn to the conversation invested all that had been said
with new meaning, and revealed a subtle diplomatic intention. The girl
seemed deliberately to review it, as she paused in her work. Then, with
a rising flush, "I ain't studyin' 'bout marryin' nobody," she asserted
staidly. "I hev laid off ter live single."

Mrs. Ware had overshot the mark, but she retorted, gallantly reckless,
"That's what yer aunt Malviny useter declar' fur gospel sure, when she
war a gal. An' she hev got ten chil'ren, an' hev buried two husbands,
an' ef all they say air true she's tollin' in the third man now. She's
a mighty spry, good-featured woman an' a fust-rate manager, yer aunt
Malviny air, an' both her husbands lef' her su'thin',--cows, or wagons,
or land. An' they war quiet men when they war alive, an' stays whar
they air put, now that they air dead; not like old Parson Hoodenpyle
what his wife hears stumpin' round the house an' preachin' every night,
though she air ez deef ez a post, an' he hev been in glory twenty
year,--twenty year, an' better. Yer aunt Malviny hed luck, so mebbe 't
ain't no killin' complaint fur a gal ter git ter talkin' like a fool
about marryin' an' sech. Leastwise, I ain't minded ter sorrow."

She looked at her daughter with a gay grin, which, distorted by her
toothless gums and the wreathing steam from the kettle, enhanced her
witch-like aspect and was spuriously malevolent. She did not notice the
stir of an approach through the brambly tangles of the heights above
until it was close at hand; as she turned, she thought only of the
mountain cattle,--to see the red cow's picturesque head and crumpled
horns thrust over the sassafras bushes, or to hear the brindle's
clanking bell. It was certainly less unexpected to Cynthia when a young
mountaineer, clad in brown jeans trousers and a checked homespun shirt,
emerged upon the rocky slope. He still wore his blacksmith's leather
apron, and his powerful corded hammer-arm was bare beneath his tightly
rolled sleeve. He was tall and heavily built; his sun-burned face was
square, with a strong lower jaw, and his features were accented by
fine lines of charcoal, as if the whole were a clever sketch. His black
eyes held fierce intimations, but there was mobility of expression
about them that suggested changing impulses, strong but fleeting. He
was like his forge fire: though the heat might be intense for a time,
it fluctuated with the breath of the bellows. Just now he was meekly
quailing before the old woman, whom he evidently had not thought to
find here. It was as apt an illustration as might be, perhaps, of
the inferiority of strength to finesse. She seemed an inconsiderable
adversary, as haggard, lean, and prematurely aged she swayed on her
prodding-stick about the huge kettle; but she was as a veritable David
to this big young Goliath, though she too flung hardly more than a
pebble at him.

"Laws-a-me!" she cried, in shrill, toothless glee; "ef hyar ain't
'Vander Price! What brung ye down hyar along o' we-uns, Vander?" she
continued, with simulated anxiety. "Hev that thar red heifer o' our'n
lept over the fence agin, an' got inter Pete's corn? Waal, sir, ef she
ain't the headin'est heifer!"

"I hain't seen none o' yer heifer, ez I knows on," replied the young
blacksmith, with gruff, drawling deprecation. Then he tried to regain
his natural manner. "I kem down hyar," he remarked in an off-hand way,
"ter git a drink o' water." He glanced furtively at the girl; then
looked quickly away at the gallant red-bird, still gayly parading among
the leaves.

The old woman grinned with delight. "Now, ef that ain't s'prisin',"
she declared. "Ef we hed knowed ez Lost Creek war a-goin' dry over
yander a-nigh the shop, so ye an' Pete would hev ter kem hyar thirstin'
fur water, we-uns would hev brung su'thin' down hyar ter drink out'n.
We-uns hain't got no gourd hyar, hev we, Cynthy?"

"'Thout it air the little gourd with the saft soap in it," said
Cynthia, confused and blushing.

Her mother broke into a high, loud laugh. "Ye ain't wantin' ter gin
'Vander the soap-gourd ter drink out'n, Cynthy! Leastwise, I ain't
goin' ter gin it ter Pete. Fur I s'pose ef ye hev ter kem a haffen mile
ter git a drink, 'Vander, ez surely Pete 'll hev ter kem, too. Waal,
waal, who would hev b'lieved ez Lost Creek would go dry nigh the shop,
an' yit be a-scuttlin' along like that, hyar-abouts!" and she pointed
with her bony finger at the swift flow of the water.

He was forced to abandon his clumsy pretense of thirst. "Lost Creek
ain't gone dry nowhar, ez I knows on," he admitted, mechanically
rolling the sleeve of his hammer-arm up and down as he talked. "It
air toler'ble high,--higher 'n I ever see it afore. 'T war jes' night
afore las' ez two men got a kyart sunk in a quicksand, whilst fordin'
the creek. An' one o' thar wheels kem off, an' they hed right smart
scufflin' ter keep thar load from washin' out'n the kyart an' driftin'
clean away. Leastwise, that was how they telled it ter me. They war
valley men, I'm a-thinkin'. They 'lowed ter me ez they hed ter cut
thar beastis out 'n the traces. They loaded him up with the goods an'
fotched him ter the shop."

Mrs. Ware forebore her ready gibes in her interest in the country-side
gossip. She ceased to prod the boiling clothes. She hung motionless
on the stick. "I s'pose they 'lowed, mebbe, ez what sort'n goods they
hed," she hazarded, seeing a peddler in the dim perspective of a
prosaic imagination.

"They lef' some along o' we-uns ter keep till they kem back agin. They
'lowed ez they could travel better ef thar beastis war eased some of
his load. They hed some o' all sorts o' truck. They 'lowed ez they war
aimin' ter sot up a store over yander ter the Settlemint on Milksick
Mounting. They lef' right smart o' truck up yander in the shed a-hint
the shop; 'pears like ter me it air a kyart-load itself. I promised
ter keer fur it till they kem back agin."

Certainly, so far as Cynthia was concerned, the sharpness of wits and
the acerbity of temper ascribed generally to the red-haired gentry
could be accounted no slander. The flame-colored halo about her face,
emblazoned upon the dusky depths of her old brown bonnet, was not more
fervid than an angry glow overspreading her delicate cheek, and an
intense fiery spark suddenly a-light in her brown eyes.

"Pete Blenkins mus' be sodden with drink, I'm a-thinkin'!" she cried
impatiently. "Like ez not them men will 'low ez the truck ain't all
thar, when they kem back. An' then thar'll be a tremenjious scrimmage
ter the shop, an' somebody'll git hurt, an' mebbe killed."

"Waal, Cynthy," exclaimed her mother, in tantalizing glee, "air you-uns
goin' ter ache when Pete's head gits bruk? That's powerful 'commodatin'
in ye, cornsiderin' ez he hev got a wife, an' chil'ren ez old ez ye be.
Waal sorrow fur Pete, ef ye air so minded."

The angry spark in Cynthia's eyes died out as suddenly as it kindled.
She began to beat the wet clothes heavily with the paddle, and her
manner was that of having withdrawn herself from the conversation.
The young blacksmith had flushed, too, and he laughed a little, but
demurely. Then, as he still rolled and unrolled the sleeve of his
hammer-arm, his wonted gravity returned.

"Pete hain't got nothin' ter do with it, nohow," he averred. "Pete
hev been away fur two weeks an' better: he hev gone ter see his uncle
Joshua, over yander on Caney Fork. He 'lowed ez apple-jack grows
powerful fine in them parts."

"Then who war holpin' at the forge ter-day?" asked Mrs. Ware,
surprised. "I 'lowed I hearn the hand-hammer an' sledge too, same ez
common."

There was a change among the lines of charcoal that seemed to define
his features. He looked humbled, ashamed. "I hed my brother a-strikin'
fur me," he said at last.

"Why, 'Vander," exclaimed the old woman shrilly, "that thar boy's a
plumb idjit! Ye oughtn't trust him along o' that sledge! He'd jes' ez
lief maul ye on the head with it ez maul the hot iron. Ye know he air
ez strong ez a ox; an' the critter's fursaken in his mind."

"I knows that," Evander admitted. "I wouldn't hev done it, ef I hedn't
been a-workin' on a new fixin' ez I hev jes' thought up, an' I war
jes' _obligated_ ter hev somebody ter strike fur me. An' laws-a-massy,
'Lijah wouldn't harm nobody. The critter war ez peart an' lively ez a
June-bug,--so proud ter be allowed ter work around like folks!" He
stopped short in sudden amazement: something stood in his eyes that had
no habit there; its presence stupefied him. For a moment he could not
speak, and he stood silently gazing at that long, level blue line, in
which the converging mountains met,--so delicately azure, so ethereally
suggestive, that it seemed to him like the Promised Land that Moses
viewed. "The critter air mighty aggervatin' mos'ly ter the folks at our
house," he continued, "but they hectors him. He treats me well."

"An ill word is spoke 'bout him ginerally round the mounting," said the
old woman, who had filled and lighted her pipe, and was now trying to
crowd down the charge, so to speak, without scorching too severely her
callous fore-finger. "I hev hearn folks 'low ez he hev got so turrible
crazy ez he oughter be sent away an' shet up in jail. An' it 'pears
like ter me ez that word air jestice. The critter's fursaken."

"Fursaken or no fursaken, he ain't goin' ter be jailed fur
nothin',--'ceptin' that the hand o' the Lord air laid too heavy on
him. I can't lighten its weight. I'm mortial myself. The rider says
thar's some holp in prayer. I hain't seen it yit, though I hev been
toler'ble busy lately a-workin' in metal, one way an' another. What
good air it goin' ter do the mounting ter hev 'Lijah jailed, stiddier
goin' round the woods a-talkin' ter the grasshoppers an' squir'ls, ez
seem ter actially know the critter, an' bein' ez happy ez they air,
'ceptin' when he gits it inter his noodle, like he sometimes do, ez he
ain't edzactly like other folks be?" He paused. Those strange visitants
trembled again upon his smoke-blackened lids. "Fursaken or no," he
cried impulsively, "the man ez tries ter git him jailed will 'low ez he
air fursaken his own self, afore I gits done with him!"

"'Vander Price," said the old woman rebukingly, "ye talk like ye hain't
got good sense yerself." She sat down on a rock embedded in the ferns
by Lost Creek, and pulled deliberately at her long cob-pipe. Then she
too turned her faded eyes upon the vast landscape, in which she had
seen no change, save the changing season and the waxing or the waning
of the day, since first her life had opened upon it. That level line
of pale blue in the poetic distance had become faintly roseate. The
great bronze-green ranges nearer at hand were assuming a royal purple.
Shadows went skulking down the valley. Across the amber zenith an eagle
was flying homeward. Her mechanical glance followed the sweeping,
majestic curves, as the bird dropped to its nest in the wild fastnesses
of Pine Mountain, that towered, rugged and severe of outline, against
the crimson west. A cow-bell jangled in the laurel.

"Old Suke's a-comin' home ez partic'lar an' percise ez ef she hed
her calf thar yit. I hev traded Suke's calf ter my merried daughter
M'ria,--her ez merried Amos Baker, in the Cove. The old brindle can't
somehow onderstan' the natur' o' the bargain, an' kems up every night
moo-ing, mighty disapp'inted. 'Twarn't much shakes of a calf, nohow,
an' I stood toler'ble well arter the trade."

She looked up at the young man with a leer of self-gratulation. He
still lingered, but the unsophisticated mother in the mountains can
be as much an obstacle to anything in the nature of love-making, when
the youth is not approved, as the expert tactician of a drawing-room.
He had only the poor consolation of helping Cynthia to carry in the
load of stiff, dry clothes to the log cabin, ambushed behind the
beech-trees, hard by in the gorge. The house had a very unconfiding
aspect; all its belongings seemed huddled about it for safe-keeping.
The beehives stood almost under the eaves; the ash-hopper was visible
close in the rear; the rain-barrel affiliated with the damp wall;
the chickens were going to roost in an althea bush beside the porch;
the boughs of the cherry and plum and crab-apple trees were thickly
interlaced above the path that led from the rickety rail fence, and
among their roots flag-lilies, lark-spur, and devil-in-the-bush mingled
in a floral mosaic. The old woman went through the gate first. But
even this inadvertence could not profit the loitering young people.
"Law, Cynthy," she exclaimed, pointing at a loose-jointed elderly
mountaineer, who was seated beneath the hop vines on the little porch,
while a gaunt gray mare, with the plow-gear still upon her, cropped
the grass close by, "yander is yer daddy, ez empty ez a gourd, I 'll
be bound! Hurry an' git supper, child. Time's a-wastin',--time's
a-wastin'!"

When Evander was half-way up the steep slope, he turned and looked down
at the embowered little house, that itself turned its face upward,
looking as it were to the mountain's summit. How it nestled there in
the gorge! He had seen it often and often before, but whenever he
thought of it afterward it was as it appeared to him now: the darkling
valley below it, the mountains behind it, the sunset sky still flaring
above it, though stars had blossomed out here and there, and the sweet
June night seemed full of their fragrance. He could distinguish for a
good while the gate, the rickety fence, the path beneath the trees.
The vista ended in the open door, with the broad flare of the fire
illumining the puncheon floor and the group of boisterous tow-headed
children; in the midst was the girl, with her bright hair and light
figure, with her round arms bare, and her deft hand stirring the batter
for bread in a wooden bowl. She looked the very genius of home, and so
he long remembered her.

The door closed at last, and he slowly resumed his way along the steep
slope. The scene that had just vanished seemed yet vividly present
before him. The gathering gloom made less impression. He took scant
heed of external objects, and plodded on mechanically. He was very
near the forge when his senses were roused by some inexplicable inward
monition. He stood still to listen: only the insects droning in the
chestnut-oaks, only the wind astir in the laurel. The night possessed
the earth. The mountains were sunk in an indistinguishable gloom, save
where the horizontal line of their summits asserted itself against
an infinitely clear sky. But for a hunter's horn, faintly wound and
faintly echoed in Lost Creek Valley, he might have seemed the only
human creature in all the vast wilderness. He saw through the pine
boughs the red moon rising. The needles caught the glister, and shone
like a golden fringe. They overhung dusky, angular shadows that he
knew was the little shanty of a blacksmith shop. In its dark recesses
was a dull red point of light, where the forge fire still smouldered.
Suddenly it was momentarily eclipsed. Something had passed before it.

"'Lijah!" he called out, in vague alarm. There was no answer. The red
spark now gleamed distinct.

"Look-a-hyar, boy, what be you-uns a-doin' of thar?" he asked, beset
with a strange anxiety and a growing fear of he knew not what.

Still no answer.

It was a terrible weapon he had put into the idiot's hand that
day,--that heavy sledge of his. He grew cold when he remembered poor
Elijah's pleasure in useful work, in his great strength gone to waste,
in the ponderous implement that he so lightly wielded. He might well
have returned to-night, with some vague, distraught idea of handling it
again. And what vague, distraught idea kept him skulking there with it?

"Foolin' along o' that new straw-cutter ter-day will be my ruin, I'm
afeard," Evander muttered ruefully. Then the sudden drops broke out on
his brow. "I pray ter mercy," he exclaimed fervently, "the boy hain't
been a-sp'ilin' o' that thar new straw-cutter!"

This fear dominated all others. He strode hastily forward. "Come out o'
thar, 'Lijah!" he cried roughly.

There were moving shadows in the great barn-like
door,--three--four--The moon was behind the forge, and he could not
count them. They were advancing shadows. A hand was laid upon his arm.
A drawling voice broke languidly on the night. "I'm up an' down sorry
ter hev ter arrest you-uns, 'Vander, bein' ez we air neighbors an'
mos'ly toler'ble friendly; but law is law, an' ye air my prisoner," and
the constable of the district paused in the exercise of his functions
to gnaw off a chew of tobacco with teeth which seemed to have grown
blunt in years of that practice; then he leisurely resumed: "I war jes'
sayin' ter the sheriff an' dep'ty hyar,"--indicating the figures in
the door-way,--"ez we-uns hed better lay low till we seen how many o'
you-uns war out hyar; else I wouldn't hev kep' ye waitin' so long."

The young mountaineer's amazement at last expressed itself in words.
"Ye hev surely los' yer senses, Jubal Tynes! What air ye arrestin' of
me fur?"

"Fur receivin' of stolen goods,--the shed back yander air full of 'em.
I dunno whether ye holped ter rob the cross-roads store or no; but
yander's the goods in the shed o' the shop, an' Pete's been away two
weeks, an' better; so 'twar obleeged ter be you-uns ez received 'em."

Evander, in a tumult of haste, told his story. The constable laughed
lazily, with his quid between his teeth. "Mebbe so,--mebbe so; but
that's fur the jedge an' jury ter study over. Them men never tuk thar
kyart no furder. 'Twar never stuck in no quicksand in Lost Creek. They
knowed the sheriff war on thar track, an' they stove up thar kyart,
an' sent the spokes an' shafts an' sech a-driftin' down Lost Creek,
thinkin' 'twould be swallered inter the mounting an' never be seen
agin. But jes' whar Lost Creek sinks under the mounting the drift war
cotched. We fund it thar, an' knowed ez all we hed ter do war ter trace
'em up Lost Creek. An' hyar we be! The goods hev been identified this
very hour by the man ez owns 'em. I hope ye never holped ter burglarize
the store, too; but 'tain't fur me ter say. Ye hev ter kem along o'
we-uns, whether ye like it or no," and he laid a heavy hand on his
prisoner's shoulder.

The next moment he was reeling from a powerful blow planted between the
eyes. It even felled the stalwart constable, for it was so suddenly
dealt. But Jubal Tynes was on his feet in an instant, rushing forward
with a bull-like bellow. Once more he measured his length upon the
ground,--close to the anvil this time, for the position of all the
group had changed in the fracas. He did not rise again; the second
blow was struck with the ponderous sledge. As the men hastened to
lift him, they were much hindered by the ecstatic capers of the idiot
brother, who seemed to have been concealed in the shop. The prisoner
made no attempt at flight, although, in the confusion, he was forgotten
for the time by the officers, and had some chance of escape. He
appeared frightened and very meek; and when he saw that there was blood
upon the sledge, and they said brains, too, he declared that he was
sorry he had done it.

"_I_ done it!" cried the idiot joyfully. "Jube sha'n't fight 'Vander!
_I_ done it!" and he was so boisterously grotesque and wild that the
men lost their wits while he was about; so they turned him roughly
out of the forge, and closed the doors upon him. At last he went
away, although for a time he beat loudly upon the shutter, and called
piteously for Evander.

It was a great opportunity for old Dr. Patton, who lived six miles
down the valley, and zealously he improved it. He often felt that in
this healthful country, where he was born, and where bucolic taste
and local attachment still kept him, he was rather a medical theorist
than a medical practitioner, so few and slight were the demands upon
the resources of his science. He was as one who has long pondered the
unsuggestive details of the map of a region, and who suddenly sees
before him its glowing, vivid landscape.

"A beautiful fracture!" he protested with rapture,--"a beautiful
fracture!"

Through all the country-side were circulated his cheerful accounts
of patients who had survived fracture of the skull. Among the simple
mountaineers his learned talk of the trephine gave rise to the
startling report that he intended to put a linchpin into Jubal Tynes's
head. It was rumored, too, that the unfortunate man's brains had "in
an' about leaked haffen out;" and many freely prompted Providence by
the suggestion that "ef Jube war ready ter die it war high time he
war taken," as, having been known as a hasty and choleric man, it was
predicted that he would "make a most survigrus idjit."

"Cur'ous enough ter me ter find out ez Jube ever hed brains," commented
Mrs. Ware. "'Twar well enough ter let some of 'em leak out ter prove
it. He hev never showed he hed brains no other way, ez I knows on.
Now," she added, "somebody oughter tap 'Vander's head, an' mebbe
they'll find him pervided, too. Wonders will never cease! Nobody would
hev accused Jube o' sech. Folks'll hev ter respec' them brains. 'Vander
done him that favior in splitting his head open."

"'Twarn't 'Vander's deed!" Cynthia declared passionately. She
reiterated this phrase a hundred times a day, as she went about her
household tasks. "'Twarn't 'Vander's deed!" How could she prove that it
was not, she asked herself as often,--and prove that against his own
word?

For she herself had heard him acknowledge the crime. The new day had
hardly broken when, driving her cow, she came by the blacksmith's shop,
all unconscious as yet of the tragedy it had housed. A vague prescience
of dawn was on the landscape; dim and spectral, it stood but half
revealed in the doubtful light. The stars were gone; even the sidereal
outline of the great Scorpio had crept away. But the gibbous moon still
swung above the dark and melancholy forests of Pine Mountain, and its
golden chalice spilled a dreamy glamour all adown the lustrous mists
in Lost Creek Valley. Ever and anon the crags reverberated with the
shrill clamor of a watch-dog at a cabin in the Cove; for there was an
unwonted stir upon the mountain's brink. The tramp of horses, the roll
of wheels, the voices of the officers at the forge, busily canvassing
their preparations for departure, sounded along the steeps. The sight
of the excited group was as phenomenal to old Suke as to Cynthia, and
the cow stopped short in her shambling run, and turned aside into the
blooming laurel with a muttered low and with crouching horns. Early
wayfarers along the road had been attracted by the unusual commotion.
A rude slide drawn by a yoke of oxen stood beneath the great pine that
overhung the forge, while the driver was breathlessly listening to the
story from the deputy sheriff. A lad, mounted on a lank gray mare, let
the sorry brute crop, unrebuked, the sassafras leaves by the wayside,
while he turned half round in his saddle, with a white horror on his
face, to see the spot pointed out on which Jubal Tynes had fallen. The
wounded man had been removed to the nearest house, but the ground was
still dank with blood, and this heightened the dramatic effects of
the recital. The sheriff's posse and their horses were picturesquely
grouped about the open barn-like door, and the wagon laden with the
plunder stood hard by. It had been discovered, when they were on the
point of departure, that one of the animals had cast a shoe, and the
prisoner was released that he might replace it.

When Evander kindled the forge fire he felt that it was for the last
time. The heavy sighing of the bellows burst forth, as if charged
with a conscious grief. As the fire alternately flared and faded, it
illumined with long, evanescent red rays the dusky interior of the
shop: the horseshoes hanging upon a rod in the window, the plowshares
and bars of iron ranged against the wall, the barrel of water in the
corner, the smoky hood and the anvil, the dark spot on the ground, and
the face of the blacksmith himself, as he worked the bellows with one
hand, while the other held the tongs with the red-hot horseshoe in the
fire. It was a pale face. Somehow, all the old spirit seemed spent.
Its wonted suggestions of a dogged temper and latent fierceness were
effaced. It bore marks of patient resignation, that might have been
wrought by a life-time of self-sacrifice, rather than by one imperious
impulse, as potent as it was irrevocable. The face appeared in some
sort sublimated.

The bellows ceased to sigh, the anvil began to sing, the ringing
staccato of the hammer punctuated the droning story of the deputy
sheriff, still rehearsing the sensation of the hour to the increasing
crowd about the door. The girl stood listening, half hidden in the
blooming laurel. Her senses seemed strangely sharpened, despite the
amazement, the incredulity, that possessed her. She even heard the
old cow cropping the scanty grass at her feet, and saw every casual
movement of the big brindled head. She was conscious of the splendid
herald of a new day flaunting in the east. Against this gorgeous
presence of crimson and gold, brightening and brightening till only
the rising sun could outdazzle it, she noted the romantic outlines of
the Cumberland crags and woody heights, and marveled how near they
appeared. She was sensible of the fragrance of the dewy azaleas, and
she heard the melancholy song of the pines, for the wind was astir. She
marked the grimaces of the idiot, looking like a dim and ugly dream in
the dark recesses of the forge. His face was filled now with strange,
wild triumph, and now with partisan anger for his brother's sake; for
Evander was more than once harshly upbraided.

"An' so yer tantrums hev brung ye ter this eend, at last, 'Vander
Price!" exclaimed an old man indignantly. "I misdoubted ye when I hearn
how ye fit, that day, yander ter the mill; an' they do say ez even
Pete Blenkins air plumb afeard ter jaw at ye, nowadays, on 'count o'
yer fightin' an' quar'lin' ways. An' now ye hev gone an' bodaciously
slaughtered pore Jubal Tynes! From what I hev hearn tell, I jedge he
air obleeged ter die. Then nothin' kin save ye!"

The girl burst suddenly forth from the flowering splendors of the
laurel. "'Twarn't 'Vander's deed!" she cried, perfect faith in every
tone. "'Vander, 'Vander, who did it? Who did it?" she reiterated
imperiously.

Her cheeks were aflame. An eager expectancy glittered in her wide brown
eyes. Her auburn hair flaunted to the breeze as brilliantly as those
golden harbingers of the sun. Her bonnet had fallen to the ground, and
her milk-piggin was rolling away. The metallic staccato of the hammer
was silenced. A vibratory echo trembled for an instant on the air. The
group had turned in slow surprise. The blacksmith looked mutely at her.
But the idiot was laughing triumphantly, almost sanely, and pointing at
the sledge to call her attention to its significant stains. The sheriff
had laid the implement carefully aside, that it might be produced in
court in case Jubal Tynes should pass beyond the point of affording,
for Dr. Patton's satisfaction, a gratifying instance of survival from
fracture of the skull, and die in a commonplace fashion which is of no
interest to the books or the profession.

"'Twarn't 'Vander's deed! It _couldn't_ be!" she declared passionately.

For the first time he faltered. There was a pause. He could not speak.

"_I_ done it!" cried the idiot, in shrill glee.

Then Evander regained his voice. "'Twar me ez done it," he said
huskily, turning away to the anvil with a gesture of dull despair.
"_I_ done it!"

Fainting is not a common demonstration in the mountains. It seemed to
the bewildered group as if the girl had suddenly dropped dead. She
revived under the water and cinders dashed into her face from the
barrel where the steel was tempered. But life returned enfeebled and
vapid. That vivid consciousness and intensity of emotion had reached
a climax of sensibility, and now she experienced the reaction. It was
in a sort of lethargy that she watched their preparations to depart,
while she sat upon a rock at the verge of the clearing. As the wagon
trundled away down the road, laden with the stolen goods, one of the
posse looked back at her with some compassion, and observed to a
companion that she seemed to take it considerably to heart, and sagely
opined that she and 'Vander "must hev been a-keepin' company tergether
some. But then," he argued, "she's a downright good-lookin' gal, ef
she do be so red-headed. An' thar air plenty likely boys left in the
mountings yit; an' ef thar ain't, she can jes' send down the valley a
piece fur me!" and he laughed, and went away quite cheerful, despite
his compassion. The horsemen were in frantic impatience to be off, and
presently they were speeding in single file along the sandy mountain
road.

Cynthia sat there until late in the day, wistfully gazing down the
long green vista where they had disappeared. She could not believe
that Evander had really gone. Something, she felt sure, would happen
to bring them back. Once and again she thought she heard the beat
of hoofs,--of distant hoofs. It was only the melancholy wind in the
melancholy pines.

They were laden with snow before she heard aught of him. Beneath
them, instead of the dusky vistas the summer had explored, were long
reaches of ghastly white undulations, whence the boles rose dark and
drear. The Cumberland range, bleak and bare, with its leafless trees
and frowning cliffs, stretched out long, parallel spurs, one above
another, one beyond another, tier upon tier, till they appeared to meet
in one distant level line somewhat grayer than the gray sky, somewhat
more desolate of aspect than all the rest of the desolate world. When
the wind rose, Pine Mountain mourned with a mighty voice. Cynthia had
known that voice since her birth. But what new meaning in its threnody!
Sometimes the forest was dumb; the sun glittered frigidly, and the
pines, every tiny needle encased in ice, shone like a wilderness of
gleaming rays. The crags were begirt with gigantic icicles; the air
was crystalline and cold, and the only sound was the clinking of
the hand-hammer and the clanking of the sledge from the forge on the
mountain's brink. For there was a new striker there, of whom Pete
Blenkins did not stand in awe. He felt peculiarly able to cope with the
world in general since his experience had been enriched by a recent
trip to Sparta. He had been subpoenaed by the prosecution in the case
of the State of Tennessee versus Evander Price, to tell the jury all he
knew of the violent temper of his quondam striker, which he did with
much gusto and self-importance, and pocketed his fee with circumspect
dignity.

"'Vander looks toler'ble skimpy an' jail-bleached,--so Pete Blenkins
say," remarked Mrs. Ware, as she sat smoking her pipe in the chimney
corner, while Cynthia stood before the warping bars, winding the
party-colored yarn upon the equidistant pegs of the great frame. "Pete
'lowed ter me ez he hed tole you-uns ez 'Vander say he air powerful
sorry he would never l'arn ter write, when he went ter the school at
the Notch. 'Vander say he never knowed ez he would have a use for sech.
But law! the critter hed better be studyin' 'bout the opportunities he
hev wasted fur grace; fur they say now ez Jube Tynes air bound ter die.
An' he will fur true, ef old Dr. Patton air the man I take him fur."

"'T warn't 'Vander's deed," said Cynthia, her practiced hands still
busily investing the warping bars with a homely rainbow of scarlet and
blue and saffron yarn. It added an embellishment to the little room,
which was already bright with the firelight and the sunset streaming in
at the windows, and the festoons of red pepper and pop-corn and peltry
swinging from the rafters.

"Waal, waal, hev it so," said her mother, in acquiescent dissent,--"hev
it so! But 't war his deed receivin' of the stolen goods; leastwise,
the jury b'lieved so. Pete say, though, ez they wouldn't hev been so
sure, ef it warn't fur 'Vander's resistin' arrest an' in an' about
haffen killin' Jubal Tynes. Pete say ez 'Vander's name fur fightin' an'
sech seemed ter hev sot the jury powerful agin him."

"An' thar war nobody thar ez would gin a good word fur him!" cried the
girl, dropping her hands with a gesture of poignant despair.

"'T warn't in reason ez thar could be," said Mrs. Ware. "'Vander's
lawyer never summonsed but a few of the slack-jawed boys from the
Settlemint ter prove his good character, an' Pete said they 'peared
awk'ard in thar minds an' flustrated, an' spoke more agin 'Vander 'n
fur him. Pete 'lows ez they hed ter be paid thar witness-fee by the
State, too, on account of 'Vander hevin' no money ter fetch witnesses
an' sech ter Sparty. His dad an' mam air mighty shiftless--always
war,--an' they hev got that hulking idjit ter eat 'em out'n house an'
home. They hev been mightily put ter it this winter ter live along,
'thout 'Vander ter holp 'em, like he uster. But they war no ways
anxious 'bout his trial, 'kase Squair Bates tole 'em ez the jedge
would app'int a lawyer ter defend 'Vander, ez he hed no money ter hire
a lawyer fur hisself. An' the jedge app'inted a young lawyer thar;
an' Pete 'lowed ez that young lawyer made the trial the same ez a
gander-pullin' fur the 'torney-gineral. Pete say ez that young lawyer's
ways tickled the 'torney-gineral haffen ter death. Pete say the
'torney-gineral jes' sot out ter devil that young lawyer, an' he done
it. Pete say the young lawyer hed never hed more 'n one or two cases
afore, an' he acted so foolish that the 'torney-gineral kep' all the
folks laffin' at him. The jury laffed, an' so did the jedge. I reckon
'Vander thought 'twar mighty pore fun. Pete say ez 'Vander's lawyer
furgot a heap ez he oughter hev remembered, an' fairly ruined 'Vander's
chances. Arter the trial the 'torney-gineral 'lowed ter Pete ez the
State hed hed a mighty shaky case agin 'Vander. But I reckon he jes'
said that ter make his own smartness in winnin' it seem more s'prisn'.
'Vander war powerful interrupted by thar laffin' an' the game they
made o' his lawyer, an' said he didn't want no appeal. He 'lowed he hed
seen enough o' jestice. He 'lowed ez he'd take the seven years in the
pen'tiary that the jury gin him, fur fear at the nex' trial they'd gin
him twenty-seven; though the 'torney-gineral say ef Jube dies they will
fetch him out agin, an' try him fur that. The 'torney-gineral 'lowed
ter Pete ez 'Vander war a fool not ter move fur a new trial an' appeal,
an' sech. He 'lowed ez 'Vander war a derned ignorant man. An' all the
folks round the court-house gin thar opinion ez 'Vander hev got less
gumption 'bout'n the law o' the land than enny man they ever see, 'cept
that young lawyer he hed ter defend him. Pete air powerful sati'fied
with _his_ performin' in Sparty. He ups an' 'lows ez they paid him a
dollar a day fur a witness-fee, an' treated him mighty perlite,--the
jedge an' jury too."

How Cynthia lived through that winter of despair was a mystery to her
afterward. Often, as she sat brooding over the midnight embers, she
sought to picture to herself some detail of the life that Evander was
leading so far away. The storm would beat heavily on the roof of the
log cabin, the mountain wind sob through the sighing pines; ever and
anon a wolf might howl in the sombre depths of Lost Creek Valley.
But Evander had become a stranger to her imagination. She could not
construct even a vague _status_ that would answer for the problematic
mode of life of the "valley folks" who dwelt in Nashville, or in the
penitentiary hard by. She began to appreciate that it was a narrow
existence within the limits of Lost Creek Valley, and that to its
simple denizens the world beyond was a foreign world, full of strange
habitudes and alien complications. Thus it came to pass that he was no
longer even a vision. Because of this subtle bereavement she would fall
to sobbing drearily beside the dreary, dying fire,--only because of
this, for she never wondered if her image to him had also grown remote.
How she pitied him, so lonely, so strange, so forlorn, as he must
be! Did he yearn for the mountains? Could he see them in the spirit?
Surely in his dreams, surely in some kindly illusion, he might still
behold that fair land which touched the sky: the golden splendors of
the sunshine sifting through the pines; flying shadows of clouds as
fleet racing above the distant ranges; untrodden woodland nooks beside
singing cascades; or some lonely pool, whence the gray deer bounded
away through the red sumach leaves.

Sombre though the present was, the future seemed darker still, clouded
by the long and terrible suspense concerning the wounded officer's
fate and the crime that Evander had acknowledged.

"He _couldn't_ hev done it," she argued futilely. "'Twarn't his deed."

She grew pale and thin, and her strength failed with her failing
spirit, and her mother querulously commented on the change.

"An' sech a hard winter ez we-uns air a-tus-slin' with; an' that thar
ewe a-dyin' ez M'ria traded fur my little calf, ez war wuth forty sech
dead critters; an' hyar be Cynthy lookin' like she hed fairly pegged
out forty year ago, an' been raised from the grave,--an' all jes'
'kase 'Vander Price hev got ter be a evil man, an' air locked up in
the pen'tiary. It beats my time! He never said nothin' 'bout marryin',
nohow, ez I knows on. I never would hev b'lieved you-uns would hev
turned off Jeemes Blake, ez hev got a good grist-mill o' his own an'
a mighty desirable widder-woman fur a mother, jes' account of 'Vander
Price. An' 'Vander will never kem back ter Pine Mounting no more'n Lost
Creek will."

Cynthia's color flared up for a moment. Then she sedately replied, "I
hev tole Jeemes Blake, and I hev tole you-uns, ez I count on livin'
single."

"I'll be bound ye never tole 'Vander that word!" cried the astute old
woman. "Waal, waal, waal!" she continued, in exclamatory disapproval,
as she leaned to the fire and scooped up a live coal into the bowl of
her pipe, "a gal is a aggervatin' contrivance, ennyhow, in the world!
But I jes' up an' tole Jeemes ez ye hed got ter lookin' so peaked an'
mournful, like some critter ez war shot an' creepin' away ter die
somewhar, an' he hedn't los' much, arter all." She puffed vigorously
at her pipe; then, with a change of tone, "An' Jeemes air mighty
slack-jawed ter his elders, too! He tuk me up ez sharp. He 'lowed ez
he hed no fault ter find with yer looks. He said ye war pritty enough
fur him. Then my dander riz, an' I spoke up, an' says, 'Mebbe so,
Jeemes, mebbe so, fur ye air in no wise pritty yerself.' An' then he
gin me no more of his jaw, but arter he hed sot a while longer he said,
'Far'well,' toler'ble perlite, an' put out."

After a long time the snow slipped gradually from the mountain top, and
the drifts in the deep abysses melted, and heavy rains came on. The
mists clung, shroud-like, to Pine Mountain. The distant ranges seemed
to withdraw themselves into indefinite space, and for weeks Cynthia was
bereft of their familiar presence. Myriads of streamlets, channeling
the gullies and swirling among the bowlders, were flowing down the
steeps to join Lost Creek, on its way to its mysterious sepulchre
beneath the mountains.

And at last the spring opened. A vivid green tipped the sombre plumes
of the pines. The dull gray mists etherealized to a silver gauze, and
glistened above the mellowing landscape. The wild cherry was blooming
far and near. From the summit of the mountain could be seen for many
a mile the dirt-road in the valley,--a tawny streak of color on every
hilltop, or winding by every fallow field and rocky slope. A wild, new
hope was suddenly astir in Cynthia's heart; a new energy fired her
blood. It may have been only the recuperative power of youth asserting
itself. To her it was as if she had heard the voice of the Lord; and
she arose and followed it.


                                  II.

Following the voice of the Lord, Cynthia took her way along a sandy
bridle-path that penetrates the dense forests of Pine Mountain. The
soft spring wind, fluttering in beneath her sun-bonnet, found the
first wild-rose blooming on her thin cheek. A new light shone like a
steadfast star in her deep brown eyes. "I hev took a-holt," she said
resolutely, "an' I'll never gin it up. 'Twarn't his deed, an' I'll
prove that, agin his own word. I dunno how,--but I'll prove it."

The woods seemed to open at last, for the brink of the ridge was close
at hand. As the trees were marshaled down the steep declivity, she
could see above their heads the wide and splendid mountain landscape,
with the benediction of the spring upon it, with the lofty peace of the
unclouded sky above it, with an impressive silence pervading it that
was akin to a holy solemnity.

There was a rocky, barren slope to the left, and among the brambly
ledges sheep were feeding. As the flock caught her attention she
experienced a certain satisfaction. "They hed sheep in the Lord's
life-time," she observed. "He gins a word 'bout'n them more'n enny
other critter."

And she sat down on a rock, among the harmless creatures, and was less
lonely and forlorn.

A little log house surmounted the slope. It was quaintly awry,
like most of the mountaineers' cabins, and the ridgepole, with its
irregularly projecting clapboards serrating the sky behind it,
described a negligently oblique line. Its clay chimney had a leaning
tendency, and was propped to its duty by a long pole. There was a
lofty martin-house, whence the birds whirled fitfully. The rail fence
inclosing the dooryard was only a few steps from the porch. There
rested the genial afternoon sunshine. It revealed the spinning-wheel
that stood near the wall; the shelf close to the door, with a pail of
water and a gourd for the incidentally thirsty; the idle churn, its
dasher on another shelf to dry; a rooster strutting familiarly in at
the open door; and a newly hatched brood picking about among the legs
of the splint-bottomed chairs, under the guidance of a matronly old
"Dominicky hen." In one of the chairs sat a man, emaciated, pallid,
swathed in many gay-colored quilts, and piping querulously in a high,
piercing key to a worn and weary woman, who came to the fence and
looked down the hill as he feebly pointed.

"Cynthy--Cynthy Ware!" she called out, "air that you-uns?"

Cynthia hesitated, then arose and went forward a few steps. "It be me,"
she said, as if making an admission.

"Kem up hyar. Jube's wantin' ter know why ye hain't been hyar ter
inquire arter him." The woman waited at the gate, and opened it for
her visitor. She looked hardly less worn and exhausted than the broken
image of a man in the chair. "Jube counts up every critter in the
mountings ez kems ter inquire arter him," she added, in a lower voice.
"'Pears-like ter me ez it air about time fur worldly pride ter hev
loosed a-holt on him; but Satan kin foster guile whar thar ain't enough
life left fur nuthin' else, an' pore Jube hev never been so gin over
ter the glory o' this world ez now."

"He 'pears ter be gittin' on some," said the girl, although she hardly
recognized in the puny, pallid apparition among the muffling quilts the
bluff and hale mountaineer she had known.

"Fust-rate!" weakly piped out the constable. "I eat a haffen pone
o' bread fur dinner!" Then he turned querulously to his wife: "Jane
Elmiry, ain't ye goin' ter git me that thar fraish aig ter whip up in
whiskey, like the doctor said?"

"'T ain't time yit, Jube," replied the patient wife. "The doctor 'lowed
ez the aig must be spang fraish; an' ez old Topknot lays ter the minit
every day, I'm a-waitin' on her."

The wasted limbs under the quilts squirmed around vivaciously. "An'
yander's the darned critter," he cried, spying old Topknot leisurely
pecking about under a lilac bush, "a-feedin' around ez complacent an'
sati'fied ez ef I warn't a-settin' hyar waitin' on her lazy bones!
Cynthy, I'm jes' a-honing arter suthin' ter eat all the time, an'
that's what makes me 'low ez I'm gittin' well; though Jane Elmiry"--he
glared fiercely at his meek wife, "hev somehows los' her knack at
cookin', an' sometimes I can't eat my vittles when they air fetched ter
me."

He fell back in his chair, his tangled, over-grown hair hardly
distinguishable from his tangled, over-grown beard. His eyes roved
restlessly about the quiet landscape. A mist was gathering over the
eastern ranges; shot with the sunlight, it was but a silken and filmy
suggestion of vapor. A line of vivid green in the valley marked the
course of Lost Creek by the willows and herbage fringing its banks. A
gilded bee, with a languorous drone, drifted in and out of the little
porch, and the shadow of the locust above it was beginning to lengthen.
The tree was in bloom, and Cynthia picked up a fallen spray as she sat
down on the step. He glanced casually at her; then, with the egotism of
an invalid, his mind reverted to himself.

"Why hain't ye been hyar ter inquire arter me, Cynthy,--you-uns, or yer
dad, or yer mam, or somebody? I hain't been lef' ter suffer, though,
'thout folkses axin' arter me, I tell ye! The miller hev been hyar day
arter day. Baker Teal, what keeps the store yander ter the Settlemint,
hev rid over reg'lar. Tom Peters kems ez sartain ez the sun. An' the
jestice o' the peace"--he winked weakly in triumph, "Squair Bates--hev
been hyar nigh on ter wunst a week. The sheriff or one o' the dep'ties
hain't been sca'ce round hyar, nuther. An' some other folkses--I name
no names--sends me all the liquor I kin drink from a still ez they say
grows in a hollow rock round hyar somewhar. They sends me all I kin
drink, an' Jane Elmiry, too. I don't want but a little, but Jane Elmiry
air a tremenjious toper, ye know!" He laughed in a shrill falsetto
at his joke, and his wife smiled, but faintly, for she realized the
invalid's pleasant mood was brief. "Ef I hed a-knowed how pop'lar I be,
I'd hev run fur jestice o' the peace stiddier constable. But nex' time
thar'll be a differ; that hain't the las' election this world will ever
see, Cynthy." Then, as his eyes fell upon her once more, he remembered
his question. "Why n't ye been hyar ter inquire arter me?"

The girl was confused by his changed aspect, his eager, restless talk,
his fierce girding at his patient wife, and lost what scanty tact she
might have otherwise claimed.

"The folkses ez rid by hyar tole us how ye be a-gittin' on. An' we-uns
'lowed ez mebbe ye wouldn't want ter see us, bein' ez we war always
sech friends with 'Vander, an'"--

The woman stopped her by a hasty gesture and a look of terror. They
did not escape the invalid's notice.

"What ails ye, Jane Elmiry?" he cried, angrily. "Ye act like ye war
_de_stracted!"

A sudden fit of coughing impeded his utterance, and gave his wife the
opportunity for a whispered aside. "He ain't spoke 'Vander's name sence
he war hurt. The doctor said he warn't ter talk about his a-gittin'
hurt, an' the man ez done it. The doctor 'lowed 't would fever him an'
put him out'n his head, an' he must jes' think 'bout'n gittin' well all
the time, an' sech."

Jubal Tynes had recovered his voice and his temper. "I hain't got
no grudge agin' 'Vander," he declared, in his old, bluff way, "nur
'Vander's friends, nuther. It air jes' that dad-burned idjit, 'Lijah,
ez I _de_spise. Jane Elmiry, ain't that old Topknot ez I hear
a-cack-lin'? Waal, waal, sir, dad-burn that thar lazy, idle poultry!
Air she a-stalkin' round the yard yit? Go, Jane Elmiry, an' see whar
she be. Ef she ain't got sense enough ter git on her nest an lay a aig
when desirable, she hain't got sense enough ter keep out'n a chicken
pie."

"I mought skeer her off'n her nest," his wife remonstrated.

But the imperious invalid insisted. She rose reluctantly, and as she
stepped off the porch she cast an imploring glance at Cynthia.

The girl was trembling. The mere mention of the deed to its victim
had unnerved her. She felt it was perhaps a safe transition from the
subject to talk about the idiot brother. "I hev hearn folks 'low ez
'Lijah oughter be locked up, but I dunno," she said.

The man fixed a concentrated gaze upon her. "Waal, ain't he?"

"'Lijah ain't locked up," she faltered, bewildered.

His face fell. Unaccountably enough, his pride seemed grievously cut
down.

"Waal, 'Lijah ain't 'sponsible, I know," he reasoned; "but bein' ez he
treated me this way, an' me a important off'cer o' the law, 'pears-like
'twould a-been more respec'ful ef they hed committed him ter jail ez
insane, or sent him ter the 'sylum,--fur they take some crazies at the
State's expense." He paused thoughtfully. He was mortified, hurt. "But
shucks!" he exclaimed presently, "let him treat haffen the county ez he
done me, ef he wants ter. I ain't a-keerin'."

Cynthia's head was awhirl. She could hardly credit her senses.

"How war it that 'Lijah treated you-uns?" she gasped.

In his turn he stared, amazed.

"Cynthy, 'pears-like ye hev los' yer mind! How did 'Lijah treat me?
Waal, 'Lijah whacked me on the head with his brother's sledge, an'
split my skull, an' the folks say some o' my brains oozed out. I hev
got more of 'em now, though, than ye hev. Ye look plumb bereft. What
ails the gal?"

"Air ye sure--sure ez that war the happening of it?--kase 'Vander tells
a differ. He 'lowed ez 't war _him_ ez hit ye with the sledge. An'
nobody suspicioned 'Lijah."

Jubal Tynes looked very near death now. His pallid face was framed in
long elf-locks; he thrust his head forward, till his emaciated throat
and neck were distinctly visible; his lower jaw dropped in astonishment.

"God A'mighty!" he ejaculated, "why hev 'Vander tole sech a lie?
_Sure!_ Why, I _seen_ 'Lijah! 'Vander never teched the sledge. An'
'Vander never teched me."

"Ye hev furgot, mebbe," she urged, feverishly. "'T war in the dark."

"Listen at the gal argufyin' with me!" he exclaimed, angrily. "I _seen_
'Lijah, I tell ye, in the light o' the forge fire. 'T war n't more 'n a
few coals, but ez 'Lijah swung his arm it fanned the fire, an' it lept
up. I seen his face in the glow, an' the sledge in his hand. 'Lijah war
hid a-hint the hood. 'Vander war t' other side o' the anvil. I gripped
with 'Lijah. I seen him plain. He hit me twict. I never los' my senses
till the second lick. Then I drapped. What ails 'Vander, ter tell sech
a lie? Ef I hed a-died, stiddier gittin' well so powerful peart, they'd
hev hung him, sure."

"Mebbe he thought they'd hang 'Lijah!" she gasped, appalled at the
magnitude of the sacrifice.

"'Lijah ain't 'sponsible ter the law," said Jubal Tynes, with his
magisterial aspect, "bein' ez he air a ravin' crazy, ez oughter be
locked up."

"I reckon 'Vander never knowed ez that war true," she rejoined,
reflectively. "The 'torney-gineral tole Pete Blenkins, when 'Vander war
convicted of receivin' of stolen goods, ez how 'Vander war toler'ble
ignorant, an' knowed powerful little 'bout the law o' the land. He done
it, I reckon, ter pertect the idjit."

Jubal Tynes made no rejoinder. He had fallen back in his chair, so
frail, so exhausted by the unwonted excitement, that she was alarmed
anew, realizing how brief his time might be.

"Jubal Tynes," she said, leaning forward and looking up at him
imploringly, "ef I war ter tell what ye hev tole me, nobody would
believe me, 'kase--'kase 'Vander an' me hev kep' company some. Hedn't
ye better tell it ter the Squair ez how 'Vander never hit ye, but
said he did, ter git the blame shet o' the idjit 'Lijah, ez ain't
'sponsible, nohows? Ain't thar no way ter make it safe fur 'Vander?
They 'lowed he wouldn't hev been convicted of receivin' of stolen goods
'ceptin' fur the way the jury thought he behaved 'bout resistin' arrest
an' hittin' ye with the sledge."

The sick man's eyes were aflame. "Ye 'low ez I'm goin' ter die, Cynthy
Ware!" he cried, with sudden energy. "I'll gin ye ter onderstand ez I
feel ez strong ez a ox! I won't do nuthin' fur 'Vander. Let him stand
or fall by the lie he hev tole! I feel ez solid ez Pine Mounting! I
won't do nuthin' ez ef I war a-goin' ter die,--like ez ef I war a
chicken with the pip--an' whar air that ole hen ez war nominated ter
lay a aig, ter whip up in whiskey, an' ain't done it?"

A sudden wild cackling broke upon the air. The red rooster, standing by
the gate, stretched up his long neck to listen, and lifted his voice in
jubilant sympathy. Jubal Tynes looked around at Cynthia with a laugh.
Then his brow darkened, and his mind reverted to his refusal.

"Ye jes' onderstand," he reiterated, "ez I won't do nuthin' like ez ef
I war goin' ter die."

She got home as best she could, weeping and wringing her hands much
of the way, feeling baffled and bruised, and aghast at the terrible
perplexities that crowded about her.

Jubal Tynes had a bad night. He was restless and fretful, and
sometimes, when he had been still for a while, and seemed about to sink
into slumber, he would start up abruptly, declaring that he could not
"git shet of studying 'bout 'n 'Vander, an' 'Lijah, an' the sledge,"
and violently wishing that Cynthia Ware had died before she ever came
interrupting him about 'Vander, and 'Lijah, and the sledge. Toward
morning exhaustion prevailed. He sank into a deep, dreamless sleep,
from which he woke refreshed and interested in the matter of breakfast.

That day a report went the excited rounds of the mountain that he
had made a sworn statement before Squire Bates, denying that Evander
Price had resisted arrest, exonerating him of all connection with the
injuries supposed to have been received at his hands, and inculpating
only the idiot Elijah. This was supplemented by Dr. Patton's affidavit
as to his patient's mental soundness and responsibility.

It roused Cynthia's flagging spirit to an ecstasy of energy. Her
strength was as fictitious as the strength of delirium, but it
sufficed. Opposition could not baffle it. Obstacles but multiplied its
expedients. She remembered that the trained and astute attorney for
the State had declared to Pete Blenkins, after the trial, that the
prosecution had no case against Evander Price for receiving stolen
goods, and must have failed but for the prejudice of the jury. It was
proved to them by his own confession that he had resisted arrest and
assaulted the officer of the law, and circumstantial evidence had a
light task, with this auxiliary, to establish other charges. Now, she
thought, if the jury that convicted him, the judge that sentenced
him, and the governor of the State were cognizant of this stupendous
self-sacrifice to fraternal affection, could they, would they, still
take seven years of his life from him? At least, they should know of
it,--she had resolved on that. She hardly appreciated the difficulty of
the task before her. She was densely ignorant. She lived in a primitive
community. Such a paper as a petition for executive clemency had
never been drawn within its experience. She could not have discovered
that this proceeding was practicable, except for the pride of office
and legal lore of Jubal Tynes. He joyed in displaying his learning;
but beyond the fact that such a paper was possible, and sometimes
successful, and that she had better see the lawyer at the Settlement
about it, he suggested nothing of value. And so she tramped a matter
of ten miles along the heavy, sandy road, through the dense and
lonely woods; and weary, but flushed with joyous hope, she came upon
the surprised lawyer at the Settlement. This was a man who built the
great structure of justice upon a foundation of fees. He listened to
her, noted the poverty of her aspect, and recommended her to secure the
coöperation of the convict's immediate relatives. And so, patiently
back again, along the dank and darkening mountain road.

The home of her lover was not an inviting abode. When she had turned
from the thoroughfare into a vagrant, irresponsible-looking path,
winding about in the depths of the forest, it might have seemed
that in a group which presently met her eyes, the animals were the
more emotional, alert, and intelligent element. The hounds came
huddling over the rickety fence, and bounded about her in tumultuous
recognition. An old sow, with a litter of shrill soprano pigs, started
up from a clump of weeds, in maternal anxiety and doubt of the
intruder's intentions. The calf peered between the rails in mild wonder
at this break in the monotony. An old man sat motionless on the fence,
with as sober and business-like an aspect as if he did it for a salary.
The porch was occupied by an indiscriminate collection of household
effects,--cooking utensils, garments, broken chairs,--and an untidy,
disheveled woman. An old crone, visible within the door, was leisurely
preparing the evening meal. Cynthia's heart warmed at the sight of the
familiar place. The tears started to her sympathetic eyes. "I hev kem
ter tell ye all 'bout'n 'Vander!" she cried impulsively, when she was
welcomed to a chair and a view of the weed-grown "gyarden-spot."

But the disclosure of her scheme did not waken responsive enthusiasm.
The old man, still dutifully riding the fence, conservatively declared
that the law of the land was a "mighty tetchy contrivance," and he
didn't feel called on to meddle with it. "They mought jail the whole
fambly, ez fur ez I know, an' then who would work the gyarden-spot, ez
air thrivin' now, an' the peas fullin' up cornsider'ble?"

Mrs. Price had "no call ter holp sot the law on 'Lijah agin 'Vander's
word. I dunno what the folks would do ter 'Lijah ef Jube died, sence he
hev swore ez he hev done afore Squair Bates. Some tole me ez 'Lijah air
purtected by bein' a idjit but I ain't sati'fied 'bout'n that. 'Lijah
war sane enough ter be toler'ble skeered when he hearn bout'n it all,
an' hev tuk ter shettin' hisself up in the shed-room when strangers kem
about." And indeed Cynthia had an unpleasant impression that the idiot
was looking out suspiciously at her from a crack in the door, but he
precipitately slammed it when she turned her head to make sure. The old
crone paused in her preparations for supper, that she might apply all
her faculties to argument. "It don't 'pear ter reason how the gov'nor
will pardon 'Vander fur receivin' of stolen goods jes' 'kase 't warn't
him ez bruk Jube Tynes's head," she declared. "Vander war jailed fur
_receivin' stolen goods_,--nobody never keered nothin' fur Jube Tynes's
head! _I_ hev knowed the Tynes fambly time out'n mind," she continued,
raising her voice in shrill contempt. "I knowed Jubal Tynes, an' his
daddy afore him. An' now ter kem talkin' ter me 'bout the gov'nor o'
Tennessee keerin' fur Jube Tynes's nicked head. _I_ don't keer nothin'
'bout Jube Tynes's nicked head; an' let 'em tell the gov'nor that fur
_me_, an' see what he will think then!"

Poor Cynthia! It had never occurred to her to account herself gifted
beyond her fellows and her opportunities. The simple events of their
primitive lives had never before elicited the contrast. It gave her
no satisfaction. She only experienced a vague, miserable wonder that
she should have perceptions beyond their range of vision, should be
susceptible of emotions which they could never share. She realized that
she could get no material aid here, and she went away at last without
asking for it.

Her little all was indeed little,--a few chickens, some "spun-truck,"
a sheep that she had nursed from an orphaned lamb, a "cag" of
apple-vinegar, and a bag of dried fruit,--but it had its value to the
mountain lawyer; and when he realized that this was indeed "all" he
drew the petition in consideration thereof, and appended the affidavits
of Jubal Tynes and Dr. Patton.

"She ain't got a red head on her for nothin'," he said to himself,
in admiration of her astuteness in insisting that, as a part of his
services, he should furnish her with a list of the jury that convicted
Evander Price.

"For every man of 'em hev got ter sot his name ter that thar petition,"
she averred.

He even offered, when his energy and interest were aroused, to take the
paper with him to Sparta when he next attended circuit court. There, he
promised, he would secure some influential signatures from the members
of the bar and other prominent citizens.

When she was fairly gone he forgot his energy and interest. He kept the
paper three months. He did not once offer it for a signature. And when
she demanded its return, it was mislaid, lost.

Oratory is a legal requisite in that region. He might have taken some
fine points from her unconscious eloquence, inspired by love and grief
and despair, her scathing arraignment of his selfish neglect, her
upbraidings and alternate appeals. It overwhelmed him, in some sort,
and yet he was roused into activity unusual enough to revive the lost
document. She went away with it, leaving him in rueful meditation. "She
_hain't_ got a red head on her for nothin'," he said, remembering her
pungent rhetoric.

But as he glanced out of the door, and saw her trudging down the road,
all her grace and pliant swaying languor lost in convulsive, awkward
haste and a feeble, jerky gait, he laughed.

For poor Cynthia had become in some sort a grotesque figure. Only
Time can pose a crusader to picturesque advantage. The man or woman
with a great and noble purpose carries about with it a pitiful little
personality that reflects none of its lustre. Cynthia's devotion, her
courage, her endurance in righting this wrong, were not so readily
apparent when, in the valley, she went tramping from one juror's house
to another's as were her travel-stained garments, her wild, eager eye,
her incoherent, anxious speech, her bare, swollen feet,--for sometimes
she was fain to carry her coarse shoes in her hands for relief in the
long journeyings. Her father had refused to aid "sech a fool yerrand,"
and locked up his mare in the barn. Without a qualm, he had beheld
Cynthia set out resolutely on foot. "She'll be back afore the cows kem
home," he said, with a laughing nod at his wife. But they came lowing
home and clanking their mellow bells in many and many a red sunset
before they again found Cynthia waiting for them on the banks of Lost
Creek.

The descent to a lower level was a painful experience to the little
mountaineer. She was "sifflicated" by the denser atmosphere of the
"valley country," and exhausted by the heat; but when she could think
only of her mission she was hopeful, elated, and joyously kept on
her thorny way. Sometimes, however, the dogs barked at her, and the
children hooted after her, and the men and women she met looked askance
upon her, and made her humbly conscious of her disheveled, dusty
attire, her awkward, hobbling gait, her lean, hungry, worn aspect.
Occasionally they asked for her story, and listened incredulously and
with sarcastic comments. Once, as she started again down the road, she
heard her late interlocutor call out to some one at the back of the
house, "Becky, take them clothes in off 'n the line, an' take 'em in
quick!"

And though her physical sufferings were great, she had some tears to
shed for sorrow's sake.

Always she got a night's lodging at the house of one or another of the
twelve jurymen, whose names were gradually affixed to the petition. But
they too had questions that were hard to answer. "Are you kin of his?"
they would ask, impressed by her hardships and her self-immolation.
And when she would answer, "No," she would fancy that the shelter
they gave her was not in confidence, but for mere humanity. And she
shrank sensitively from these supposititious suspicions. They were
poor men, mostly, but one of them stopped his plowing to lend her his
horse to the next house, and another gave her a lift of ten miles in
his wagon, as it was on his way. He it was who told her, in rehearsing
the country-side gossip, that the governor was canvassing the State
for reëlection, and had made an appointment to speak at Sparta the
following day.

A new idea flashed into her mind. Her sudden resolution fairly
frightened her. She cowered before it, as they drove along between the
fields of yellowing corn, all in the gairish sunshine, spreading so
broadly over the broad plain. That night she lay awake thinking of it,
while the cold drops started upon her brow. Before daybreak she was
up and trudging along the road to Sparta. It was still early when she
entered the little town of the mountain bench, set in the flickering
mists and chill, matutinal sunshine, and encompassed on every hand by
the mighty ranges. A flag floated from the roof of the court-house, and
there was an unusual stir in the streets. Excited groups were talking
at every corner, and among a knot of men, standing near, one riveted
her attention. He had been spoken of in her hearing as the governor of
the State. Bold with the realization of the opportunity, she pushed
through the staring crowd and thrust the much-thumbed petition into his
hand. He cast a surprised glance upon her, then looked at the paper.
"All right; I'll examine it," he said hastily, and folding it he turned
away. In his political career he had studied many faces; unconsciously
an adept, he may have deciphered those subtle hieroglyphics of
character, and despite her ignorance, her poverty, and the low,
criminal atmosphere of her mission, read in her eyes the dignity of her
endeavor, the nobility of her nature, and the prosaic martyrdom of her
toilsome experience. He turned suddenly back to reassure her. "Rely on
it," he said heartily, "I'll do what I can."

Her pilgrimage was accomplished; there was nothing more but to turn
her face to the mountains. It seemed to her at times as if she should
never reach them. They were weary hours before she came upon Lost
Creek, loitering down the sunlit valley to vanish in the grewsome
caverns beneath the range. The sumach leaves were crimsoning along
its banks. The scarlet-oak emblazoned the mountain side. Above the
encompassing heights the sky was blue, and the mountain air tasted
like wine. Never a crag or chasm so sombre but flaunted some swaying
vine or long tendriled moss, gilded and gleaming yellow. Buckeyes
were falling, and the ashy "Indian pipes" silvered the roots of the
trees. In every marshy spot glowed the scarlet cardinal-flower, and
the goldenrod had sceptred the season. Now and again the forest quiet
was broken by the patter of acorns from the chestnut-oaks, and the
mountain swine were abroad for the plenteous mast. Overhead she heard
the faint, weird cry of wild geese winging southward. The whole aspect
of the scene was changed, save only Pine Mountain. There it stood,
solemn, majestic, mysterious, masked by its impenetrable growth, and
hung about with duskier shadows wherever a ravine indented the slope.
The spirit within it was chanting softly, softly. For the moment she
felt the supreme exaltation of the mountains. It lifted her heart. And
when a sudden fluctuating red glare shot out over the murky shades, and
the dull sighing of the bellows reached her ear from the forge on the
mountain's brink, and the air was presently vibrating with the clinking
of the hand-hammer and the clanking of the sledge, and the crags
clamored with the old familiar echoes, she realized that she had done
all she had sought to do; that she had gone forth helpless but for her
own brave spirit; that she had returned helpful, and hopeful, and that
here was her home, and she loved it.

This enabled her to better endure the anger and reproaches of her
relatives and the curiosity and covert suspicion of the whole
country-side.

Evander's people regarded the situation with grave misgivings. "I hope
ter the mercy-seat," quavered old man Price, "ez Cynthy Ware hain't
gone an' actially sot the gov'nor o' Tennessee more' n ever agin that
pore critter; but I misdoubts,"--he shook his head piteously, as he
perched on the fence,--"I misdoubts."

"An' the insurance o' that thar gal!" cried Mrs. Price. "She never had
no call ter meddle with 'Vander."

Cynthia's mother entertained this view, also, but for a different
reason. "'Twar no consarn o' Cynthy's, nohow," she said, advising with
her daughter Maria. "Cynthy air neither kith nor kin o' 'Vander, who
air safer an' likelier in the pen'tiary 'n ennywhar else, 'kase it
leaves her no ch'ice but Jeemes Blake, ez she hed better take whilst
he air in the mind fur it an' whilst she kin git him."

Jubal Tynes wished he could have foreseen that she would meet the
governor, for he could have told her exactly what to say; and this, he
was confident, would have secured the pardon.

And it was clearly the opinion of the "mounting," expressed in the
choice coteries assembled at the mill, the blacksmith's shop, the
Settlement, and the still-house, that a "young gal like Cynthy" had
transcended all the bounds of propriety in this "wild junketing after
gov'nors an' sech through all the valley country, whar she warn't
knowed from a gate-post, nor her dad nuther."

There were, however, doubters, who disparaged the whole account of the
journey as a fable, and circulated a whisper that the petition had
never been presented.

This increased to open incredulity as time wore on, to ridicule, to
taunts, for no word came of the petition for pardon and no word of the
prisoner.

The bleak winter wore away; spring budded and bloomed into summer;
summer was ripening into autumn, and every day, as the corn yellowed
and thickly swathed ears hung far from the stalk, and the drone of the
locust was loud in the grass, and the deep, slumberous glow of the
sunshine suffused every open spot, Cynthia, with the return of the
season, was vividly reminded of her weary ploddings, with bleeding
feet and aching head, between such fields along the lengthening valley
roads. And the physical anguish she remembered seemed light--seemed
naught--to the anguish of suspense which racked her now. Sometimes she
felt impelled to a new endeavor. Then her strong common sense checked
the useless impulse. She had done all that could be done. She had
planted the seed. She had worked and watched, and beheld it spring up
and put forth and grow into fair proportions; only time might bring its
full fruition.

The autumn was waning; cold rains set in, and veined the rocky chasms
with alien torrents; the birds had all flown, when suddenly the
Indian summer, with its golden haze and its great red sun, its purple
distances and its languorous joy, its balsamic perfumes and its vagrant
day-dreams, slipped down upon the gorgeous crimson woods, and filled
them with its glamour and its poetry.

One of these days--a perfect day--a great sensation pervaded Pine
Mountain. Word went the rounds that a certain notorious horse thief,
who had served out his term in the peni tentiary, had stopped at the
blacksmith shop on his way home, glad enough of the prospect of being
there once more; "an' ez pious in speech ez the rider, mighty nigh,"
said the dwellers about Pine Mountain, unfamiliar with his aspect as
a penitent and discounting his repentance. It was a long story he had
to tell about himself, and he enjoyed posing as the central figure
in the curious crowd that had gathered about him. He seemed for the
time less like a criminal than a great traveler, so strange and full
of interest to the simple mountaineers were his experiences and the
places he had seen. He stood leaning against the anvil, as he talked,
looking out through the barn-like door upon the amplitude of the great
landscape before him; its mountains so dimly, delicately blue in the
distance, so deeply red and brown and yellow nearer at hand, and still
closer shaded off by the dark plumy boughs of the pines on either side
of the ravine above which the forge was perched. Deep in the valley,
between them all, Lost Creek hied along, veining the purple haze with
lines of palpitating silver. It was only when the material for personal
narration was quite exhausted that he entered, though with less zest,
on other themes.

"Waal,--now, 'Vander Price," he drawled, shifting his great cowhide
boots one above another. "I war 'stonished when I hearn ez 'Vander
war in fur receivin' of stolen goods. Shucks!"--his little black eyes
twinkled beneath the drooping brim of a white wool hat, and his wide,
flat face seemed wider and flatter for a contemptuous grin,--"I can't
onderstand how a man kin git his own cornsent ter go cornsortin' with
them ez breaks inter stores and dwellin's an' sech, an' hankerin' arter
store-fixin's an' store-truck. Live-stock air a differ. The beastis air
temptin', partic'lar ef they air young an' hev got toler'ble paces."
Perhaps a change in the faces of his audience admonished him, for he
qualified: "The beastis air temptin'--_ter the ungodly_. I hev gin over
sech doin's myself, 'kase we hed a toler'ble chaplain yander in the
valley" (he alluded thus equivocally to his late abode), "an' I sot
under the preachin' a good while. But store-truck!--shucks! Waal, the
gyards 'lowed ez 'Vander war a turrible feller ter take keer on, when
they war a-fetchin' him down ter Nashvul. He jes' seemed desolated. One
minit he'd fairly cry ez ef every sob would take his life; an' the nex'
he'd be squarin' off ez savage, an' tryin' ter hit the gyards in the
head. He war ironed, hand an' foot."

There was no murmur of sympathy. All listened with stolid curiosity,
except Cynthia, who was leaning against the open door. The tears
forced their way, and silently flowed, unheeded, down her cheeks. She
fixed her brown eyes upon the man as he went on:--

"But when they struck the railroad, an' the critter seen the iron
engine ez runs by steam, like I war a-tellin' ye about, he jes' stood
rooted ter the spot in amaze; they could sca'cely git him budged away
from thar. They 'lowed they hed never seen sech joy ez when he war
travelin' on the steam-kyars a-hint it. When they went a-skeetin' along
ez fast an' ez steady ez a tur-r-key-buzzard kin fly, 'Vander would
jes' look fust at one o' the gyards an' then at the t'other, a-smilin'
an' tickled nearly out 'n his senses. An' wunst he said, 'Ef this ain't
the glory o' God revealed in the work o' man, what is?' The gyards
'lowed he acted so cur'ous they would hev b'lieved he war a plumb
idjit, ef it hedn't a-been fur what happened arterward at the Pen."

"Waal, what war it ez happened at the Pen?" demanded Pete Blenkins. His
red face, suffused with the glow of the smouldering forge-fire, was
a little wistful, as if he grudged his quondam striker these unique
sensations.

"They put him right inter the forge at the Pen, an' he tuk ter the work
like a pig ter carrots." The ex-convict paused for a moment, and cast
his eye disparagingly about the primitive smithy. "They do a power o'
work thar, Pete, ez you-uns never drempt of."

"Shucks!" rejoined Pete incredulously, yet a trifle ill at ease.

"'Vander war a good blacksmith fur the mountings, but they sot him ter
l'arnin' thar. They 'lowed, though, ez he war pearter'n the peartest.
He got ter be powerful pop'lar with all the gyards an' authorities, an'
sech. He war plumb welded ter his work--he sets more store by metal
than by grace. He 'lowed ter me ez he wouldn't hev missed bein' thar
fur nuthin'! 'Vander air a powerful cur'ous critter: he 'lowed ter me
ez one year in the forge at the Pen war wuth a hundred years in the
mountings ter him."

Poor Cynthia! Her eyes, large, luminous, and sweet, with the holy
rapture of a listening saint, were fixed upon the speaker's evil,
uncouth face. Evander had not then been so unhappy!

"But when they hired out the convict labor ter some iron works' folks,
'Vander war glad ter go, 'kase he'd git ter l'arn more yit 'bout
workin' in iron an' sech. An' he war powerful outed when he hed ter
kem back, arter ten months, from them works. He hed tuk his stand in
metal thar, too. An' he hed fixed some sort'n contrivance ter head
rivets quicker'n cheaper'n it air ginerally done; an' he war afeard
ter try ter git it 'patented,' ez he calls it, 'kase he b'lieved the
Pen could claim it ez convict labor,--though some said not. Leastwise,
he determinated ter hold on ter his idee till his term war out. But
he war powerful interrupted in his mind fur fear somebody else would
think up the idee, too, an' patent it fust. He war powerful irked by
the Pen arter he kem back from the iron works. He 'lowed ter me ez he
war fairly crazed ter git back ter 'em. He 'lowed ez he hed ruther see
that thar big shed an' the red hot puddler's balls a-trundlin' about,
an' all the wheels a-whurlin', an' the big shears a-bitin' the metal ez
nip, an' the tremenjious hammer a-poundin' away, an' all the dark night
around split with lines o' fire, than to see the hills o' heaven! It
'pears to me mo' like hell! But jes' when 'Vander war honing arter them
works ez ef it would kill him ter bide away from thar, his pardon kem.
He fairly lept an' shouted fur joy!"

"His pardon!" cried Cynthia.

"Air 'Vander pardoned fur true?" exclaimed a chorus of mountaineers.

The ex-convict stared about him in surprise. "Ain't you-uns knowed that
afore? 'Vander hev been out'n the Pen a year."

A year! A vague, chilly premonition thrilled through Cynthia. "Whar be
he now?" she asked.

"Yander ter them iron works. He lit out straight. I seen him las' week,
when I war travelin' from my cousin Jerry's house, whar I went ez soon
ez I got out'n the Pen. The steam-kyars stopped at a station ez be nigh
them iron works, an' I met up with 'Vander on the platform. That's how
I fund out all I hev been a-tellin' ye, 'kase we didn't hev no time ter
talk whilst we war in the Pen; they don't allow no chin-choppin' thar.
When 'Vander war released, the folks at the iron works tuk him ter work
on weges, an' gin him eighty dollars a month."

There was an outburst of incredulity. "Waal, sir!" "Tim'thy, ye kerry
that mouth o' yourn too wide open, an' it leaks out all sorts o' lies!"
"We-uns know ye of old, Tim'thy!" "Pine Mounting haint furgot ye yit!"

"I wouldn't gin eighty dollars fur 'Vander Price, hide, horns, an'
tallow!" declared Pete Blenkins, folding his big arms over his leathern
apron, and looking about with the air of a man who has placed his
valuation at extremely liberal limits.

"I knowed ye wouldn't b'lieve that, but it air gospel-true," protested
the ex-convict. "Thar is more money a-goin' in the valley 'n thar is in
the mountings, an' folks pays more fur work. Besides that, 'Vander hev
got a patent, ez he calls it, fur his rivet contrivance, an' he 'lows
ez it hev paid him some a'ready. It'll sorter stiffen up the backbone
o' that word ef I tell ye ez he 'lowed ez he hed jes' sent two hunderd
dollars ter Squair Bates ter lift the mortgage off'n old man Price's
house an' land, an' two hunderd dollars more ter be gin ter his dad
ez a present. An' Squair Bates acted 'cordin' ter 'Vander's word, an'
lifted the mortgage, an' handed old man Price the balance. An' what
do ye s'pose old man Price done with the money? He went right out an'
buried it in the woods, fur fear he'd be pulled out'n his bed fur it,
some dark night, by lawless ones. He'll never find it agin, I reckon.
The idjit hed more sense. I seen 'Lijah diggin' fur it, ez I rid by
thar ter-day."

"Did 'Vander 'low when he air comin' back ter Pine Mounting?" asked
Pete Blenkins. "He hev been gone two year an' a half now."

"I axed him that word. An' he said he mought kem back ter see his folks
nex' year, mebbe, or the year arter that. But I misdoubts. He air so
powerful tuk up with metal an' iron, an' sech, an' so keen 'bout his
'ventions, ez he calls 'em, ez he seemed mighty glad ter git shet o'
the mountings. 'Vander 'lows ez you-uns dunno nothin' 'bout iron up
hyar, Pete."

It was too plain. Cynthia could not deceive herself. He had forgotten
her. His genius, once fairly evoked, possessed him, and faithfully his
ambitions served it. His love, in comparison, was but a little thing,
and he left it in the mountains,--the mountains that he did not regret,
that had barred him so long from all he valued, that had freed him at
last only through the prison doors. His love had been an unavowed love,
and there was no duty broken. For the first time she wondered if he
ever knew that she cared for him,--if he never remembered. And then she
was suddenly moved to ask, "Did he 'low ter you-uns who got his pardon
fur him?"

"I axed that word when las' I seen him, an' the critter said he
actially hed never tuk time ter think 'bout'n that. He 'lowed he war
so tickled ter git away from the Pen'tiary right straight ter the iron
works an' the consarn he hed made ter head rivets so peart, ez he never
wondered 'bout'n it. He made sure, though, now he had kem ter study
'bout'n it, ez his dad hed done it, or it mought hev been gin him fur
good conduc' an' sech."

"'Twar Cynthy hyar ez done some of it," explained Pete Blenkins,
"though Jubal Tynes stirred himself right smart."

As Cynthia walked slowly back to her home in the gorge, she did not
feel that she had lavished a noble exaltation and a fine courage in
vain; that the subtlest essence of a most ethereal elation was expended
as the motive power of a result that was at last flat, and sordid,
and most material. She did not murmur at the cruelty of fate that she
should be grieving for his woes while he was so happy, so blithely
busy. She did not regret her self-immolation. She did not grudge all
that love had given him; she rejoiced that it was so sufficient, so
nobly ample. She grudged only the wasted feeling, and she was humbled
when she thought of it.

The sun had gone down, but the light yet lingered. The evening star
trembled above Pine Mountain. Massive and darkling it stood against the
red west. How far, ah, how far, stretched that mellow crimson glow, all
adown Lost Creek Valley, and over the vast mountain solitudes on either
hand! Even the eastern ranges were rich with this legacy of the dead
and gone day, and purple and splendid they lay beneath the rising moon.
She looked at it with full and shining eyes.

"I dunno how he kin make out ter furgit the mountings," she said;
and then she went on, hearing the crisp leaves rustling beneath her
tread, and the sharp bark of a fox in the silence of the night-shadowed
valley.

Mrs. Ware had predicted bitter things of Cynthia's future, more
perhaps in anger than with discreet foresight. Now, when her prophecy
was in some sort verified, she shrank from it, as if with the word
she had conjured up the fact. And her pride was touched in that her
daughter should have been given the "go-by," as she phrased it. All the
mountain--nay, all the valley--would know of it. "Law, Cynthy," she
exclaimed, aghast, when the girl had rehearsed the news, "what be ye
a-goin' ter do?"

"I'm a-goin' ter weavin'," said Cynthia. She already had the shuttle
in her hand. It was a useful expression for a broken heart, as she was
expert at the loom.

She became so very skillful, with practice, that it was generally
understood to be mere pastime when she would go to help a neighbor
through the weaving of the cloth for the children's clothes. She went
about much on this mission: for although there were children at home,
the work was less than the industry, and she seemed "ter hev a craze
fur stirrin' about, an' war a toler'ble oneasy critter." She was said
to have "broken some sence 'Vander gin her the go-by, like he done,"
and was spoken of at the age of twenty-one as a "settled single woman;"
for early marriages are the rule in the mountains. When first her
father and then her mother died, she cared for all the household, and
the world went on much the same. The monotony of her tragedy made it
unobtrusive. Perhaps no one on Pine Mountain remembered aright how it
had all come about, when after an absence of ten years Evander Price
suddenly reappeared among them.

Old man Price had, in the course of nature, ceased to sit upon the
fence,--he could hardly be said to have lived. The fence itself was
decrepit; the house was falling to decay. The money which Evander had
sent from time to time, that it might be kept comfortable, had been
safely buried in various localities and in separate installments, as
the remittances had come. To this day the youth of Pine Mountain,
when afflicted with spasms of industry and, as unaccustomed, the lust
for gold, dig for it in likely spots as unavailingly as the idiot
once sought it. Evander took the family with him to his valley home,
and left the little hut for the owl and the gopher to hide within,
for the red-berried vines to twine about the rotting logs, for the
porch to fall in the wind, for silence to enter therein and make it a
dwelling-place.

"How will yer wife like ter put up with the idjit?" asked Pete Blenkins
of his old striker.

"She'll be _obleeged_ ter like it!" retorted Evander, with an angry
flash in his eyes, presaging contest.

It revealed the one dark point in his prospects. The mountaineers
were not so slow-witted as to overlook it, but Evander had come to be
the sort of man whom one hardly likes to question. He had a traveling
companion, however, who hailed from the same neighborhood, and who
talked learnedly of coal measures, and prodded and digged and bought
leagues of land for a song,--much of it dearly bought. He let fall a
hint that in marrying, Evander had contrived to handicap himself. "He
would do wonders but for that woman!"

His mountain auditors could hardly grasp the finer points of the
incompatibility; they could but dimly appreciate that the kindling
scintilla of a discovery in mechanics, more delicately poised on
practicability than a sunbeam on a cobweb, could have a tragic
extinction in a woman's inopportune peevishness or selfish exactions.

In Evander's admiration of knowledge and all its infinite radiations,
he had been attracted by a woman far superior to himself in education
and social position, although not in this world's goods. She was the
telegraph operator at the station near the iron works. She had felt
that there was a touch of romance and self-abnegation in her fancy for
him, and this titillated her more tutored imagination. His genius was
held in high repute at the iron works, and she had believed him a rough
diamond. She did not realize how she could have appreciated polished
facets and a brilliant lustre and a conventional setting until it was
too late. Then she began to think this genius of hers uncouth, and she
presently doubted if her jewel were genuine. For although of refined
instincts, he had been rudely reared, while she was in some sort inured
to table manners and toilet etiquette and English grammar. She could
not be content with his intrinsic worth, but longed for him to prove
his value to the world, that it might not think she had thrown herself
away. In moments of disappointment and depression his prison record
bore heavily upon her, and there was a breach when, in petulance, she
had once asked, If he were indeed innocent in receiving the stolen
goods, why had he not proved it? And she urged him to much striving to
be rich; and she would fain travel the old beaten road to wealth in the
iron business, and scorned experiments and new ideas and inventions,
that took money out without the certainty of putting it in. And she
had been taught, and was an adept in specious argument. He could not
answer her; he could only keep doggedly on his own way; but obstinacy
is a poor substitute for ardor. Though he had done much, he had done
less than he had expected,--far, far less in financial results than she
had expected. His ambitions were still hot within him, but they were
worldly ambitions now. They scorched his more delicate sensibilities,
and seared his freshest perceptions, and set his heart afire with
sordid hopes. He was often harassed by a lurking doubt of his powers;
he vaguely sought to measure them; and he began to fear that this in
itself was a sign of the approach to their limits. He could still lift
his eyes to great heights, but alas for the wings,--alas!

He had changed greatly: he had become nervous, anxious, concentrated,
yet not less affectionate. He said much about his wife to his old
friends, and never a word but loyal praise. "Em'ly air school-l'arned
fur true, an' kin talk ekal ter the rider."

The idiot 'Lijah was welcome at his side, and the ancient yellow
cur, that used to trot nimbly after him in the old days, rejoiced to
limp feebly at his heels. He came over, one morning, and sat on the
rickety little porch with Cynthia, and talked of her father and mother;
but he had forgotten the mare, whose death she also mentioned, and
the fact that old Suke's third calf was traded to M'ria Baker. His
recollections were all vague, although at some reminiscence of hers
he laughed jovially, and 'lowed that "in them days, Cynthy, ye an' me
hed a right smart notion of keeping company tergether." He did not
notice how pale she was, and that there was often a slight spasmodic
contraction of her features. She was busy with her spinning-wheel, as
she placidly replied, "Yes,--though I always 'lowed ez I counted on
livin' single."

It was only a fragmentary attention that he accorded her. He was full
of his plans and anxious about rains, lest a rise in Caney Fork should
detain him in the mountains; and he often turned and surveyed the
vast landscape with a hard, callous glance of worldly utility. He saw
only weather signs. The language of the mountains had become a dead
language. Oh, how should he read the poem that the opalescent mist
traced in an illuminated text along the dark, gigantic growths of Pine
Mountain!

At length he was gone, and forever, and Cynthia's heart adjusted itself
anew. Sometimes, to be sure, it seems to her that the years of her life
are like the floating leaves drifting down Lost Creek, valueless and
purposeless, and vaguely vanishing in the mountains. Then she remembers
that the sequestered subterranean current is charged with its own
inscrutable, imperative mission, and she ceases to question and regret,
and bravely does the work nearest her hand, and has glimpses of its
influence in the widening lives of others, and finds in these a placid
content.




              A-PLAYIN' OF OLD SLEDGE AT THE SETTLEMINT.


"I hev hearn tell ez how them thar boys rides thar horses over hyar
ter the Settlemint nigh on ter every night in the week ter play
kyerds,--'Old Sledge' they calls it; an' thar goin's-on air jes'
scandalous,--jes' a-drinkin' of apple-jack, an' a-bettin' of thar
money."

It was a lonely place: a sheer precipice on one side of the road that
curved to its verge; on the other, an ascent so abrupt that the tall
stems of the pines seemed laid upon the ground as they were marshaled
in serried columns up the slope. No broad landscape was to be seen from
this great projecting ledge of the mountain; the valley was merely a
little basin, walled in on every side by the meeting ranges that rose
so high as to intercept all distant prospect, and narrow the world to
the contracted area bounded by the sharp lines of their wooded summits,
cut hard and clear against the blue sky. But for the road, it would
have seemed impossible that these wild steeps should be the chosen
haunt of aught save deer, or bear, or fox; and certainly the instinct
of the eagle built that eyrie called the Settlement, still higher, far
above the towering pine forest. It might be accounted a tribute to the
enterprise of Old Sledge that mountain barriers proved neither let nor
hindrance, and here in the fastnesses was held that vivacious sway,
potent alike to fascinate and to scandalize.

In the middle of the stony road stood a group of roughly clad
mountaineers, each in an attitude of sluggish disinclination to
the allotted task of mending the highway, leaning lazily upon a
grubbing-hoe or sorry spade,--except, indeed, the overseer, who was
upheld by the single crowbar furnished by the county, the only sound
implement in use among the party. The provident dispensation of
the law, leaving the care of the road to the tender mercies of its
able-bodied neighbors over eighteen and under forty-five years of age,
was a godsend to the Settlement and to the inhabitants of the tributary
region, in that even if it failed of the immediate design of securing a
tolerable passway through the woods, it served the far more important
purpose of drawing together the diversely scattered settlers, and
affording them unwonted conversational facilities. These meetings were
well attended, although their results were often sadly inadequate.
To-day the usual complement of laborers was on hand, except the three
boys whose scandalous susceptibility to the mingled charms of Old
Sledge and apple-jack had occasioned comment.

"They'll hev ter be fined, ef they don't take keer an' come an' work,"
remarked the overseer of the road, one Tobe Rains, who reveled in a
little brief authority.

"From what I hev hearn tell 'bout thar go-in's-on, none of 'em is
a-goin' ter hev nuthin' ter pay fines with, when they gits done
with thar foolin' an' sech," said Abner Blake, a man of weight and
importance, and the eldest of the party.

It did not seem to occur to any of the group that the losses among the
three card-players served to enrich one of the number, and that the
deplorable wholesale insolvency shadowed forth was not likely to ensue
in substance. Perhaps their fatuity in this regard arose from the fact
that fining the derelict was not an actuality, although sometimes of
avail as a threat.

"An' we hev ter leave everythink whar it fell down, an' come hyar ter
do thar work fur 'em,--a-fixin' up of this hyar road fur them ter
travel," exclaimed Tobe Rains, attempting to chafe himself into a rage.
"It's got ter quit,--that's what I say; this hyar way of doin' hev got
ter quit." By way of lending verisimilitude to the industrial figure
of rhetoric, he lifted his hammer and dealt an ineffectual blow at a
large bowlder. Then he picked up his crowbar, and, leaning heavily on
the implement, resigned himself to the piquant interest of gossip.
"An' thar's that Josiah Tait," he continued, "a settled married man,
a-behavin' no better 'n them fool boys. He hain't struck a lick of work
fur nigh on ter a month,--'ceptin' a-goin' huntin' with the t'others,
every wunst in a while. He hev jes' pulled through at the little eend
of the horn. I never sot much store by him, nohow, though when he war
married ter Melindy Price, nigh 'bout a year ago, the folks all 'lowed
ez she war a-doin' mighty well ter git him, ez he war toler'ble well
off through his folks all bein' dead but him, an' he hed what he hed
his own self."

"I wouldn't let _my_ darter marry no man ez plays kyerds," said a very
young fellow, with great decision of manner, "no matter what he hed,
nor how he hed it."

As the lady referred to was only two weeks old, and this solicitude
concerning her matrimonial disposition was somewhat premature, there
was a good-natured guffaw at the young fellow's expense.

"An' now," Tobe Rains resumed, "ef Josiah keeps on the way ez he hev
started, he hain't a-goin' ter hev no more 'n the t'other boys round
the mounting,--mebbe not ez much,--an' Melindy Price hed better hev
a-tuken somebody what owned less but hed a harder grip."

A long silence fell upon the party. Three of the twenty men assembled,
in dearth of anything else to do, took heart of grace and fell to work;
fifteen leaned upon their hoes in a variety of postures, all equally
expressive of sloth, and with slow eyes followed the graceful sweep of
a hawk, drifting on the wind, without a motion of its wings, across
the blue sky to the opposite range. Two, one of whom was the overseer,
searched their pockets for a plug of tobacco, and when it was found
its possessor gave to him that lacked. At length, Abner Blake, who
furnished all the items of news, and led the conversation, removed
his eyes from the flight of the hawk, as the bird was absorbed in the
variegated October foliage of the opposite mountain, and reopened the
discussion. At the first word the three who were working paused in
attentive quietude; the fifteen changed their position to one still
more restful; the overseer sat down on a bowlder by the roadside, and
placed his contemplative elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands.

"I hev hearn tell," said Abner Blake, with the pleasing consciousness
of absorbing the attention of the company, and being able to meet high
expectations, "ez how Josiah hev los' that thar brindled heifer ter
Budd Wray, an' the main heft of his crap of corn. But mebbe he'll take
a turn now an' win 'em back agin."

"'Tain't likely," remarked Tobe Rains.

"No, 'tain't," coincided the virtuous fifteen.

The industrious three, who might have done better in better company,
went to work again for the space of a few minutes; but the next
inarticulate gurgle, preliminary always to Blake's speech,--a sort of
rising-bell to ring up somnolent attention,--brought them once more to
a stand-still.

"An' cornsiderin' ez how Budd Wray,--he it war ez won 'em; I seen
the heifer along o' the cow ter his house yestiddy evenin', ez I
war a-comin' from a-huntin' yander ter the sulphur spring,--an'
cornsiderin' ez he is nuthin' but a single man, an' hain't got no wife,
it do look mighty graspin' ter be a-takin' from a man ez hev got a wife
an' a houseful of his wife's kinsfolks ter look arter. Mighty graspin',
it 'pears like ter me."

"I s'pose," said one of the three workers suggestively,--"I s'pose ez
how Budd won it fair. 'Twarn't no onderhand job, war it?"

There was a portentous silence. The flight of the hawk, again floating
above the mountains, now in the shadow of the resting clouds, now in
the still sunshine, was the only motion in the landscape. The sudden
bark of a fox in the woods near at hand smote the air shrilly.

"That thar ain't fur me ter say," Blake replied at last, with
significant emphasis.

The suspicion fell upon the party like a revelation, with an auxiliary
sense of surprise that it had not been earlier presented, so patent was
the possibility.

Still that instinct of justice latent in the human heart kept the pause
unbroken for a while. Then Blake, whose information on most points at
issue entitled him to special consideration, proceeded to give his
opinion on the subject: "I'm a perfessin' member of the church, an'
I dunno one o' them thar kyerds from the t'other; an' what is more,
I ain't a-wantin' ter know. I hev seen 'em a-playin' wunst, an' I
hearn 'em a-talkin' that thar foolishness 'bout 'n 'high' an' 'low,'
an' sech,--they'll all be low enough 'fore long. But what I say is, I
dunno how come Josiah Tait, what's always been a peart, smart boy, an'
his dad afore him always war a thrivin' man, an' Budd Wray war never
nobody nor nuthin',--he war always mighty no-'count, him an' all his
folks,--an' what I dunno is, how come he kin git the upper hand of
Josiah Tait at these hyar kyerds, an' can't git it no other way. Ef he
keeps on a-playin' of Old Sledge hyar at the Settlemint, he'll be wuth
ez much ez anybody on the mounting what's done been a-workin' all thar
days, an' hed a toler'ble start ter begin with. It don't look fair an'
sensible ter me."

"'Pears like ter me," said the very young fellow, father of the very
young daughter, "ef a man is old enough ter git married, he is old
enough to take keer of hisself. I kin make out no good reason why
Josiah Tait oughter be pertected agin Budd Wray. 'Pears ter me ef one
of 'em kin larn ter play Old Sledge, the t'other kin. An' Josiah hev
got toler'ble good sense."

"That's how come all ye young muskrats dunno nuthin'," retorted Blake
in some heat. "Jes' let one of you-uns git turned twenty year old, an'
ye think ye air ez wise an' ez settled as ef ye war sixty, an' ye can't
l'arn nuthin' more."

"All the same, I don't see ez Josiah Tait needs a dry-nuss ter keep off
Wray an' sech critters," was the response. And here this controversy
ended.

"Somehow," said Tobe Rains, reflectively, "it don't look likely ter me
ez he an' Josiah Tait hev enny call ter be sech frien'ly folks. I hev
hearn ez how Budd Wray war a-follerin' round Melindy Price afore she
war married, an' she liked him fust-rate till Josiah tuk ter comin'
'bout 'n the Scrub-Oak Ridge, whar she lived in them days. That thar
ain't the stuff ter make frien's out'n. Thar is some sort 'n cur'ous
doin's a-goin' on 'bout'n these hyar frien'ly kyerds."

"I knowed that thar 'bout'n his a-follerin' round Melindy afore she
war married. I 'lowed one time ez Melindy hed a mind ter marry Wray
stiddier Josiah," said the young father, shaken in his partisanship.
"An' it always 'peared like ter me ez it war mighty comical ez he an'
Josiah tuk ter playin' of Old Sledge an' sech tergether."

These questions were not easy of solution. Many speculations were
preferred concerning the suspicious circumstance of Budd Wray's
singular proficiency in playing Old Sledge; but beyond disparaging
innuendo and covert insinuation conjecture could not go. Everything was
left doubtful, and so was the road.

It was hardly four o'clock, but the languid work had ceased and the
little band was dispersing. Some had far to go through the deep woods
to their homes, and those who lived closer at hand were not disposed
to atone for their comrades' defection by prolonging their stay. The
echoes for a long time vibrated among the lonely heights with the
metallic sound of their horses' hoofs, every moment becoming fainter,
until at last all was hushed. Dusky shadows, which seemed to be exhaled
from the ground, rose higher and higher up the mountain side from the
reservoir of gloom that lay in the valley. The sky was a lustrous
contrast to the darkling earth. The sun still lingered, large and
red, above the western summits; the clouds about it were gorgeous
in borrowed color; even those hovering in the east had caught the
reflection of the sunset splendor, and among their gold and crimson
flakes swung the silver globe of the hunter's moon. Now and then, at
long intervals, the bark of the fox quivered on the air; once the
laurel stirred with a faint rustle, and a deer stood in the midst of
the ill-mended road, catching upon his spreading antlers the mingled
light of sun and moon. For a moment he was motionless, his hoof
uplifted; the next, with an elastic spring, as of a creature without
weight, he was flying up the steep slope and disappearing amid the
slumberous shades of the dark pines. A sudden sound comes from far
along the curves of the road,--a sound foreign to woods and stream
and sky; again, and yet again, growing constantly more distinct, the
striking of iron against stone, the quick, regular beat of a horse's
tread, and an equestrian figure, facing the moon and with the sun at
his back, rides between the steep ascent and the precipice on his way
to the Settlement and the enticements of Old Sledge.

He was not the conventional type of the roistering blade. There was
an expression of settled melancholy on his face very usual with these
mountaineers, reflected, perhaps, from the indefinable tinge of sadness
that rests upon the Alleghany wilds, that hovers about the purpling
mountain-tops, that broods over the silent woods, that sounds in the
voice of the singing waters. Nor was he like the prosperous "perfessin'
member" of the card-playing _culte_. His listless manner was that of
stolidity, not of a studied calm; his brown jeans suit was old and worn
and patched; his hat, which had seen many a drenching winter rain and
scorching summer sun, had acquired sundry drooping curves undreamed of
in its maker's philosophy. He rode a wiry gray mare without a saddle,
and carried a heavy rifle. He was perhaps twenty-three years of age,
a man of great strength and stature, and there were lines about his
lips and chin which indicated a corresponding development of a firm
will and tenacity of purpose. His slow brown eyes were fixed upon the
horizon as he went around the ledge, and notwithstanding the languid
monotony of the expression of his face he seemed absorbed in some
definite train of thought, rather than lost in the vague, hazy reverie
which is the habitual mental atmosphere of the quiescent mountaineer.
The mare, left to herself, traveled along the rocky way in a debonair
fashion implying a familiarity with worse roads, and soon was around
the curve and beginning the sharp ascent which led to the Settlement.
There was a rickety bridge to cross, that spanned a deep, narrow
stream, which caught among its dark pools now a long, slender, polished
lance of sunlight, and now a dart from the moon. As the rider went on
upward the woods were dense as ever; no glimpse yet of the signet of
civilization set upon the wilderness and called the Settlement. By
the time he had reached the summit the last red rays of the day were
fading from the tops of the trees, but the moon, full and high in the
eastern heavens, shed so refulgent a light that it might be questioned
whether the sun rose on a brighter world than that which he had left.
A short distance along level ground, a turn to the right, and here,
on the highest elevation of the range, was perched the little town.
There was a clearing of ten acres, a blacksmith's shop, four log huts
facing indiscriminately in any direction, a small store of one story
and one room, and a new frame court-house, whitewashed and inclosed by
a plank fence. In the last session of the legislature, the Settlement
had been made the county-seat of a new county; the additional honor of
a name had been conferred upon it, but as yet it was known among the
population of the mountain by its time-honored and accustomed title.

Wray dismounted in front of the store, hitched the mare to a laurel
bush, and, entering, discovered his two boon companions drearily
waiting, and shuffling the cards again and again to while away the
time. An inverted splint-basket served as table; a tallow dip, a great
extravagance in these parts, blinked on the head of a barrel near
by, and gave a most flickering and ineffectual light, but the steady
radiance of the moon poured in a wide, white flood through the open
door, and kindly supplied all deficiencies. The two young mountaineers
were of the usual sad-eyed type, and the impending festivities might
have seemed to those of a wider range of experience than the Settlement
could furnish to be clouded with a funereal aspect. Before the fire,
burning low and sullenly in the deep chimney, were sitting two elderly
men, who looked with disfavor upon Wray as he came in and placed his
gun with a clatter in the corner.

"Ye war a long time a-gittin' hyar, Budd," said one of the
card-shufflers in a gentle voice, with curiously low-spirited
cadences. He spoke slowly, too, and with a slight difficulty, as if he
seldom had occasion to express himself in words and his organs were out
of practice. He was the proprietor of the store, one Tom Scruggs, and
this speech was by way of doing the honors. The other looked up with
recognizing eyes, but said nothing.

"I war hendered some," replied Wray, seating himself in a rush-bottomed
chair, and drawing close to the inverted basket. "Ez I war a-comin'
along, 'bout haffen mile an' better from our house,--'twar nigh on ter
three o'clock, I reckon,--I seen the bigges', fattes' buck I hev seen
this year a-bouncin' through the laurel, an' I shot him. An' I hed to
kerry him 'long home, 'kase suthin' mought hev got him ef I hed a-left
him thar. An' it hendered me some."

"An' we hev ter sit hyar a-wastin' away an' a-waitin' while ye goes
a-huntin' of deer," said Josiah Tait, angrily, and speaking for the
first time. "I could hev gone an' shot twenty deer ef I would hev tuk
the time. Ye said ez how ye war a-goin' ter be hyar an hour by sun, an'
jes' look a-yander," pointing to the lustrous disc of the moon.

"That thar moon war high enough 'fore the sun war a-settin'," returned
Wray. "Ef ye air in sech a hurry, whyn't yer cut them thar kyerds fur
deal, an' stop that thar jowin' o' yourn. I hev hed ez much of that ez
I am a-goin' ter swallow."

"I'll put it down ye with the ramrod o' that thar gun o' mine, ef ye
don't take keer how ye talk," retorted the choleric Tait; "an' ef that
don't set easy on yer stomach, I'll see how ye'll digest a bullet."

"I'm a-waitin' fur yer ramrod," said Wray. "Jes' try that fust, an' see
how it works."

The melancholy-voiced store-keeper interrupted these amenities, not
for the sake of peace,--white-winged angel,--but in the interests of
Old Sledge. "Ef I hed a-knowed ez how ye two boys war a-goin' ter take
ter quarrelin' an' a-fightin' round hyar, a-stiddier playin' of kyerds
sensible-like, I wouldn't hev shet up shop so quick. I hed a good many
little turns of work ter do, what I hev lef' ter play kyerds. An' ye
two mought jow tergether some other day, it 'pears like ter me. Ye air
a-wastin' more time a-jowin', Josiah, than Budd tuk up in comin' an'
deer-huntin' tergether. Ye hev cut the lowest in the pack, so deal the
kyerds, or give 'em ter them ez will."

The suggestion to resign the deal touched Josiah in a tender spot.
He protested that he was only too willing to play,--that was all he
wanted. "But ter be kep' a-waitin' hyar while Budd comes a-snakin'
through the woods, an' a-stoppin' ter shoot wild varmints an' sech, an'
then a-goin' home ter kerry 'em, an' then a-snakin' agin through the
woods, an' a-gittin' hyar nigh on ter night-time,--that's what riles
me."

"Waal, go 'long, now!" exclaimed Wray, fairly roused out of his
imperturbability. "Deal them kyerds, an' stop a-talkin'. That thar
tongue o' yourn will git cut out some o' these hyar days. It jes' goes
like a grist-mill, an' it's enough ter make a man deef fur life."

Thus exhorted, Josiah dealt. In receiving their hands the players
looked searchingly at every card, as if in doubtful recognition of
an old acquaintance; but before the game was fairly begun another
interruption occurred. One of the elderly men beside the fire rose and
advanced upon the party.

"Thar is a word ez we hev laid off ter ax ye, Budd Wray, which will be
axed twict,--wunst right hyar, an' wunst at the Jedgmint Day. War it
ye ez interjuced this hyar coal o' fire from hell, that ye call Old
Sledge, up hyar ter the Settlemint?"

The querist was a gaunt, forlorn-looking man, stoop-shouldered, and
slow in his movements. There was, however, a distinct intimation of
power in his lean, sinewy figure, and his face bore the scarlet scar
of a wound torn by a furious fang, which, though healed long ago, was
an ever-present reminder of a fierce encounter with a wild beast, in
which he had come off victorious. The tones of his voice and the drift
and rhetoric of his speech bespoke the loan of the circuit-rider.

The card-players looked up, less in surprise than exasperation, and
Josiah Tait, fretfully anticipating Wray, spoke in reply: "No, he
never. I fotched this hyar coal o' fire myself, an' ef ye don't look
out an' stand back out'n the way it'll flare up an' singe ye. I larnt
how ter play when I went down yander ter the Cross-Roads, an' I brung
it ter the Settlemint myself."

There was a mingled glow of the pride of the innovator and the
disdainful superiority of the iconoclast kindling within Josiah Tait
as he claimed the patent for Old Sledge. The catechistic terrors of
the Last Day had less reality for him than the present honor and glory
appertaining to the traveled importer of a new game. The Judgment Day
seemed imminent over his dodging head only when beholding the masterly
scene-painting of the circuit-rider, and the fire and brimstone out of
sight were out of mind.

"But ef ye air a-thinkin' of callin' me ter 'count fur sech," said
Wray, nodding at the cards, "I'll hev ye ter know ez I kin stand up
ter anything I does. I hev got no call ter be ashamed ov myself, an' I
ain't afeard o' nuthin' an' nobody."

"Ye gin me ter onderstand, then, ez Josiah l'arned ye ter play?" asked
the self-constituted grand inquisitor. "How come, then, Budd Wray, ez
ye wins all the truck from Josiah, ef ye air jes' a-l'arnin'?"

There was an angry exclamation from Josiah, and Wray laughed out
triumphantly. The walls caught the infrequent mirthful sound, and
reverberated with a hollow repetition. From the dark forest just beyond
the moon-flooded clearing the echo rang out. There was a subtle, weird
influence in those exultant tones, rising and falling by fitful starts
in that tangled, wooded desert; now loud and close at hand, now the
faintest whisper of a sound. The men all turned their slow eyes toward
the sombre shadows, so black beneath the silver moon, and then looked
at each other.

"It's 'bout time fur me ter be a-startin'," said the old hunter.
"Whenever I hear them critters a-laffin' that thar way in them woods I
puts out fur home an' bars up the door, fur I hev hearn tell ez how the
sperits air a-prowlin' round then, an' some mischief is a-happenin'."

"'T ain't nuthin' but Budd Wray a-laffin'," said the store-keeper
reassuringly. "I hev hearn them thar rocks an' things a-answerin' back
every minute in the day, when anybody hollers right loud."

"They don't laff, though, like they war a-laffin' jes' a while ago."

"No, they don't," admitted the store-keeper reluctantly; "but mebbe it
air 'kase thar is nobody round hyar ez hev got much call ter laff."

He was unaware of the lurking melancholy in this speech, and it passed
unnoticed by the others.

"It's this hyar a-foolin' along of Old Sledge an' sech ez calls the
sperits up," said the old hunter. "An' ef ye knows what air good fur
ye, ye'll light out from hyar an' go home. They air a-laffin' yit"--He
interrupted himself, and glanced out of the door.

The faintest staccato laugh thrilled from among the leaves. And then
all was silent, not even the bark of a dog nor a tremulous whisper of
the night-wind.

The other elderly man, who had not yet spoken, rose from his seat by
the fire. "I'm a-goin', too," he said. "I kem hyar ter the Settlemint,"
he added, turning upon the gamblers, "'kase I hev been called ter warn
ye o' the wickedness o' yer ways, ez Jonah afore me war tole ter go up
ter Nineveh ter warn the folks thar."

"Things turns out powerful cur'ous wunst in a while," retorted Wray.
"He war swallowed by a whale arterward."

"'Kase he wouldn't do ez he war tole; but even thar Providence
perfected him. He kem out'n the whale agin, what nobody kin do ez gits
swallowed in the pit. They hev ter stay."

"It hain't me ez keeps up this hyar game," said Wray sullenly, but
stung to a slight repentance by this allusion to the pit. "It air
Josiah hyar ez is a-aimin' ter win back the truck he hev los'; an' so
air Tom, hyar. I hev hed toler'ble luck along o' this Old Sledge, but
they know, an' they hev got ter stand up ter it, ez I never axed none
of 'em ter play. Ef they scorches tharselves with this hyar coal o'
fire from hell, ez ye calls it, Josiah brung it, an' it air Tom an' him
a-blowin' on it ez hev kep' it a-light."

"I ain't a-goin' ter quit," said Josiah Tait angrily, the loser's
desperate eagerness pulsing hot and quick through his veins,--"I ain't
a-goin' ter quit till I gits back that thar brindled heifer an' that
thar gray mare out yander, what Budd air a-ridin', an' them thar two
wagon-loads o' corn."

"We hev said our say, an' we air a-goin'," remarked one of the unheeded
counselors.

"An' play on of yer kyerds!" cried Josiah to the others, in a louder,
shriller voice than was his wont, as the two elderly men stepped out of
the door. The woods caught the sound and gave it back in a higher key.

"S'pose we stops fur ter-night," suggested the store-keeper; "them thar
rocks do sound sort 'n cur'ous now."

"I ain't a-goin' ter stop fur nuthin' an' nobody!" exclaimed Josiah,
in a tremor of keen anxiety to be at the sport. "Dad-burn the sperits!
Let 'em come in, an' I 'll deal 'em a hand. Thar! that trick is mine.
Play ter this hyar queen o' trumps."

The royal lady was recklessly thrown upon the basket, with all her foes
in ambush. Somehow, they did not present themselves. Tom was destitute,
and Budd followed with the seven. Josiah again pocketed the trick with
unction. This trifling success went disproportionately far in calming
his agitation, and for a time he played more needfully. Tom Scruggs's
caution made ample amends for his lack of experience. So slow was he,
and so much time did he require for consideration, that more than once
he roused his companions to wrath. The anxieties with which he was
beset preponderated over the pleasure afforded by the sport, and the
winning back of a half-bushel measure, which he had placed in jeopardy
and lost, so satisfied this prudent soul that he announced at the end
of the game that he would play no more for this evening. The others
were welcome, though, to continue if they liked, and he would sit by
and look on. He snuffed the blinking tallow dip, and reseated himself,
an eager spectator of the play that followed.

Wray was a cool hand. Despite the awkward, unaccustomed clutch upon the
cards and the doubtful recognition he bestowed on each as it fell upon
the basket, he displayed an imperturbability and nerve that usually
come only of long practice, and a singular pertinacity in pursuing
the line of tactics he had marked out,--lying in wait and pouncing
unerringly upon his prey in the nick of time. The brindled heifer's
mother followed her offspring into his ownership; a yoke of oxen, a
clay-bank filly, ten hogs,--every moment he was growing richer. But
his success did not for an instant shake his stolid calm, quicken his
blood, nor relax his vigilant attention; his exultation was held well
in hand under the domination of a strong will and a settled purpose.
Josiah Tait became almost maddened by these heavy losses; his hands
trembled, his eager exclamations were incoherent, his dull eyes blazed
at fever heat, and ever and anon the echo of his shrill, raised voice
rang back from the untiring rocks.

The single spectator of the game now and then, in the intervals of
shuffling and dealing the cards, glanced over his shoulder at the
dark trees whence the hidden mimic of the woods, with some strong
suggestion of sinister intent, repeated the agitated tones. There was
a silver line all along the summit of the foliage, along the roofs of
the houses and the topmost rails of the fences; a sense of freshness
and dew pervaded the air, and the grass was all a-sparkle. The shadows
of the laurel about the door were beginning to fall on the step, every
leaf distinctly defined in the moon's magical tracery. He knew without
looking up that she had passed the meridian, and was swinging down the
western sky.

"Boys," he said, in a husky under-tone,--he dared not speak aloud,
for the mocker in the woods,--"boys, I reckon it's 'bout time we war
a-quittin' o' this hyar a-playin' of Old Sledge; it's midnight an'
past, an' Budd hev tolerable fur ter go."

The tallow dip, that had long been flickering near its end, suddenly
went out, and the party suffered a partial eclipse. Josiah Tait dragged
the inverted basket closer to the door and into the full brilliance
of the moon, declaring that neither Wray nor he should leave the
house till he had retrieved his misfortunes or lost every thing in
the effort. The host, feeling that even hospitality has its limits,
did not offer to light another expensive candle, but threw a quantity
of pine-knots on the smouldering coals; presently a white blaze was
streaming up the chimney, and in the mingled light of fire and moon the
game went on.

"Ye oughter take keer, Josiah," remonstrated the sad-voiced
store-keeper, as a deep groan and a deep curse emphasized the result of
high, jack, and game for Wray, and low alone for Tait. "An' it's 'bout
time ter quit."

"Dad-burn the luck!" exclaimed Josiah, in a hard, strained voice, "I
ain't a-goin' ter leave this hyar spot till I hev won back them thar
critters o' mine what he hev tuk. An' I kin do it,--I kin do it in one
more game. I'll bet--I'll bet"--he paused in bewildered excitement; he
had already lost to Wray everything available as a stake. There was a
sudden unaccountable gleam of malice on the lucky winner's face; the
quick glance flashed in the moonlight into the distended hot eyes of
his antagonist. Wray laughed silently, and began to push his chair away
from the basket.

"Stop! stop!" cried Josiah, hoarsely. "I hev got a house,--a house
an' fifty acres, nigh about. I'll bet the house an' land agin what ye
hev won from me,--them two cows, an' the brindled heifer, an' the
gray mare, an' the clay-bank filly, an' them ten hogs, an' the yoke o'
steers, an' the wagon, an' the corn,--them two loads o' corn: that will
'bout make it even, won't it?" He leaned forward eagerly as he asked
the question.

"Look a-hyar, Josiah," exclaimed the store-keeper, aghast, "this hyar
is a-goin' too fur! Hain't ye los' enough a'ready but ye must be
a-puttin' up the house what shelters ye? Look at me, now: I ain't done
los' nothin' but the half-bushel measure, an' I hev got it back agin.
An' it air a blessin' that I _hev_ got it agin, for 'twould hev been
mighty ill-convenient round hyar 'thout it."

"Will ye take it?" said Josiah, almost pleadingly, persistently
addressing himself to Wray, regardless of the remonstrant host. "Will
ye put up the critters agin the house an' land?"

Wray made a feint of hesitating. Then he signified his willingness
by seating himself and beginning to deal the cards, saying before he
looked at his hand, "That thar house an' land o' yourn agin the truck
ez I hev won from ye?"

"Oh, Lord, boys, this _must_ be sinful!" remonstrated the proprietor
of the cherished half-bushel measure, appalled by the magnitude of the
interests involved.

"Hold yer jaw! hold yer jaw!" said Josiah Tait. "I kin hardly make out
one kyerd from another while ye're a-preachin' away, same ez the rider!
I done tole ye, Budd," turning again to Wray, "I'll put up the house
an' land agin the truck. I'll git a deed writ fur ye in the mornin', ef
ye win it," he added, hastily, thinking he detected uncertainty still
lurking in the expression of Wray's face. "The court air a-goin' tar
sit hyar ter-morrer, an' the lawyers from the valley towns will be hyar
toler'ble soon, I reckon. An' I'll git ye a deed writ fust thing in the
mornin'."

"Ye hearn him say it?" said Wray, turning to Tom Scruggs.

"I hearn him," was the reply.

And the game went on.

"I beg," said Josiah, piteously, after carefully surveying his hand.

"I ain't a-goin' ter deal ye nare 'nother kyerd," said Wray. "Ye kin
take a pint fust."

The point was scored by the faithful looker-on in Josiah's favor. High,
low, and game were made by Wray, jack being in the pack. Thus the score
was three to one. In the next deal, the trump, a spade, was allowed
by Wray to stand. He led the king. "I'm low, anyhow," said Josiah, in
momentary exultation, as he played the deuce to it. Wray next led the
ace whisking for the jack, and caught it.

"Dad-burn the rotten luck!" cried Josiah.

With the advantage of high and jack a foregone conclusion, Wray began
to play warily for game. But despite his caution he lost the next
trick. Josiah was in doubt how to follow up this advantage; after an
anxious interval of cogitation he said, "I b'lieve I'll throw away
fur a while," and laid that safe card, the five of diamonds, upon the
basket. "Tom," he added, "put on some more o' them knots. I kin hardly
tell what I'm a-doin' of. I hev got the shakes, an' somehow 'nother my
eyes is cranky, and wobble so ez I can't see."

The white sheets of flame went whizzing merrily up the chimney, and the
clear light fell full upon the basket as Wray laid upon the five the
ten of diamonds.

"Lord! Josiah!" exclaimed Tom Scruggs, becoming wild, and even more ill
judged than usual, beginning to feel as if he were assisting at his
friend's obsequies, and to have a more decided conviction that this way
of coming by house and land and cattle and goods was sinful. "Lord!
Josiah! that thar kyerd he's done saved 'll count him ten fur game. Ye
had better hev played that thar queen o' di'monds, an' dragged it out
'n him."

"Good Lord in heaven!" shrieked Josiah, in a frenzy at this
unwarrantable disclosure.

"Lord in heaven!" rang loud from the depths of the dark woods.
"Heaven!" softly vibrated the distant heights. The crags close at hand
clanged back the sound, and the air was filled with repetitions of the
word, growing fainter and fainter, till they might have seemed the echo
of a whisper.

The men neither heard nor heeded. Tom Scruggs, although appreciating
the depth of the infamy into which he had unwittingly plunged, was
fully resolved to stand stoutly upon the defensive,--he even extended
his hand to take down his gun, which was laid across a couple of nails
on the wall.

"Hold on, Josiah,--hold on!" cried Wray, as Tait drew his knife. "Tom
never went fur ter tell, an' I'll give ye a ten ter make it fair.
Thar's the ten o' hearts; an' a ten is the mos' ez that thar critter of
a queen could hev made out ter hev tuk, anyhow."

Josiah hesitated.

"That thar is the mos' ez she could hev done," said the store-keeper,
smoothing over the results of his carelessness. "The jacks don't count
but fur one apiece, so that thar ten is the mos' ez she could hev made
out ter git, even ef I hedn't a-forgot an' tole Budd she war in yer
hand."

Josiah was mollified by this very equitable proposal, and resuming his
chair he went on with the play. The ten of hearts which he had thus
secured was, however, of no great avail in counting for game. Wray had
already high and jack, and game was added to these. The score therefore
stood six to two in his favor.

The perennial faith of the gambler in the next turn of the wheel was
strong in Josiah Tait. Despite his long run of bad luck, he was still
animated by the feverish delusion that the gracious moment was surely
close at hand when success would smile upon him. Wray, it was true,
needed to score only one point to turn him out of house and land,
homeless and penniless. He was confident it would never be scored. If
he could make the four chances he would be even with his antagonist,
and then he could win back in a single point all that he had lost. His
face wore a haggard, eager expectation, and the agitation of the moment
thrilled through every nerve. He watched with fiery eyes the dealing of
the cards, and after hastily scrutinizing his hand he glanced with keen
interest to see the trump turned. It was a knave, counting one for the
dealer. There was a moment of intense silence; he seemed petrified as
his eyes met the triumphant gaze of his opponent. The next instant he
was at Wray's throat.

The shadows of the swaying figures reeled across the floor, marring
the exquisite arabesque of moonshine and laurel leaves,--quick, hard
panting, a deep oath, and spasmodic efforts on the part of each to draw
a sharp knife prevented by the strong intertwining arms of the other.

The store-keeper, at a safe distance, remonstrated with both, to no
purpose, and as the struggle could end only in freeing a murderous
hand he rushed into the clearing, shouting the magical word "Fight!"
with all the strength of his lungs. There was no immediate response,
save that the affrighted rocks rang with the frenzied cry, and the
motionless woods and the white moonlight seemed pervaded with myriads
of strange, uncanny voices. Then a cautious shutter of a glassless
window was opened, and through the narrow chink there fell a bar of
red light, on which was clearly defined an inquiring head, like an
inquisitively expressive silhouette. "They air a-fightin' yander ter
the store, whar they air a-playin' of Old Sledge," said the master of
the shanty, for the enlightenment of the curious within. And then he
closed the shutter, and like the law-abiding citizen that he was betook
himself to his broken rest. This was the only expression of interest
elicited.

A dreadful anxiety was astir in the store-keeper's thoughts. One
of the men would certainly be killed; but he cared not so much for
the shedding of blood in the abstract as that the deed should be
committed on his premises at the dead of night; and there might be such
a concatenation of circumstances, through the malefactor's willful
perversion of the facts, that suspicion would fall upon him. The
first circuit court ever held in the new county would be in session
to-morrow; and the terrors of the law, deadly to an unaccustomed mind,
were close upon him. Finding no help from without, he rushed back into
the store, determined to make one more appeal to the belligerents.
"Budd," he cried, "I'll holp ye ter hold Josiah, ef ye'll promise ye
won't tech him ter hurt. He air crazed, through a-losin' of his truck.
Say ye won't tech him ter hurt, an' I'll holp ye ter hold him."

Josiah succumbed to their united efforts, and presently made no further
show of resistance, but sank, still panting, into one of the chairs
beside the inverted basket, and gazed blankly, with the eyes of a
despairing, hunted creature, out at the sheen of the moonlight.

"I ain't a-wantin' ter hurt nobody," said Wray, in a surly tone. "I
never axed him ter play kyerds, nor ter bet, nor nuthin'. He l'arned me
hisself, an' ef I hed los' stiddier of him he would be a-thinkin' now
ez it's all right."

"I'm a-goin' ter stand up ter what I done said, though," Josiah
declared brokenly. "Ye needn't be afeard ez how I ain't a-goin' ter
make my words true. Ef ye comes hyar at noon ter-morrer, ye'll git that
thar deed, an' ye kin take the house an' land ez I an' my folks hev
hed nigh on ter a hundred year. I ain't a-goin' ter fail o' my word,
though."

He rose suddenly, and stepped out of the door. His footfalls sounded
with a sullen thud in the utter quietude of the place; a long shadow
thrown by the sinking moon dogged him noiselessly as he went, until he
plunged into the depths of the woods, and their gloom absorbed both him
and his silent pursuer.

A dank, sunless morning dawned upon the house in which Josiah Tait
and his fathers had lived for nearly a hundred years: it was a humble
log cabin nestled in the dense forest, about four miles from the
Settlement. Fifty cleared acres, in an irregular shape, lay behind
it; the cornstalks, sole remnant of the crop lost at Old Sledge, were
still standing, their sickly yellow tint blanched by contrast with the
dark brown of the tall weeds in a neighboring field, that had grown up
after the harvested wheat, and flourished in the summer sun, and died
under the first fall of the frost. A heavy moisture lay upon them at
noon, this dreary autumnal day; a wet cloud hung in the tree-tops;
here and there among its gray vapors, a scarlet bough flamed with
sharply accented intensity. There was no far-reaching perspective in
the long aisles of the woods; the all-pervading mist had enwrapped the
world, and here, close at hand, were bronze-green trees, and there
spectre-like outlines of boles and branches, dimly seen in the haze,
and beyond an opaque, colorless curtain. From the chimney of the house
the smoke rose slowly; the doors were closed, and not a creature was
visible save ten hogs prowling about in front of the dwelling among the
fallen acorns, pausing and looking up with that odd, porcine expression
of mingled impudence and malignity as Budd Wray appeared suddenly in
the mist and made his way to the cabin.

He knocked; there was a low-toned response. After hesitating a moment,
he lifted the latch and went in. He was evidently unexpected; the two
occupants of the room looked at him with startled eyes, in which,
however, the momentary surprise was presently merged in an expression
of bitter dislike. The elder, a faded, careworn woman of fifty, turned
back without a word to her employment of washing clothes. The younger,
a pretty girl of eighteen, looked hard at him with fast-filling blue
eyes, and rising from her low chair beside the fire said, in a voice
broken by grief and resentment, "Ef this hyar house air yourn, Budd
Wray, I wants ter git out 'n it."

"I hev come hyar ter tell ye a word," said Budd Wray, meeting her
tearful glance with a stern stolidity. He flung himself into a chair,
and fixing his moody eyes on the fire went on: "A word ez I hev been
a-aimin' an' a-contrivin' ter tell ye ever sence ye war married ter
Josiah Tait, an' afore that,--ever sence ye tuk back the word ez ye
hed gin me afore ye ever seen him, 'kase o' his hevin' a house, an'
critters, an' sech like. He hain't got none now,--none of 'em. I hev
been a-layin' off ter bring him ter this pass fur a long time, 'count
of the scandalous way ye done treated me a year ago las' June. He
hain't got no house, nor no critters, nor nuthin'. I done it, an' I
come hyar with the deed in my pocket ter tell ye what I done it fur."

Her tears flowed afresh, and she looked appealingly at him. He did not
remove his indignant eyes from the blaze, stealing timidly up the smoky
chimney. "I never hed nuthin' much," he continued, "an' I never said
I hed nuthin' much, like Josiah; but I thought ez how ye an' me might
make out toler'ble well, bein' ez we sot consider'ble store by each
other in them days, afore he ever tuk ter comin' a-huntin' yander ter
Scrub-Oak Ridge, whar ye war a-livin' then. I don't keer nuthin' 'bout
'n it now, 'ceptin' it riles me, an' I war bound ter spite ye fur it. I
don't keer nuthin' more 'bout _ye_ now than fur one o' them thar dead
leaves. I want ye ter know I jes' done it ter spite ye,--_ye_ is the
one. I hain't got no grudge agin Josiah ter talk about. He done like
any other man would."

The color flared into the drooping face, and there was a flash in the
weeping blue eyes.

"I s'pose I hed a right ter make a ch'ice," she said, angrily, stung by
these taunts.

"Jes' so," responded Wray, coolly; "ye hed a right ter make a ch'ice
a-twixt two men, but no gal hev got a right ter put a man on one eend
o' the beam, an' a lot o' senseless critters an' house an' land on the
t'other. Ye never keered nuthin' fur me nor Josiah nuther, ef the truth
war knowed; ye war all tuk up with the house an' land an' critters. An'
they hev done lef ye, what nare one o' the men would hev done."

The girl burst into convulsive sobs, but the sight of her distress
had no softening influence upon Wray. "I hev done it ter pay ye back
fur what ye hev done ter me, an' I reckon ye'll 'low now ez we air
toler'ble even. Ye tuk all I keered fur away from me, an' now I hev
tuk all ye keer fur away from ye. An' I'm a-goin' now yander ter
the Settlemint ter hev this hyar deed recorded on the book ter the
court-house, like Lawyer Green tole me ter do right straight. I laid
off, though, ter come hyar fust, an' tell ye what I hev been aimin' ter
be able ter tell ye fur a year an' better. An' now I'm a-goin' ter git
this hyar deed recorded."

He replaced the sheet of scrawled legal-cap in his pocket, and rose to
go; then turned, and, leaning heavily on the back of his chair, looked
at her with lowering eyes.

"Ye're a pore little critter," he said, with scathing contempt. "I
dunno what ails Josiah nor me nuther ter hev sot our hearts on sech a
little stalk o' cheat."

He went out into the enveloping mountain mist with the sound of
her weeping ringing in his ears. His eyes were hot, and his angry
heart was heavy. He had schemed and waited for his revenge with
persistent patience. Fortune had favored him, but now that it had
fully come, strangely enough it failed to satisfy him. The deed in
his breast-pocket weighed like a stone, and as he rode on through
the clouds that lay upon the mountain top, the sense of its pressure
became almost unendurable. And yet, with a perplexing contrariety of
emotion, he felt more bitterly toward her than ever, and experienced
a delight almost savage in holding the possessions for which she had
been so willing to resign him. "Jes' kicked me out 'n the way like I
war nuthin' more 'n that thar branch o' pisen-oak, fur a passel o'
cattle an' sech like critters, an' a house an' land,--'kase I don't
count Josiah in. 'Twar the house an' land an' sech she war a-studyin'
'bout." And every moment the weight of the deed grew heavier. He took
scant notice of external objects as he went, keeping mechanically
along the path, closed in twenty yards ahead of him by the opaque
curtain of mist. The trees at the greatest distance visible stood
shadow-like and colorless in their curious, unreal atmosphere; but now
and then the faintest flake of a pale rose tint would appear in the
pearly haze, deepening and deepening, till at the vanishing point of
the perspective a gorgeous scarlet-oak tree would rise, red enough to
make a respectable appearance on the planet Mars. There was an audible
stir breaking upon the silence of the solemn woods, the leaves were
rustling together, and drops of moisture began to patter down upon
the ground. The perspective grew gradually longer and longer, as the
rising wind cleared the forest aisles; and when he reached the road
that ran between the precipice and the steep ascent above, the clouds
were falling apart, the mist had broken into thousands of fleecy white
wreaths, clinging to the fantastically tinted foliage, and the sunlight
was striking deep into the valley. The woods about the Settlement were
all aglow with color, and sparkling with the tremulous drops that
shimmered in the sun.

There was an unwonted air of animation and activity pervading the
place. To the court-house fence were hitched several lean, forlorn
horses, with shabby old saddles, or sometimes merely blankets; two or
three wagons were standing among the stumps in the clearing. The door
of the store was occupied by a coterie of mountaineers, talking with
unusual vivacity of the most startling event that had agitated the
whole country-side for a score of years,--the winning of Josiah Tait's
house and land at Old Sledge. The same subject was rife among the
choice spirits congregated in the court-house yard and about the portal
of that temple of justice, and Wray's approach was watched with the
keenest interest.

He dismounted, and walked slowly to the door, paused, and turning as
with a sudden thought threw himself hastily upon his horse; he dashed
across the clearing, galloped heedlessly down the long, steep slope,
and the astounded loiterers heard the thunder of the hoofs as they beat
at a break-neck speed upon the frail, rotten timbers of the bridge
below.

Josiah Tait had put his troubles in to soak at the still-house, and
this circumstance did not tend to improve the cheerfulness of his
little, home when he returned in the afternoon. The few necessities
left to the victims of Old Sledge had been packed together, and were in
readiness to be transported with him, his wife, and mother-in-law to
Melinda's old home on Scrub-Oak Ridge, when her brother should drive
his wagon over for them the next morning.

They never knew how to account for it. While the forlorn family were
sitting before the smoking fire, as the day waned, the door was
suddenly burst open, and Budd Wray strode in impetuously. A brilliant
flame shot up the chimney, and the deed which Josiah Tait had that
day executed was a cinder among the logs. He went as he came, and the
mystery was never explained.

There was, however, "a sayin' goin' 'bout the mounting ez how Josiah
an' Melindy jes' 'ticed him, somehow 'nother, ter thar house, an' held
him, an' tuk the deed away from him tergether. An' they made him send
back the critters an' the corn what he done won away from 'em." This
version came to his ears, and was never denied. He was more ashamed of
relenting in his vengeance than of the wild legend that he had been
worsted in a tussle with Melinda and Josiah.

And since the night of Budd Wray's barren success the playing of Old
Sledge has become a lost art at the Settlement.




                        THE STAR IN THE VALLEY.


He first saw it in the twilight of a clear October evening. As the
earliest planet sprang into the sky, an answering gleam shone red
amid the glooms in the valley. A star too it seemed. And later, when
the myriads of the fairer, whiter lights of a moonless night were all
athrob in the great concave vault bending to the hills, there was
something very impressive in that solitary star of earth, changeless
and motionless beneath the ever-changing skies.

Chevis never tired of looking at it. Somehow it broke the spell that
draws all eyes heavenward on starry nights. He often strolled with
his cigar at dusk down to the verge of the crag, and sat for hours
gazing at it and vaguely speculating about it. That spark seemed to
have kindled all the soul and imagination within him, although he knew
well enough its prosaic source, for he had once questioned the gawky
mountaineer whose services he had secured as guide through the forest
solitudes during this hunting expedition.

"That thar spark in the valley?" Hi Bates had replied, removing the
pipe from his lips and emitting a cloud of strong tobacco smoke.
"'Tain't nuthin' but the light in Jerry Shaw's house, 'bout haffen mile
from the foot of the mounting. Ye pass that thar house when ye goes
on the Christel road, what leads down the mounting off the Backbone.
That's Jerry Shaw's house,--that's what it is. He's a blacksmith, an'
he kin shoe a horse toler'ble well when he ain't drunk, ez he mos'ly
is."

"Perhaps that is the light from the forge," suggested Chevis.

"That thar forge ain't run more 'n half the day, let 'lone o' nights.
I hev never hearn tell on Jerry Shaw a-workin' o' nights,--nor in the
daytime nuther, ef he kin git shet of it. No sech no 'count critter
'twixt hyar an' the Settlemint."

So spake Chevis's astronomer. Seeing the star even through the prosaic
lens of stern reality did not detract from its poetic aspect. Chevis
never failed to watch for it. The first faint glinting in the azure
evening sky sent his eyes to that red reflection suddenly aglow in
the valley; even when the mists rose above it and hid it from him, he
gazed at the spot where it had disappeared, feeling a calm satisfaction
to know that it was still shining beneath the cloud-curtain. He
encouraged himself in this bit of sentimentality. These unique eventide
effects seemed a fitting sequel to the picturesque day, passed in
hunting deer, with horn and hounds, through the gorgeous autumnal
forest; or perchance in the more exciting sport in some rocky gorge
with a bear at bay and the frenzied pack around him; or in the idyllic
pleasures of bird-shooting with a thoroughly-trained dog; and coming
back in the crimson sunset to a well-appointed tent and a smoking
supper of venison or wild turkey,--the trophies of his skill. The vague
dreaminess of his cigar and the charm of that bright bit of color
in the night-shrouded valley added a sort of romantic zest to these
primitive enjoyments, and ministered to that keen susceptibility of
impressions which Reginald Chevis considered eminently characteristic
of a highly wrought mind and nature.

He said nothing of his fancies, however, to his fellow sportsman,
Ned Varney, nor to the mountaineer. Infinite as was the difference
between these two in mind and cultivation, his observation of both
had convinced him that they were alike incapable of appreciating and
comprehending his delicate and dainty musings. Varney was essentially a
man of this world; his mental and moral conclusions had been adopted in
a calm, mercantile spirit, as giving the best return for the outlay,
and the market was not liable to fluctuations. And the mountaineer
could go no further than the prosaic fact of the light in Jerry Shaw's
house. Thus Reginald Chevis was wont to sit in contemplative silence
on the crag until his cigar was burnt out, and afterward to lie awake
deep in the night, listening to the majestic lyric welling up from the
thousand nocturnal voices of these mountain wilds.

During the day, in place of the red light a gauzy little curl of smoke
was barely visible, the only sign or suggestion of human habitation
to be seen from the crag in all the many miles of long, narrow valley
and parallel tiers of ranges. Sometimes Chevis and Varney caught
sight of it from lower down on the mountain side, whence was faintly
distinguishable the little log-house and certain vague lines marking
a rectangular inclosure; near at hand, too, the forge, silent and
smokeless. But it did not immediately occur to either of them to
theorize concerning its inmates and their lives in this lonely place;
for a time, not even to the speculative Chevis. As to Varney, he gave
his whole mind to the matter in hand,--his gun, his dog, his game,--and
his note-book was as systematic and as romantic as the ledger at home.

It might be accounted an event in the history of that log-hut when
Reginald Chevis, after riding past it eighty yards or so, chanced one
day to meet a country girl walking toward the house. She did not look
up, and he caught only an indistinct glimpse of her face. She spoke to
him, however, as she went by, which is the invariable custom with the
inhabitants of the sequestered nooks among the encompassing mountains,
whether meeting stranger or acquaintance. He lifted his hat in return,
with that punctilious courtesy which he made a point of according to
persons of low degree. In another moment she had passed down the narrow
sandy road, overhung with gigantic trees, and, at a deft, even pace,
hardly slackened as she traversed the great log extending across the
rushing stream, she made her way up the opposite hill, and disappeared
gradually over its brow.

The expression of her face, half-seen though it was, had attracted his
attention. He rode slowly along, meditating. "Did she go into Shaw's
house, just around the curve of the road?" he wondered. "Is she Shaw's
daughter, or some visiting neighbor?"

That night he looked with a new interest at the red star, set like a
jewel in the floating mists of the valley.

"Do you know," he asked of Hi Bates, when the three men were seated,
after supper, around the camp-fire, which sent lurid tongues of
flame and a thousand bright sparks leaping high in the darkness, and
illumined the vistas of the woods on every side, save where the sudden
crag jutted over the valley,--"Do you know whether Jerry Shaw has a
daughter,--a young girl?"

"Ye-es," drawled Hi Bates, disparagingly, "he hev."

A pause ensued. The star in the valley was blotted from sight;
the rising mists had crept to the verge of the crag; nay, in the
undergrowth fringing the mountain's brink, there were softly clinging
white wreaths.

"Is she pretty?" asked Chevis.

"Waal, no, she ain't," said Hi Bates, decisively. "She's a pore,
no 'count critter." Then he added, as if he were afraid of being
misapprehended, "Not ez thar is any harm in the gal, ye onderstand.
She's a mighty good, saft-spoken, quiet sort o' gal, but she's a pore,
white-faced, slim little critter. She looks like she hain't got no
sort'n grit in her. She makes me think o' one o' them slim little slips
o' willow every time nor I sees her. She hain't got long ter live, I
reckon," he concluded, dismally.

Reginald Chevis asked him no more questions about Jerry Shaw's daughter.

Not long afterward, when Chevis was hunting through the deep woods
about the base of the mountain near the Christel road, his horse
happened to cast a shoe. He congratulated himself upon his proximity
to the forge, for there was a possibility that the blacksmith might be
at work; according to the account which Hi Bates had given of Jerry
Shaw's habits, there were half a dozen chances against it. But the shop
was at no great distance, and he set out to find his way back to the
Christel road, guided by sundry well-known landmarks on the mountain
side: certain great crags hanging above the tree-tops, showing in
grander sublimity through the thinning foliage, or beetling bare and
grim; a dismantled and deserted hovel, the red-berried vines twining
amongst the rotting logs; the full flow of a tumultuous stream making
its last leap down a precipice eighty feet high, with yeasty, maddening
waves below and a rainbow-crowned crystal sheet above. And here again
the curves of the woodland road. As the sound of the falling water
grew softer and softer in the distance, till it was hardly more than
a drowsy murmur, the faint vibrations of a far-off anvil rang upon
the air. Welcome indeed to Chevis, for however enticing might be the
long rambles through the redolent October woods with dog and gun, he
had no mind to tramp up the mountain to his tent, five miles distant,
leading the resisting horse all the way. The afternoon was so clear
and so still that the metallic sound penetrated far through the quiet
forest. At every curve of the road he expected to see the log-cabin
with its rail fence, and beyond the low-hanging chestnut-tree, half its
branches resting upon the roof of the little shanty of a blacksmith's
shop. After many windings a sharp turn brought him full upon the humble
dwelling, with its background of primeval woods and the purpling
splendors of the western hills. The chickens were going to roost in
a stunted cedar-tree just without the door; an incredibly old man,
feeble and bent, sat dozing in the lingering sunshine on the porch; a
girl, with a pail on her head, was crossing the road and going down a
declivity toward a spring which bubbled up in a cleft of the gigantic
rocks that were piled one above another, rising to a great height. A
mingled breath of cool, dripping water, sweet-scented fern, and pungent
mint greeted him as he passed it. He did not see the girl's face, for
she had left the road before he went by, but he recognized the slight
figure, with that graceful poise acquired by the prosaic habit of
carrying weights upon the head, and its lithe, swaying beauty reminded
him of the mountaineer's comparison,--a slip of willow.

And now, under the chestnut-tree, in anxious converse with Jerry Shaw,
who came out hammer in hand from the anvil, concerning the shoe to
be put on Strathspey's left fore-foot, and the problematic damage
sustained since the accident. Chevis's own theory occupied some minutes
in expounding, and so absorbed his attention that he did not observe,
until the horse was fairly under the blacksmith's hands, that, despite
Jerry Shaw's unaccustomed industry, this was by no means a red-letter
day in his habitual dissipation. He trembled for Strathspey, but it was
too late now to interfere. Jerry Shaw was in that stage of drunkenness
which is greatly accented by an elaborate affectation of sobriety. His
desire that Chevis should consider him perfectly sober was abundantly
manifest in his rigidly steady gait, the preternatural gravity in his
bloodshot eyes, his sparingness of speech, and the earnestness with
which he enunciated the acquiescent formulæ which had constituted his
share of the conversation. Now and then, controlling his faculties
by a great effort, he looked hard at Chevis to discover what doubts
might be expressed in his face concerning the genuineness of this
staid deportment; and Chevis presently found it best to affect too.
Believing that the blacksmith's histrionic attempts in the _rôle_ of
sober artisan were occupying his attention more than the paring of
Strathspey's hoof, which he held between his knees on his leather
apron, while the horse danced an animated measure on the other three
feet, Chevis assumed an appearance of indifference, and strolled away
into the shop. He looked about him, carelessly, at the horseshoes
hanging on a rod in the rude aperture that served as window, at the
wagon-tires, the plowshares, the glowing fire of the forge. The air
within was unpleasantly close, and he soon found himself again in the
door-way.

"Can I get some water here?" he asked, as Jerry Shaw reëntered, and
began hammering vigorously at the shoe destined for Strathspey.

The resonant music ceased for a moment. The solemn, drunken eyes were
slowly turned upon the visitor, and the elaborate affectation of
sobriety was again obtrusively apparent in the blacksmith's manner. He
rolled up more closely the blue-checked homespun sleeve from his corded
hammer-arm, twitched nervously at the single suspender that supported
his copper-colored jeans trousers, readjusted his leather apron hanging
about his neck, and, casting upon Chevis another glance, replete with
a challenging gravity, fell to work upon the anvil, every heavy and
well-directed blow telling with the precision of machinery.

The question had hardly been heard before forgotten. At the next
interval, when he was going out to fit the horse, Chevis repeated his
request.

"Water, did ye say?" asked Jerry Shaw, looking at him with narrowing
eyelids, as if to shut out all other contemplation that he might
grapple with this problem. "Thar's no fraish water hyar, but ye kin
go yander ter the house and ax fur some; or," he added, shading his
eyes from the sunlight with his broad, blackened hand, and looking at
the huge wall of stone beyond the road, "ye kin go down yander ter the
spring, an' ax that thar gal fur a drink."

Chevis took his way, in the last rays of sunshine, across the road
and down the declivity in the direction indicated by the blacksmith.
A cool gray shadow fell upon him from the heights of the great rocks,
as he neared them; the narrow path leading from the road grew dank
and moist, and presently his feet were sunk in the still green and
odorous water-loving weeds, the clumps of fern, and the pungent
mint. He did not notice the soft verdure; he did not even see the
beautiful vines that hung from earth-filled niches among the rocks,
and lent to their forbidding aspect something of a smiling grace;
their picturesque grouping, where they had fallen apart to show this
sparkling fountain of bright up-springing water, was all lost upon his
artistic perceptions. His eyes were fixed on the girl standing beside
the spring, her pail filled, but waiting, with a calm, expectant look
on her face, as she saw him approaching.

No creature could have been more coarsely habited: a green cotton
dress, faded to the faintest hue; rough shoes, just visible beneath her
skirts; a dappled gray and brown calico sun-bonnet, thrown aside on a
moss-grown bowlder near at hand. But it seemed as if the wild nature
about her had been generous to this being toward whom life and fortune
had played the niggard. There were opaline lights in her dreamy eyes
which one sees nowhere save in sunset clouds that brood above dark
hills; the golden sunbeams, all faded from the landscape, had left a
perpetual reflection in her bronze hair; there was a subtle affinity
between her and other pliant, swaying, graceful young things, waving in
the mountain breezes, fed by the rain and the dew. She was hardly more
human to Chevis than certain lissome little woodland flowers, the very
names of which he did not know,--pure white, star-shaped, with a faint
green line threading its way through each of the five delicate petals;
he had seen them embellishing the banks of lonely pools, or growing
in dank, marshy places in the middle of the unfrequented road, where
perhaps it had been mended in a primitive way with a few rotting rails.

"May I trouble you to give me some water?" asked Chevis, prosaically
enough. She neither smiled nor replied. She took the gourd from the
pail, dipped it into the lucent depths of the spring, handed it to him,
and stood awaiting its return when he should have finished. The cool,
delicious water was drained, and he gave the gourd back. "I am much
obliged," he said.

"Ye're welcome," she replied, in a slow, singing monotone. Had the
autumn winds taught her voice that melancholy cadence?

Chevis would have liked to hear her speak again, but the gulf between
his station and hers--so undreamed of by her (for the differences
of caste are absolutely unknown to the independent mountaineers),
so patent to him--could be bridged by few ideas. They had so little
in common that for a moment he could think of nothing to say. His
cogitation suggested only the inquiry, "Do you live here?" indicating
the little house on the other side of the road.

"Yes," she chanted in the same monotone, "I lives hyar."

She turned to lift the brimming pail. Chevis spoke again: "Do you
always stay at home? Do you never go anywhere?"

Her eyes rested upon him, with a slight surprise looking out from among
their changing lights. "No," she said, after a pause; "I hev no call to
go nowhar ez I knows on."

She placed the pail on her head, took the dappled sun-bonnet in her
hand, and went along the path with the assured, steady gait and the
graceful backward poise of the figure that precluded the possibility of
spilling a drop from the vessel.

He had been touched in a highly romantic way by the sweet beauty of
this little woodland flower. It seemed hard that so perfect a thing of
its kind should be wasted here, unseen by more appreciative eyes than
those of bird, or rabbit, or the equally uncultured human beings about
her; and it gave him a baffling sense of the mysterious injustice of
life to reflect upon the difference in her lot and that of others of
her age in higher spheres. He went thoughtfully through the closing
shadows to the shop, mounted the re-shod Strathspey, and rode along
the rugged ascent of the mountain, gravely pondering on worldly
inequalities.

He saw her often afterward, although he spoke to her again but once.
He sometimes stopped as he came and went on the Christel road, and sat
chatting with the old man, her grandfather, on the porch, sunshiny
days, or lounged in the barn-like door of Jerry Shaw's shop talking to
the half-drunken blacksmith. He piqued himself on the readiness with
which he became interested in these people, entered into their thoughts
and feelings, obtained a comprehensive idea of the machinery of life
in this wilderness,--more complicated than one could readily believe,
looking upon the changeless face of the wide, unpopulated expanse of
mountain ranges stretching so far beneath that infinite sky. They
appealed to him from the basis of their common humanity, he thought,
and the pleasure of watching the development of the common human
attributes in this peculiar and primitive state of society never palled
upon him. He regarded with contempt Varney's frivolous displeasure and
annoyance because of Hi Bates's utter insensibility to the difference
in their social position, and the necessity of either acquiescing in
the supposititious equality or dispensing with the invaluable services
of the proud and independent mountaineer; because of the _patois_ of
the untutored people, to hear which, Varney was wont to declare, set
his teeth on edge; because of their narrow prejudices, their mental
poverty, their idle shiftlessness, their uncouth dress and appearance.
Chevis flattered himself that he entertained a broader view. He had
not even a subacute idea that he looked upon these people and their
inner life only as picturesque bits of the mental and moral landscape;
that it was an æsthetic and theoretical pleasure their contemplation
afforded him; that he was as far as ever from the basis of common
humanity.

Sometimes while he talked to the old man on the sunlit porch, the "slip
o' willow" sat in the door-way, listening too, but never speaking.
Sometimes he would find her with her father at the forge, her fair,
ethereal face illumined with an alien and fluctuating brilliancy,
shining and fading as the breath of the fire rose and fell. He came to
remember that face so well that in a sorry sketch-book, where nothing
else was finished, there were several laborious pages lighted up with a
faint reflection of its beauty. But he was as much interested perhaps,
though less poetically, in that massive figure, the idle blacksmith. He
looked at it all from an ideal point of view. The star in the valley
was only a brilliant, set in the night landscape, and suggested a
unique and pleasing experience.

How should he imagine what luminous and wistful eyes were turned
upward to where another star burned,--the light of his camp-fire on
the crag; what pathetic, beautiful eyes had learned to watch and wait
for that red gleam high on the mountain's brow,--hardly below the
stars in heaven it seemed! How could he dream of the strange, vague,
unreasoning trouble with which his idle comings and goings had clouded
that young life, a trouble as strange, as vague, as vast, as the
limitless sky above her.

She understood him as little. As she sat in the open door-way, with the
flare of the fire behind her, and gazed at the red light shining on
the crag, she had no idea of the heights of worldly differences that
divided them, more insurmountable than precipices and flying chutes of
mountain torrents, and chasms and fissures of the wild ravine: she knew
nothing of the life he had left, and of its rigorous artificialities
and gradations of wealth and estimation. And with a heart full of
pitiable unrealities she looked up at the glittering simulacrum of a
star on the crag, while he gazed down on the ideal star in the valley.

The weeks had worn deep into November. Chevis and Varney were thinking
of going home; indeed, they talked of breaking camp day after
to-morrow, and saying a long adieu to wood and mountain and stream.
They had had an abundance of good sport and a surfeit of roughing it.
They would go back to town and town avocations invigorated by their
holiday, and taking with them a fresh and exhilarating recollection of
the forest life left so far behind.

It was near dusk, on a dull, cold evening, when Chevis dismounted
before the door of the blacksmith's little log-cabin. The chestnut-tree
hung desolate and bare on the eaves of the forge; the stream rushed by
in swift gray whirlpools under a sullen gray sky; the gigantic wall of
broken rocks loomed gloomy and sinister on the opposite side of the
road,--not so much as a withered leaf of all their vines clung to their
rugged surfaces. The mountains had changed color: the nearest ranges
were black with the myriads of the grim black branches of the denuded
forest; far away they stretched in parallel lines, rising tier above
tier, and showing numberless gradations of a dreary, neutral tint,
which grew ever fainter in the distance, till merged in the uniform
tone of the sombre sky.

Indoors it was certainly more cheerful. A hickory fire dispensed alike
warmth and light. The musical whir of a spinning-wheel added its
unique charm. From the rafters depended numberless strings of bright
red pepper-pods and ears of pop-corn; hanks of woolen and cotton yarn;
bunches of medicinal herbs; brown gourds and little bags of seeds. On
rude shelves against the wall were ranged cooking utensils, drinking
vessels, etc., all distinguished by that scrupulous cleanliness which
is a marked feature of the poor hovels of these mountaineers, and in
striking contrast to the poor hovels of lowlanders. The rush-bottomed
chairs, drawn in a semicircle before the rough, ill-adjusted stones
which did duty as hearth, were occupied by several men, who seemed to
be making the blacksmith a prolonged visit; various members of the
family were humbly seated on sundry inverted domestic articles, such as
wash-tubs, and splint-baskets made of white oak. There was circulating
among Jerry Shaw's friends a flat bottle, facetiously denominated
"tickler," readily emptied, but as readily replenished from a keg in
the corner. Like the widow's cruse of oil, that keg was miraculously
never empty. The fact of a still near by in the wild ravine might
suggest a reason for its perennial flow. It was a good strong article
of apple-brandy, and its effects were beginning to be distinctly
visible.

Truly the ethereal woodland flower seemed strangely incongruous with
these brutal and uncouth conditions of her life, as she stood at a
little distance from this group, spinning at her wheel. Chevis felt
a sudden sharp pang of pity for her when he glanced toward her; the
next instant he had forgotten it in his interest in her work. It was
altogether at variance with the ideas which he had hitherto entertained
concerning that humble handicraft. There came across him a vague
recollection from his city life that the peasant girls of art galleries
and of the lyric stage were wont to sit at the wheel. "But perhaps
they were spinning flax," he reflected. This spinning was a matter
of walking back and forth with smooth, measured steps and graceful,
undulatory motion; a matter, too, of much pretty gesticulation,--the
thread in one hand, the other regulating the whirl of the wheel. He
thought he had never seen attitudes so charming.

Jerry Shaw hastened to abdicate and offer one of the rush-bottomed
chairs with the eager hospitality characteristic of these
mountaineers,--a a hospitality that meets a stranger on the threshold
of every hut, presses upon him, ungrudgingly, its best, and follows
him on his departure with protestations of regret out to the rickety
fence. Chevis was more or less known to all of the visitors, and
after a little, under the sense of familiarity and the impetus of the
apple-brandy, the talk flowed on as freely as before his entrance.
It was wilder and more antagonistic to his principles and prejudices
than anything he had hitherto heard among these people, and he looked
on and listened, interested in this new development of a phase of
life which he had thought he had sounded from its lowest note to the
top of its compass. He was glad to remain; the scene had impressed
his cultivated perceptions as an interior by Teniers might have done,
and the vehemence and lawlessness of the conversation and the threats
of violence had little reality for him; if he thought about the
subject under discussion at all, it was with a reassuring conviction
that before the plans could be carried out the already intoxicated
mountaineers would he helplessly drunk. Nevertheless, he glanced
ever and anon at the young girl, loath that she should hear it, lest
its virulent, angry bitterness should startle her. She was evidently
listening, too, but her fair face was as calm and untroubled as one of
the pure white faces of those flower-stars of his early stay in the
mountains.

"Them Peels oughtn't ter be let live!" exclaimed Elijah Burr, a
gigantic fellow, arrayed in brown jeans, with the accompaniments of
knife, powder-horn, etc., usual with the hunters of the range; his gun
stood, with those of the other guests, against the wall in a corner of
the room. "They oughtn't ter be let live, an' I'd top off all three of
'em fur the skin an' horns of a deer."

"That thar is a true word," assented Jerry Shaw. "They oughter be run
down an' kilt,--all three o' them Peels."

Chevis could not forbear a question. Always on the alert to add to his
stock of knowledge of men and minds, always analyzing his own inner
life and the inner life of those about him, he said, turning to his
intoxicated host, "Who are the Peels, Mr. Shaw,--if I may ask?"

"Who air the Peels?" repeated Jerry Shaw, making a point of seizing the
question. "They air the meanest men in these hyar mountings. Ye might
hunt from Copperhead Ridge ter Clinch River, an' the whole spread o'
the valley, an' never hear tell o' no sech no 'count critters."

"They oughtn't ter be let live!" again urged Elijah Burr. "No man ez
treats his wife like that dad-burned scoundrel Ike Peel do oughter be
let live. That thar woman is my sister an' Jerry Shaw's cousin,--an' I
shot him down in his own door year afore las'. I shot him ter kill; but
somehow 'nother I war that shaky, an' the cussed gun hung fire a-fust,
an' that thar pore wife o' his'n screamed an' hollered so, that I never
done nuthin' arter all but lay him up for four month an' better for
that thar pore critter ter nuss. He'll see a mighty differ nex' time I
gits my chance. An' 'tain't fur off," he added threateningly.

"Wouldn't it be better to persuade her to leave him?" suggested Chevis
pacifically, without, however, any wild idea of playing peace-maker
between fire and tow.

Burr growled a fierce oath, and then was silent.

A slow fellow on the opposite side of the fire-place explained: "Thar's
whar all the trouble kem from. She wouldn't leave him, fur all he
treated her awful. She said ez how he war mighty good ter her when he
warn't drunk. So 'Lijah shot him."

This way of cutting the Gordian knot of domestic difficulties might
have proved efficacious but for the shakiness induced by the thrill of
fraternal sentiment, the infusion of apple-brandy, the protest of the
bone of contention, and the hanging fire of the treacherous gun. Elijah
Burr could remember no other failure of aim for twenty years.

"He won't git shet of me that easy agin!" Burr declared, with another
pull at the flat tickler. "But ef it hedn't hev been fur what happened
las' week, I mought hev let him off fur awhile," he continued,
evidently actuated by some curiously distorted sense of duty in the
premises. "I oughter hev kilt him afore. But now the cussed critter is
a gone coon. Dad-burn the whole tribe!"

Chevis was desirous of knowing what had happened last week. He did not,
however, feel justified in asking more questions. But apple-brandy is
a potent tongue-loosener, and the unwonted communicativeness of the
stolid and silent mountaineers attested its strength in this regard.
Jerry Shaw, without inquiry, enlightened him.

"Ye see," he said, turning to Chevis, "'Lijah he thought ez how ef he
could git that fool woman ter come ter his house, he could shoot Ike
fur his meanness 'thout botherin' of her, an' things would all git
easy agin. Waal, he went thar one day when all them Peels, the whole
lay-out, war gone down ter the Settlemint ter hear the rider preach,
an' he jes' run away with two of the brats,--the littlest ones, ye
onderstand,--a-thinkin' he mought tole her off from Ike that thar way.
We hearn ez how the pore critter war nigh onter distracted 'bout 'em,
but Ike never let her come arter 'em. Leastways, she never kem. Las'
week Ike kem fur 'em hisself,--him an' them two cussed brothers o'
his'n. All 'Lijah's folks war out'n the way; him an' his boys war off
a-huntin', an' his wife hed gone down ter the spring, a haffen mile
an' better, a-washin' clothes; nobody war ter the house 'ceptin' them
two chillen o' Ike's. An' Ike and his brothers jes' tuk the chillen
away, an' set fire ter the house; an' time 'Lijah's wife got thar,
'twar nuthin' but a pile o' ashes. So we've determinated ter go up
yander ter Laurel Notch, twenty mile along the ridge of the mounting,
ter-night, an' wipe out them Peels,--'kase they air a-goin' ter move
away. That thar wife o' Ike's, what made all the trouble, hev fretted
an' fretted at Ike till he hev determinated ter break up an' wagon
across the range ter Kaintucky, whar his uncle lives in the hills
thar. Ike hev gin his cornsent ter go jes' ter pleasure her, 'kase she
air mos' crazed ter git Ike away whar 'Lijah can't kill him. Ike's
brothers is a-goin', too. I hearn ez how they'll make a start at noon
ter-morrer."

"They'll never start ter Kaintucky ter-morrer," said Burr, grimly.
"They'll git off, afore that, fur hell, stiddier Kaintucky. I hev been
a-tryin' ter make out ter shoot that thar man ever sence that thar gal
war married ter him, seven year ago,--seven year an' better. But what
with her a-foolin' round, an' a-talkin', an' a-goin' on like she war
distracted--she run right 'twixt him an' the muzzle of my gun wunst,
or I would hev hed him that time fur sure--an' somehow 'nother that
critter makes me so shaky with her ways of goin' on that I feel like I
hain't got good sense, an' can't git no good aim at nuthin'. Nex' time,
though, thar'll be a differ. She ain't a-goin' ter Kaintucky along of
him ter be beat fur nuthin' when he's drunk."

It was a pitiable picture presented to Chevis's open-eyed
imagination,--this woman standing for years between the two men she
loved: holding back her brother from his vengeance of her wrongs by
that subtle influence that shook his aim; and going into exile with
her brute of a husband when that influence had waned and failed, and
her wrongs were supplemented by deep and irreparable injuries to
her brother. And the curious moral attitude of the man: the strong
fraternal feeling that alternately nerved and weakened his revengeful
hand.

"We air goin' thar 'bout two o'clock ter-night," said Jerry Shaw, "and
wipe out all three o' them Peels,--Ike an' his two brothers."

"They oughtn't ter be let live," reiterated Elijah Burr, moodily. Did
he speak to his faintly stirring conscience, or to a woful premonition
of his sister's grief?

"They'll all three be stiff an' stark afore daybreak," resumed Jerry
Shaw. "We air all kin ter 'Lijah, an' we air goin' ter holp him top
off them Peels. Thar's ten of us an' three o' them, an' we won't hev
no trouble 'bout it. An' we'll bring that pore critter, Ike's wife,
an' her chillen hyar ter stay. She's welcome ter live along of us till
'Lijah kin fix some sort'n place fur her an' the little chillen. Thar
won't be no trouble a-gittin' rid of the men folks, ez thar is ten of
us an' three o' them, an' we air goin' ter take 'em in the night."

There was a protest from an unexpected quarter. The whir of the
spinning-wheel was abruptly silenced. "I don't see no sense," said
Celia Shaw, her singing monotone vibrating in the sudden lull,--"I
don't see no sense in shootin' folks down like they war nuthin' better
nor bear, nor deer, nor suthin' wild. I don't see no sense in it. An' I
never did see none."

There was an astonished pause.

"Shet up, Cely! Shet up!" exclaimed Jerry Shaw, in mingled anger and
surprise. "Them folks ain't no better nor bear, nor sech. They hain't
got no right ter live,--them Peels."

"No, that they hain't!" said Burr.

"They is powerful no 'count critters, I know," replied the little
woodland flower, the firelight bright in her opaline eyes and on the
flakes of burnished gold gleaming in the dark masses of her hair. "They
is always a-hangin' round the still an' a-gittin' drunk; but I don't
see no sense in a-huntin' 'em down an' a-killin' 'em off. 'Pears ter
me like they air better nor the dumb ones. I don't see no sense in
shootin' 'em."

"Shet up, Cely! Shet up!" reiterated Shaw.

Celia said no more. Reginald Chevis was pleased with this indication
of her sensibility; the other women--her mother and grandmother--had
heard the whole recital with the utmost indifference, as they sat
by the fire monotonously carding cotton. She was beyond her station
in sentiment, he thought. However, he was disposed to recant this
favorable estimate of her higher nature when, twice afterward, she
stopped her work, and, filling the bottle from the keg, pressed it
upon her father, despite her unfavorable criticism of the hangers-on
of stills. Nay, she insisted. "Drink some more," she said. "Ye hain't
got half enough yit." Had the girl no pity for the already drunken
creature? She seemed systematically trying to make him even more
helpless than he was.

He had fallen into a deep sleep before Chevis left the house, and
the bottle was circulating among the other men with a rapidity that
boded little harm to the unconscious Ike Peel and his brothers at
Laurel Notch, twenty miles away. As Chevis mounted Strathspey he
saw the horses of Jerry Shaw's friends standing partly within and
partly without the blacksmith's shop They would stand there all
night, he thought It was darker when he commenced the ascent of the
mountain than he had anticipated. And what was this driving against
his face,--rain? No, it was snow. He had not started a moment too
soon. But Strathspey, by reason of frequent travel, knew every foot
of the way, and perhaps there would only be a flurry. And so he went
on steadily up and up the wild, winding road among the great, bare,
black trees and the grim heights and chasms. The snow fell fast,--so
fast and so silently, before he was half-way to the summit he had lost
the vague companionship of the sound of his horse's hoofs, now muffled
in the thick carpet so suddenly flung upon the ground. Still the snow
fell, and when he had reached the mountain's brow the ground was deeply
covered, and the whole aspect of the scene was strange. But though
obscured by the fast-flying flakes, he knew that down in the bosom of
the white valley there glittered still that changeless star.

"Still spinning, I suppose," he said to himself, as he looked toward it
and thought of the interior of the log-cabin below. And then he turned
into the tent to enjoy his cigar, his æsthetic reveries, and a bottle
of wine.

But the wheel was no longer awhirl. Both music and musician were gone.
Toiling along the snow-filled mountain ways; struggling with the
fierce gusts of wind as they buffeted and hindered her, and fluttered
derisively among her thin, worn, old garments; shivering as the driving
flakes came full into the pale, calm face, and fell in heavier and
heavier wreaths upon the dappled calico sun-bonnet; threading her
way through unfrequented woodland paths, that she might shorten the
distance; now deftly on the verge of a precipice, whence a false
step of those coarse, rough shoes would fling her into unimaginable
abysses below; now on the sides of steep ravines, falling sometimes
with the treacherous, sliding snow, but never faltering; tearing her
hands on the shrubs and vines she clutched to help her forward, and
bruised and bleeding, but still going on; trembling more than with
the cold, but never turning back, when a sudden noise in the terrible
loneliness of the sheeted woods suggested the close proximity of a wild
beast, or perhaps, to her ignorant, superstitious mind, a supernatural
presence,--thus she journeyed on her errand of deliverance.

Her fluttering breath came and went in quick gasps; her failing limbs
wearily dragged through the deep drifts; the cruel winds untiringly
lashed her; the snow soaked through the faded green cotton dress to the
chilled white skin,--it seemed even to the dull blood coursing feebly
through her freezing veins. But she had small thought for herself
during those long, slow hours of endurance and painful effort. Her pale
lips moved now and then with muttered speculations: how the time went
by; whether they had discovered her absence at home; and whether the
fleeter horsemen were even now ploughing their way through the longer,
winding mountain road. Her only hope was to outstrip their speed. Her
prayer--this untaught being!--she had no prayer, except perhaps her
life, the life she was so ready to imperil. She had no high, cultured
sensibilities to sustain her. There was no instinct stirring within
her that might have nerved her to save her father's, or her brother's,
or a benefactor's life. She held the creatures that she would have
died to warn in low estimation, and spoke of them with reprobation and
contempt. She had known no religious training, holding up forever the
sublimest ideal. The measureless mountain wilds were not more infinite
to her than that great mystery. Perhaps, without any philosophy, she
stood upon the basis of a common humanity.

When the silent horsemen, sobered by the chill night air and the cold
snow, made their cautious approach to the little porch of Ike Peel's
log-hut at Laurel Notch, there was a thrill of dismayed surprise
among them to discover the door standing half open, the house empty
of its scanty furniture and goods, its owners fled, and the very dogs
disappeared; only, on the rough stones before the dying fire, Celia
Shaw, falling asleep and waking by fitful starts.

"Jerry Shaw swore ez how he would hev shot that thar gal o'
his'n,--that thar Cely," Hi Bates said to Chevis and Varney the next
day, when he recounted the incident, "only he didn't think she hed
her right mind; a-walkin' through this hyar deep snow full fifteen
mile,--it's fifteen mile by the short cut ter Laurel Notch,--ter git
Ike Peel's folks off 'fore Lijah an' her dad could come up an' settle
Ike an' his brothers. Leastways, 'Lijah an' the t'others, fur Jerry hed
got so drunk he couldn't go; he war dead asleep till ter-day, when they
kem back a-fotchin' the gal with 'em. That thar Cely Shaw never did
look ter me like she hed good sense, nohow. Always looked like she war
queer an' teched in the head."

There was a furtive gleam of speculation on the dull face of the
mountaineer when his two listeners broke into enthusiastic commendation
of the girl's high heroism and courage. The man of ledgers swore that
he had never heard of anything so fine, and that he himself would
walk through fifteen miles of snow and midnight wilderness for the
honor of shaking hands with her. There was that keen thrill about
their hearts sometimes felt in crowded theatres, responsive to the
cleverly simulated heroism of the boards; or in listening to a poet's
mid-air song; or in looking upon some grand and ennobling phase of life
translated on a great painter's canvas.

Hi Bates thought that perhaps they too were a little "teched in the
head."

There had fallen upon Chevis a sense of deep humiliation. Celia Shaw
had heard no more of that momentous conversation than he; a wide
contrast was suggested. He began to have a glimmering perception
that despite all his culture, his sensibility, his yearnings toward
humanity, he was not so high a thing in the scale of being; that he had
placed a false estimate upon himself. He had looked down on her with a
mingled pity for her dense ignorance, her coarse surroundings, her low
station, and a dilettante's delight in picturesque effects, and with
no recognition of the moral splendors of that star in the valley. A
realization, too, was upon him that fine feelings are of most avail as
the motive power of fine deeds.

He and his friend went down together to the little log-cabin. There had
been only jeers and taunts and reproaches for Celia Shaw from her own
people. These she had expected, and she had stolidly borne them. But
she listened to the fine speeches of the city-bred men with a vague
wonderment on her flower-like face,--whiter than ever to-day.

"It was a splendid--a noble thing to do," said Varney, warmly.

"I shall never forget it," said Chevis, "it will always be like a
sermon to me."

There was something more that Reginald Chevis never forgot: the look
on her face as he turned and left her forever; for he was on his way
back to his former life, so far removed from her and all her ideas
and imaginings. He pondered long upon that look in her inscrutable
eyes,--was it suffering, some keen pang of despair?--as he rode down
and down the valley, all unconscious of the heart-break he left behind
him. He thought of it often afterward; he never penetrated its mystery.

He heard of her only once again. On the eve of a famous day, when
visiting the outposts of a gallant corps, Reginald Chevis happened to
recognize in one of the pickets the gawky mountaineer who had been his
guide through those autumnal woods so far away. Hi Bates was afterward
sought out and honored with an interview in the general's tent; for the
accidental encounter had evoked many pleasant reminiscences in Chevis's
mind, and among other questions he wished to ask was what had become of
Jerry Shaw's daughter.

"She's dead,--long ago," answered Hi Bates. "She died afore the winter
war over the year ez ye war a-huntin' thar. She never hed good sense
ter my way o' thinkin', nohow, an' one night she run away, an' walked
'bout fifteen mile through a big snow-storm. Some say it settled on her
chist. Anyhow, she jes' sorter fell away like afterward, an' never held
up her head good no more. She always war a slim little critter, an'
looked like she war teched in the head."

There are many things that suffer unheeded in those mountains: the
birds that freeze on the trees; the wounded deer that leaves its
cruel kind to die alone; the despairing, flying fox with its pursuing
train of savage dogs and men. And the jutting crag whence had shone
the camp-fire she had so often watched--her star, set forever--looked
far over the valley beneath, where in one of those sad little rural
graveyards she had been laid so long ago.

But Reginald Chevis has never forgotten her. Whenever he sees the
earliest star spring into the evening sky, he remembers the answering
red gleam of that star in the valley.




                 ELECTIONEERIN' ON BIG INJUN MOUNTING.


"An' ef ye'll believe me, he hev hed the face an' grace ter come
a-prowlin' up hyar on Big Injun Mounting, electioneerin' fur votes, an'
a-shakin' hands with every darned critter on it."

To a superficial survey the idea of a constituency might have seemed
incongruous enough with these rugged wilds. The July sunshine rested
on stupendous crags; the torrent was bridged only by a rainbow
hovering above the cataract; in all the wide prospect of valley and
far-stretching Alleghany ranges the wilderness was broken by no field
or clearing. But over this gloomy primeval magnificence of nature
universal suffrage brooded like a benison, and candidates munificently
endowed with "face an' grace" were wont to thread the tangled mazes of
Big Injun Mounting.

The presence of voters in this lonely region was further attested by
a group of teamsters, who had stopped at the wayside spring that the
oxen might drink, and in the interval of waiting had given themselves
over to the interest of local politics and the fervor of controversy.

"Waal, they tells me ez he made a powerful good 'torney-gineral las'
time. An' it 'pears ter me ez the mounting folks oughter vote fur him
agin them town cusses, 'kase he war born an' raised right down hyar on
the slope of Big Injun Mounting. He never lef' thar till he war twenty
year old, when he went ter live yander at Carrick Court House, an'
arter a while tuk ter studyin' of law."

The last speaker was the most uncouth of the rough party, and
poverty-stricken as to this world's goods. Instead of a wagon, he
had only a rude "slide;" his lean oxen were thrust from the water
by the stronger and better fed teams; and his argument in favor
of the reëlection of the attorney for the State in this judicial
circuit--called in the vernacular "the 'torney-gineral"--was received
with scant courtesy.

"Ye're a darned fool ter be braggin' that Rufus Chadd air a mounting
boy!" exclaimed Abel Stubbs, scornfully. "He hev hed the insurance
ter git ez thick ez he kin with them town folks down thar at Ephesus,
an' he hev made ez hard speeches agin everybody that war tuk ter jail
from Big Injun ez ef he hed never laid eyes on 'em till that minit;
an' arter all that the mounting folks hev done fur him, too! 'Twar
thar vote that elected him the fust time he run, 'kase the convention
put up that thar Taylor man, what nobody knowed nuthin' about an'
jes' _de_spised; an' the t'other candidates wouldn't agree ter the
convention, but jes' went before the people ennyhow, an' the vote war
so split that Big Injun kerried Rufe Chadd in. An' what do he do? Ef it
hedn't hev been fur his term a-givin' out he would hev jailed the whole
mounting arter a while!"

The dwellers on Big Injun Mounting are not the first rural community
that have aided in the election of a prosecuting officer, and afterward
have become wroth with a fiery wrath because he prosecutes.

"An' them town folks," Abel Stubbs continued, after a pause,--"at
fust they war mightily interrupted 'bout the way that the election hed
turned out, an' they promised the Lord that they would never butt agin
a convention no more while they lived in this life. Hevin' a mounting
lawyer over them town folks in Colbury an' Ephesus war mighty humbling
ter thar pride, I reckon; nobody hed never hearn tell o' sech a thing
afore. But when these hyar horse-thieves an' mounting fellers ginerally
got ter goin' in sech a constancy ter the pen'tiary, them town folks
changed thar tune 'bout Rufe Chadd. They 'lowed ez they hed never hed
sech a good 'torney-gineral afore. An' now they air goin' ter hev a new
election, an' hyar is Rufe a-leadin' off at the head of the convention
ez graceful ez ef he hed never butted agin it in his life."

"Waal," drawled a heavy fellow, speaking for the first time,--a rigid
soul, who would fain vote the straight ticket,--"I won't support Rufe
Chadd; an' yit I dunno how I kin git my cornsent ter vote agin the
nominee."

"Rufe Chadd air goin' ter be beat like hell broke loose," said Abel
Stubbs, hopefully.

"He will ef Big Injun hev enny say so 'bout 'n it," rejoined the rigid
voter. "I hev never seen a man ez onpopular ez he is nowadays on this
mounting."

"I hev hearn tell that the kin-folks of some of them convicts, what he
made sech hard speeches agin, hev swore ter git even with him yit,"
said Abel Stubbs. "Rufe Chadd hev been shot at twice in the woods sence
he kem up on Big Injun Mounting. I seen him yestiddy, an' he tole me
so; an' he showed me his hat whar a rifle ball hed done gone through.
An' I axed him ef he warn't afeard of all them men what hed sech a
grudge agin him. 'Mister Stubbs,' he say, sorter saft,--ye know them's
the ways he hev l'arned in Ephesus an' Colbury an' sech, an' he hed,
afore he ever left Big Injun Mounting, the sassiest tongue that ever
wagged,--'Mister Stubbs,' Rufe say, mighty perlite, 'foolin' with me
is like makin' faces at a rattlesnake: it may be satisfying to the
feelin's, but 't ain't safe.' That's what Rufe tole ter me."

"'T would pleasure me some ter see Rufe Chadd agin," said the driver of
the slide. "Me an' him air jes' the same age,--thirty-three year. We
used ter go huntin' tergether some. They tells me ez he hev app'inted
ter speak termo-rrer at the Settlemint along of them t'other five
candidates what air a-runnin' agin him. I likes ter hear him speak; he
knocks things up somehow."

"He did talk mighty sharp an' stingin' the fust time he war
electioneerin' on Big Injun Mounting," the rigid voter reluctantly
admitted; "but mebbe he hev furgot how sence he hev done been livin'
with them town folks."

"Ef ye wants ter know whether Rufe Chadd hev furgot how ter talk, jes'
take ter thievin' of horses an' sech, will ye!" exclaimed Abel Stubbs,
with an emphatic nod. "Ye oughter hev hearn the tale my brother brung
from the court-house at Ephesus when Josh Green war tried. He said Rufe
jes' tuk that jury out 'n tharselves; an' he gits jes' sech a purchase
on every jury he speaks afore. My brother says he believes that ef
Rufe hed gin the word, that jury would hev got out 'n thar cheers an'
throttled Josh. It's a mighty evil sort 'n gift,--this hyar way that
Rufe talks."

"Waal, his tongue can't keep the party from bein' beat. I hates ter see
it disgraced agin," said the rigid voter. "But law, I can't stand hyar
all day jowin' 'bout Rufus Chadd! I hev got my wheat ter thrash this
week, though I don't expec' ter make more 'n enough fur seed fur nex'
year,--ef that. I must be joltin' along."

The ox-carts rumbled slowly down the steep hill, the slide continued
its laborious ascent, and the forest was left once more to the fitful
stir of the wind and the ceaseless pulsations of the falling torrent.
The shadows of the oak leaves moved to and fro with dazzling effects of
interfulgent sunbeams. Afar off the blue mountains shimmered through
the heated air; but how cool was this clear rush of emerald water and
the bounding white spray of the cataract! The sudden flight of a bird
cleft the rainbow; there was a flash of moisture on his swift wings,
and he left his wild, sweet cry echoing far behind him. Beetling high
above the stream, the crags seemed to touch the sky. One glance up
and up those towering, majestic steeps,--how it lifted the soul! The
Settlement, perched upon the apparently inaccessible heights, was not
visible from the road below. It cowered back affrighted from the verge
of the great cliff and the grimly yawning abysses. The huts, three or
four in number, were all silent, and might have been all tenantless, so
lonely was their aspect. Behind them rose the dense forest, filling the
background. In a rush-bottomed chair before the little store was the
only human creature to be seen in the hamlet,--a man whose appearance
was strangely at variance with his surroundings. He had the long, lank
frame of the mountaineer; but instead of the customary brown jeans
clothes, he wore a suit of blue flannel, and a dark straw hat was drawn
over his brow. This simple attire and the cigar that he smoked had
given great offense to the already prejudiced dwellers on Big Injun
Mounting. It was not deemed meet that Rufe Chadd should "git tuk up
with them town ways, an' sot hisself ter wearin' of store-clothes."
His face was a great contrast to the faces of the stolid mountaineers.
It was keenly chiseled; the constant friction of thought had worn away
the grosser lines, leaving sharply defined features with abrupt turns
of expression. The process might be likened to the gradual denudation
of those storied strata of his mountains by the momentum of their
torrents.

And here was no quiet spirit. It could brook neither defeat nor
control; conventional barriers went down before it; and thus some years
ago it had come to pass that a raw fellow from the unknown wildernesses
of the circuit was precipitated upon it as the attorney for the State.
A startling sensation had awaited the dull court-rooms of the villages.
The mountaineer seemed to have brought from his rugged heights certain
subtle native instincts, and the wily doublings of the fox, the sudden
savage spring of the catamount, the deadly sinuous approach of the
copperhead, were displayed with a frightful effect translated into
human antagonism. There was a great awakening of the somnolent bar;
counsel for the defense became eager, active, zealous, but the juries
fell under his domination, as the weak always submit to the strong.
Those long-drawn cases that hang on from term to term because of
faint-hearted tribunals, too merciful to convict, too just to acquit,
vanished as if by magic from the docket. The besom of the law swept the
country, and his name was a terror and a threat.

His brethren of the bar held him in somewhat critical estimation. It
was said that his talents were not of a high order; that he knew no
law; that he possessed only a remarkable dexterity with the few broad
principles familiar to him, and a certain swift suppleness in their
application, alike effectual and imposing. He was a natural orator,
they admitted. His success lay in his influence on a jury, and his
influence on a jury was due to a magnetic earnestness and so strong
a belief in his own powers that every word carried conviction with
it. But he did not see in its entirety the massive grandeur of that
greatest monument of human intellect known as the common law of England.

In the face of all detraction, however, there were the self-evident
facts of his success and the improvement in the moral atmosphere
wrought during his term of office. He was thinking of these things as
he sat with his absorbed eyes fastened upon the horizon, and of the
change in himself since he had left his humble home on the slope of
Big Injun Mounting. There he had lived seventeen years in ignorance of
the alphabet; he was the first of his name who could write it. From an
almost primitive state he had overtaken the civilization of Ephesus
and Colbury,--no great achievement, it might seem to a sophisticated
imagination; but the mountains were a hundred years behind the progress
of those centres. His talents had burst through the stony crust of
circumstance, like the latent fires of a volcano. And he had plans
for the future. Only a short while ago he had been confident when
he thought of them; now they were hampered by the great jeopardy of
his reëlection, because of the egregious blindness that could not
distinguish duty from malice, justice from persecution. He had felt
the strength of education and civilization; he was beginning to feel
the terrible strength of ignorance. His faith in his own powers was on
the wane. He had experienced a suffocating sense of impotence when, in
stumping Big Injun Mounting, he had been called upon by the meagre but
vociferous crowd to justify the hard bearing of the prosecution upon
Josh Green "fur stealin' of Squire Bibb's old gray mare, that ye knows,
Rufe,--fur ye hev plowed with her,--warn't wuth more 'n ten dollars. Ef
Josh hedn't been in the dark, he wouldn't hev teched sech a pore old
critter. Tell us 'bout 'n seven year in the pen'tiary fur a mare wuth
ten dollars." What possibility--even with Chadd's wordy dexterity--of
satisfying such demands as this! He found that the strength of
ignorance lies in its blundering brutality. And he found, too, that
mental supremacy does not of its inherent nature always aspire, but
can be bent downward to low ends. The opposing candidates made capital
of these illogical attacks; they charged him with his most brilliant
exploits as ingenious perversions of the law and attempts upon the
liberties of the people. Chadd began to despair of dissipating the
prejudice and ignorance so readily crystallized by his opponents, and
the only savage instinct left to him was to die game. He justified
his past conduct by the curt declaration that he had done his duty
according to the law, and he asked the votes of his fellow-citizens
with an arrogant _hauteur_ worthy of Coriolanus.

The afternoon was wearing away; the lengthening shadows were shifting;
the solitary figure that had been motionless in the shade was now
motionless in the golden sunshine. A sound broke upon the air other
than the muffled thunder of the falls and the droning reiteration of
the katydid. There came from the rocky path threading the forest the
regular beat of horses' hoofs, and in a few moments three men rode
into the clearing that sloped to the verge of the cliff. The first
faint footfall was a spell to wake the Settlement to sudden life:
sundry feminine faces were thrust out of the rude windows; bevies of
lean-limbed, tow-headed, unkempt children started up from unexpected
nooks; the store-keeper strolled to the door, and stood with his pipe
in his mouth, leaning heavily against the frame; and Rufus Chadd
changed his position with a slow, lounging motion, and turned his eyes
upon the road.

"Waal," said the store-keeper, with frank criticism, as the trio came
in sight, "Isaac Boker's drunk agin. It's the natur' of the critter,
I'm a-thinkin'. He hev been ter the still, ez sure ez ye air born.
I hopes 't ain't a dancin'-drunk he hev got. The las' time he hed a
dancin'-drunk, he jes' bounced up an' down the floor, an' hollered an'
sung an' sech, an' made sech a disturbament that the Settle_mint_ war
kep' awake till daybreak, mighty nigh. 'T war mighty pore enjoymint
for the Settle_mint_. 'T war like sittin' up with the sick an' dead,
stiddier along of a happy critter like him. I'm powerful sorry fur
his wife, 'kase he air mighty rough ter her when he air drunk; he
cut her once a toler'ble bad slash. She hev hed ter do all the work
fur four year,--plowin', an' choppin' wood, an cookin', an' washin',
an' sech. It hev aged her some. An' all her chillen is gals,--little
gals. Boys, now, mought grow some help, but gals is more no 'count the
bigger they gits. She air a tried woman, surely. Isaac is drunk ez a
constancy,--dancin'-drunk, mos'ly. Nuthin' kin stop him."

"A good thrashing would help him a little, I'm thinking," drawled
the lawyer. "And if I lived here as a constancy I'd give it to him
the first sober spell he had." His speech was slow; his voice was
spiritless and languid; he still possessed the tone and idiom of the
mountaineer, but he had lost the characteristic pronunciation, more
probably from the influence of other associations than an appreciation
of its incorrectness.

"That ain't the right sort o' sawder fur a candidate, Rufe," the
store-keeper admonished him. "An' 'tain't safe no how fur sech a slim,
stringy boy ez ye air ter talk that way 'bout'n Isaac Boker. He air a
tremenjous man, an' ez strong ez an ox."

"I can thrash any man who beats his wife," protested the officer of the
law. "I don't see how the Settlement gets its own consent to let that
sort of thing go on."

"She air his wife," said the store-keeper, who was evidently of
conservative tendencies. "An' she air powerful tuk up with him. I hev
hearn her 'low ez he air better dancin'-drunk than other men sober. She
could hev married other men; she didn't suffer with hevin' no ch'ice."

"He ought to be put under lock and key," said Chadd. "That would
sober him. I wish these dancin'-drunk fellows could be sent to the
state-prison. I could make a jury think ten years was almost too good
for that wife-beating chap. I'd like to see him get away from me."

There was a certain calculating cruelty in his face as he said this.
He was animated by no chivalric impulse to protect the weak and
helpless; the spirit roused within him was rather the instinct of the
beast of prey. The store-keeper looked askance at him. In his mental
review of the changes wrought in the past few years there was one
that had escaped Rufus Chadd's attention. The process was insinuating
and gradual, but the result was bold and obvious. In the constant
opposition in which he was placed to criminals, in the constant
contemplation of the worst phases of human nature, in the active effort
which his duty required to bring the perpetrators of all foul deeds to
justice, he had grown singularly callous and pitiless. The individual
criminal had been merged in the abstract idea of crime. After the first
few cases he had been able to banish the visions of the horrors brought
upon other lives than that of the prisoner by the verdict of guilty.
Mother, wife, children,--these pale, pursuing phantoms were exorcised
by prosaic custom, and his steely insensibility made him the master of
many a harrowing court-room scene.

"That would be a mighty pore favor ter his wife," said the
store-keeper, after a pause. "She hed ruther be beat."

The three men had dismounted, hitched their horses, and were now
approaching the store. Rufus Chadd rose to shake hands with the
foremost of the party. The quick fellow was easily schooled, and the
store-keeper's comment upon his lack of policy induced him to greet
the new-comers with a greater show of cordiality than he had lately
practiced toward his constituents.

"I never looked ter find ye hyar this soon, Rufe," said one of the
arrivals. "What hev ye done with the t'other candidates?"

"I left them behind, as I always do," said Chadd, laughing, "and as I
expect to do again next Thursday week, if I can get you to promise to
vote for me."

"I ain't a-goin' ter vote fur ye,--nary time," interpolated Boker, as
he reeled heavily forward.

"Well, I'm sorry for that," said Chadd, with the candidate's
long-suffering patience. "Why?"

Isaac Boker felt hardly equal to argument, but he steadied himself as
well as he could, and looked vacantly into the eyes of his interlocutor
for some pointed inspiration; perhaps he caught there an intimation
of the contempt in which he was held. He still hesitated, but with a
sudden anger inflaming his bloated face. Chadd waited a moment for a
reply; then he turned carelessly away, saying that he would stroll
about a little, as sitting still so long was fatiguing.

"Ef ye war whar ye oughter be, a-follerin' of the plow," said Isaac
Boker, "ye wouldn't git a chance ter tire yerself a-sittin' in a cheer."

"I don't hold myself too high for plowing," replied Chadd, in a
conciliatory manner. "Plowing is likely work for any able-bodied man."
This speech was unlucky. There was in it an undercurrent of suggestion
to Isaac Boker's suspicious conscience. He thought Chadd intended a
covert allusion to his own indolence in the field, and his wife's
activity as a substitute. "It was only an accident that took me out of
the furrow," Chadd continued.

"'Twar a killin' accident ter the country," said Isaac Boker. "Fur they
tells me that ye don't know no more law than a mounting fox." Chadd
laughed, but he sneered too. His patience was evaporating. Still he
restrained his irritation by an effort, and Boker went on: "Folks ez is
bred ter the plow ain't got the sense an' the showin' ter make peart
lawyers. An' that's why I ain't a-goin' ter vote fur ye."

This plain speaking was evidently relished by the others; they said
nothing, but their low acquiescent chuckle demonstrated their opinion.

"I haven't asked you for your vote," said Chadd, sharply.

The burly fellow paused for a moment, in stupid surprise; then his
drunken wrath rising, he exclaimed, "An' whyn't ye ax me fur my vote,
then? Ye're the damnedest critter in this country, Rufe Chadd, ter come
electioneerin' on Big Injun Mounting, an' a-makin' out ez I ain't good
enough ter be axed ter vote fur ye! Ye hed better not be tryin' ter sot
me down lower 'n other folks. I'll break that empty cymlin' of a head
of yourn," and he raised his clenched fist.

"If you come a step nearer I'll throw you off the bluff," said Chadd.

"That'll be a powerful cur'ous tale ter go the rounds o' the mounting,"
remarked one of the disaffected by-standers. "Ye hev done all ye kin
ter torment yer own folks up hyar on Big Injun Mounting what elected ye
afore; an' then ye comes up hyar agin, an' the fust man that says he
won't vote fur ye must be flunged off'n the bluff."

"'Pears ter me," said Isaac Boker, surlily, and still shaking his fist,
"ez thar ain't all yit in the pen'tiary that desarves ter go thar.
Better men than ye air, Rufe Chadd, hev been locked up, an' hung too,
sence ye war elected ter office."

There was a sudden change in the lawyer's attitude; a strong tension
of the muscles, as of a wild-cat ready to spring; the quickening of
his blood showed in his scarlet face; there was a fiery spark in his
darkening eyes.

"Oh, come now, Rufe," said one of the lookers-on hastily. "Ye oughtn't
ter git ter fightin' with a drunken man. Jes' walk yerself off fur a
while."

"Oh, he can _say_ what he likes while he's drunk," replied Chadd, with
a short, scornful laugh. "But I tell you, now, he had better keep his
fists for his wife."

The others gathered about the great, massive fellow, who was violently
gesticulating and incoherently asserting his offended dignity. Chadd
strolled away toward the gloomy woods, his hands in his pockets,
and his eyes bent upon the ground. Glances of undisguised aversion
followed him,--from the group about the store, from the figures in
the windows and doors of the poor dwellings, even from the half-clad
children who paused in their spiritless play to gaze after him. He was
vaguely conscious of these pursuing looks of hatred, but only once he
saw the universal sentiment expressed in a face. As the long shadows
of the forest fell upon his path, he chanced to raise his eyes, and
encountered those of a woman, standing in Boker's cabin. He went on,
feeling like a martyr. The thick foliage closed upon him; the sound
of his languid footsteps died in the distance, and the figures on
the cliff stood in the sunset glow, watching the spot where he had
disappeared, as silent and as motionless as if they had fallen under
some strange, uncanny spell.

The calm of the woodland, the refreshing aromatic odors, the rising
wind after the heat of the sultry day, exerted a revivifying influence
upon the lawyer's spirits, as he walked on into the illimitable
solitudes of the forest. Night was falling before he turned to retrace
his way; above the opaque, colorless leaves there was the lambent
glinting of a star; the fitful plaint of a whip-poor-will jarred the
dark stillness; grotesque black shadows had mustered strong among the
huge boles of the trees. But he took no note of the gathering gloom;
somehow, his heart had grown suddenly light. He had forgotten the
drunken wrangler and all the fretting turmoils of the canvass; once
he caught himself in making plans, with his almost impossible success
in the election as a basis. And yet, inconsistently enough, he felt a
dismayed astonishment at his unaccountable elation. The workings of his
own mind and their unexpected developments were always to him strange
phenomena. He was introspective enough to take heed of this inward
tumult, and he had a shrewd suspicion that more activity was there
than in all the mental exercitations of the combined bench and bar of
the circuit. But he harbored a vague distrust of this uncontrollable
power within, so much stronger than the untutored creature to whom
it appertained. A harassing sense of doubleness often possessed him,
and he was torn by conflicting counsels,--the inherent inertia and
conservatism of the mountaineer, who would fain follow forever the
traditional customs of his ancestry, and an alien overwhelming impetus,
which carried him on in spite of himself, and bewildered him with his
own exploits. He was helpless under this unreasonable expectation of
success, and regarded the mental gymnastic of joyous anticipation with
perplexed surprise. "I'm fixing a powerful disappointment for myself,"
he said.

He could now see, through the long vista of the road, the open space
where the Settlement was perched upon the crag. The black, jagged
outline of the rock serrated the horizon, and was cut sharply into
the delicate, indefinable tints of the sky. Above it a great red moon
was rising. There was the gleam of the waterfall; how did it give
the sense of its emerald green in the darkness? The red, rising moon
showed, but did not illumine, the humble cluster of log huts upon the
great cliff. Here and there a dim yet genial flare of firelight came
broadly flickering out into the night. It was darker still in the
dense woods from which the road showed this nocturnal picture framed
in the oak leaves above his head. But was a sudden flash of lightning
shooting across that clear, tenderly-tinted sky? He felt his warm blood
gushing down his face; he had a dizzying sense of falling heavily; and
he heard, strangely dulled, a hoarse, terrified cry, which he knew
he did not utter. It echoed far through the quiet woods, startling
the apathetic inhabitants of the Settlement, and waking all the weird
spirits of the rocks. The men sitting in the store took their pipes
from their mouths, and looked at each other in surprise.

"What's that?" asked one of the newly-arrived candidates, an Ephesus
man, who held that the mountains were not over and above safe for
civilized people, and was fain to investigate unaccustomed sounds.

"Jes' somebody a-hollerin' fur thar cow, mebbe," said the store-keeper.
"Or mebbe it air Isaac Boker, ez gits dancin'-drunk wunst in a while."

The cry rose again, filling all the rocky abysses and mountain heights
with a frenzied horror. From the woods a dark figure emerged upon the
crag; it seemed to speed along the sky, blotting out, as it went, the
moon and stars. The men at the store sprang to their feet, shaken by a
speechless agitation, when Isaac Boker rushed in among them, suddenly
sobered, and covered with blood.

"I hev done it!" he exclaimed, with a pallid anguish upon his bloated
face. "I met him in the woods, an' slashed him ter pieces."

The red moon turned to gold in the sky, and the world was flooded with
a gentle splendor; and as the hours went by no louder sound broke upon
the gilded dusk than the throb of the cataract, pulsing like the heart
of the mountains, and the stir of the wind about the rude hut where the
wounded man had been carried.

When Rufus Chadd opened his eyes upon the awe-stricken faces that
clustered about the bed, he had no need to be reminded of what had
happened. The wave of life, which it seemed would have carried him so
far, had left him stranded here in the ebb, while all the world sailed
on.

"They hev got Isaac Boker tied hard an' fast, Rufe," said the
store-keeper, in an attempt to reply to the complex changes of
expression that flitted over the pale face.

Chadd did not answer. He was thinking that no adequate retribution
could be inflicted upon Isaac Boker. The crime was not only the
destruction of merely sensuous human life, but, alas, of that
subtler entity of human schemes, and upward-reaching ambitions, and
the immeasurable opportunity of achievement, which after all is the
essence of the thing called life. He was to die at the outset of
his career, which his own steadfast purpose and unaided talent had
rendered honorable and brilliant, for the unreasoning fury of a drunken
mountaineer. And this was an end for a man who had turned his ambitious
eyes upon a chief-justice's chair,--an absurd ambition but for its
splendid effrontery! In all this bitterness, however, it was some
comfort to know that the criminal had not escaped.

"Are you able to tell how it happened, Chadd?" asked one of the lawyers.

As Chadd again opened his eyes, they fell upon the face of a woman
standing just within the door,--so drawn and piteous a face, with such
lines of patient endurance burnt into it, with such a woful prophecy in
the sunken, horror-stricken eyes, he turned his head that he might see
it no more. He remembered that face with another expression upon it. It
had given him a look like a stab from the door of Boker's hut, when he
had passed in the afternoon. He wished never to see it again, and yet
he was constrained to glance back. There it was, with its quiver of a
prescient heart-break. He felt a strange inward thrill, a bewildering
rush of emotion. That sense of doubleness and development which so
mystified him was upon him now. He was surprised at himself when he
said, distinctly, so that all might hear, "If I die--don't let them
prosecute Isaac Boker."

There was a sudden silence, so intense that it seemed as if the hush of
death had already fallen, or that the primeval stillness of creation
was never broken. Had his soul gone out into the night? Was there now
in the boundless spaces of the moonlit air some mysterious presence,
as incomprehensible to this little cluster of overawed humanity as to
the rocks and woods of the mighty, encompassing wilderness? How did the
time pass? It seemed hours before the stone-like figure stirred again,
and yet the white radiance on the puncheon floor had not shifted. His
consciousness was coming back from those vague border-lands of life
and death. He was about to speak once more. "Nobody can know how it
happened except me." And then again, as he drifted away, "Don't let
them prosecute."

There was a fine subject of speculation at the Settlement the next
morning, when the country-side gathered to hear the candidates speak.
The story of Isaac Boker's attack upon Rufus Chadd was repeated
to every new-comer, and the astonishment created by the victim's
uncharacteristic request when he had thought he was dying revived
with each consecutive recital. It presently became known that no
fatal result was to be anticipated. The doctor, who lived twenty
miles distant, and who had just arrived, said that the wounds, though
painful, were not dangerous, and his opinion added another element of
interest to the eager discussion of the incident.

Thus relieved of the shadow of an impending tragedy, the knots of
men congregated on the great cliff gradually gave themselves up to
the object of their meeting. Candidates of smiling mien circulated
among the saturnine, grave-faced mountaineers. In circulation, too,
were other genial spirits, familiarly known as "apple-jack." It was a
great occasion for the store-keeper; so pressing and absorbing were
his duties that he had not a moment's respite, until Mr. Slade, the
first speaker of the day, mounted a stump in front of the store and
began to address his fellow-citizens. He was a large, florid man, with
a rotund voice and a smooth manner, and he was considered Chadd's
most formidable competitor. The mountaineers hastily concentrated in
a semicircle about him, listening with the close attention singularly
characteristic of rural audiences. Behind the crowd was the immensity
of the unpeopled forests; below, the mad fret of the cataract; above,
the vast hemisphere of the lonely skies; and far, far away was the
infinite stretching of those blue ranges that the Indians called The
Endless.

Chadd had lain in a sort of stupor all the morning, vaguely conscious
of the distant mountains visible through the open window,--vaguely
conscious of numbers of curious faces that came to the door and gazed
in upon him,--vaguely conscious of the candidate's voice beginning to
resound in the noontide stillness. Then he roused himself.

The sensation of the first speech came at its close. As Chadd lay in
expectation of the stentorian "Hurrah for Slade!" which should greet
his opponent's peroration, his face flushed, his hands trembled; he
lifted himself on his elbow, and listened again. He could hardly trust
his senses, yet there it was once more,--his own name, vibrating in a
prolonged cheer among the mountain heights, and echoing far down the
narrow valley.

That sympathetic heart of the multitude, so quick to respond to a noble
impulse, had caught the true interpretation of last night's scene, and
to-day all the barriers of ignorance and misunderstanding were down.

The heaviest majority ever polled on Big Injun Mounting was in the
reëlection of the attorney for the State. And the other candidates
thought it a fine electioneering trick to get one's self artistically
slashed; they became misanthropic in their views of the inconstancy of
the people, and lost faith in saving grace and an overruling Providence.

This uncharacteristic episode in the life of Rufus Chadd was always
incomprehensible to his associates. He hardly understood it himself.
He had made a keen and subtle distinction in a high moral principle.
As Abel Stubbs said, in extenuation of the inconsistency of voting for
him, "I knows that this hyar Rufe Chadd air a powerful hard man, an'
evil-doers ez offends agin the law ain't got no mercy ter expect from
him. But then he don't hold no grudge agin them ez hev done _him_ harm.
An' that's what I'm a-lookin' at."




                     THE ROMANCE OF SUNRISE ROCK.


                                  I.

What momentous morning arose with so resplendent a glory that it should
have imprinted its indelible reflection on the face of this great
Cumberland cliff; what eloquence of dawn so splendid that the dumb,
insensate stone should catch its spirit and retain its expression
forever and forever? A deep, narrow stream flowed around the base of
the "paint-rock." Immense fissures separated it from its fellows. And
charged with its subtler meaning it towered above them in isolated
majesty. Moons waxed and waned; nations rose and fell; centuries came
and went. And still it faced the east, and still, undimmed by storm and
time, it reiterated the miracle and the prophecy of the rising sun.

"'Twar painted by the Injuns,--that's what I hev always hearn tell.
Them folks war mos'ly leagued with the Evil One. That's how it kem
they war gin the grasp ter scuffle up that thar bluff, ez air four
hunderd feet high an' ez sheer ez a wall; it ain't got foothold fur a
cockle-burr. I hev hearn tell that when they got ez high ez the pictur'
they war 'lowed by the devil ter stand on air. An' I believes it. Else
how'd they make out ter do that thar job?"

The hairy animal, whose jeans suit proclaimed him man, propounded
this inquiry with a triumphant air. There was a sarcastic curve on
the lips of his interlocutor. Clearly it was not worth his while to
enlighten the mountaineer,--to talk of the unknown races whose work
so long survives their names, to speculate upon the extent of their
civilization and the mechanical contrivances that reached those
dizzy heights, to confide his nebulous fancies clustering about the
artist-poet who painted this grand, rude lyric upon the immortal rock.
He turned from the strange picture, suspended between heaven and earth,
and looked over the rickety palings into the dismal little graveyard
of the mountaineers. Nowhere, he thought, was the mystery of life and
death so gloomily suggested. Humanity seemed so small, so transitory
a thing, expressed in these few mounds in the midst of the undying
grandeur of the mountains. Material nature conquers; man and mind are
as naught. Only a reiteration of a well-conned lesson, for so far this
fine young fellow of thirty had made a failure of life; the material
considerations with which he had wrestled had got the better of him,
and a place within the palings seemed rather preferable to his place
without.

It was still strange to John Cleaver that his lines should have fallen
in this wilderness; that the door of that house on the slope of the
Backbone should be the only door upon earth open to him; that such men
as this mountaineer were his neighbors and associates. The fact seemed
a grotesque libel on likelihood. As he rode away he was thinking of his
costly education, the sacrifices his father had made to secure it, his
dying conviction, which was such a comfort to him, that in it he had
left his penniless son a better thing than wealth,--with such training
and such abilities what might he not reach? When John Cleaver returned
from his medical studies in Paris to the Western city of his birth, to
scores of charity patients, and to a fine social position by virtue
of the prestige of a good family, there seemed only a little waiting
needed. But the old physicians held on to life and the paying practice
with the grip of the immortals. And he found it difficult to sustain
existence while he waited.

At the lowest ebb of his fortunes there came to him a letter from a
young lawyer, much in his own professional position, but who had
confessed himself beaten and turned sheep-farmer. Here, among the
mountains of East Tennessee, said the letter, he had bought a farm for
a song; the land was the poorest he ever saw, but served his purposes,
and the house was a phenomenal structure for these parts,--a six-room
brick, built fifty years ago by a city man with a bucolic craze and
consumptive tendencies. The people were terribly poor; still, if his
friend would come he might manage to pick up something, for there was
not a physician in a circuit of sixty miles.

So Cleaver had turned his face to the mountains. But unlike the
sheep-farmer he did not meet his reverses lightly. The man was at bay.
And like a savage thing he took his ill-fortune by the throat. Success
had seemed so near that there was something like the pain of death in
giving up the life to which he had looked forward with such certainty.
He could not console himself with this comatose state, and call it
life. He often told himself that there was nothing left but to think of
what he might have done, and eat out his heart. His ambition died hard.

As his horse ambled along, a gruff voice broke his reverie, "'Light an'
hitch," called out the master of a wayside hovel.

A man of different temperament might have found in Cleaver's uncouth
surroundings some points of palliation. His heart might have warmed
to the ignorant mountaineers' high and tender virtue of hospitality.
A responsive respect might have been induced by the contemplation of
their pride, so intense that it recognizes no superior, so inordinate
that one is tempted to cry out, Here are the true republicans! or,
indeed, Here are the only aristocrats! The rough fellow was shambling
out to stop him with cordial insistence. An old crone, leaning on a
stick in the door-way, called after her son, "Tell him ter 'light an'
hitch, Peter, an' eat his supper along of we-uns." A young girl sitting
on the rude porch, reeling yarn preparatory to weaving, glanced up,
her sedate face suddenly illumined. Even the bare-footed, tow-headed
children stood still in pleased expectation. Certainly John Cleaver's
position in life was as false as it was painful. But the great human
heart was here, untutored though it was, and roughly accoutred. And he
himself had found that Greek and Latin do not altogether avail.

The little log-house was encompassed by the splendor of autumnal
foliage. A purple haze clung to the distant mountains; every range and
every remove had a new tone and a new delight. The gray crags, near at
hand, stood out sharply against the crimson sky. And high above them
all in its impressive isolation loomed Sunrise Rock, heedless of the
transitory dying day and the ineffective coming night.

The girl's reel was still whirling; at regular intervals it ticked and
told off another cut. Cleaver's eyes were fixed upon her as he declined
Peter Teake's invitation. He had seen her often before, but he did not
know as yet that that face would play a strange part in the little
mental drama that was to lead to the making of his fortune. Her cheek
was flushed; her delicate crimson lips were slightly parted; the live
gold of the sunbeams touched the dead-yellow, lustreless masses of her
hair. Here and there the clustering tendrils separated, as they hung
about her shoulders, and disclosed bright glimpses of a red cotton
kerchief knotted around her throat; she wore a dark blue homespun
dress, and despite the coarse texture of her attire there was something
of the mingled brilliance and softness of the autumn tints in her
humble presence. Her eyes reminded him of those deep, limpid mountain
streams with golden-brown pebbles at the bottom. Scornful as he was,
he was only a man--and a young man. With a sudden impulse he leaned
forward and handed her a pretty cluster of ferns and berries which he
had gathered in the forest.

The reel stopped, the thread broke. She looked up, as she received
mechanically his woodland treasure, with so astonished a face that it
induced in this man of the world a sense of embarrassment.

"Air they good yerbs fur somethin'?" she asked.

A quick comprehension of the ludicrous situation flashed through
his mind. She evidently made no distinctions in the healing art as
practiced by him and the "yerb-doctor," with whom he occasionally came
into professional contact. And the presentation of the "yerbs" seemed a
prescription instead of a compliment.

"No,--no," he said hastily, thinking of the possibility of a decoction.
"They are not good for tea. They are of no use,--except to look at."

And he rode away, laughing softly.

Everything about the red brick house was disorganized and dilapidated;
but the dining-room, which served the two young bachelors as a
sitting-room also, was cheerful with the glow of a hickory fire and
a kerosene lamp, and although the floor was bare and the tiny-paned
windows curtained only with cobwebs, there was a suggestively
comfortable array of pipes on the mantel-piece, and a bottle of
gracious aspect. Sitting in front of the fire, the light full on
his tawny beard and close-clipped blond hair, was a man of splendid
proportions, a fine, frank, intellectual face, and a manner and
accent that proclaimed him as distinctly exotic as his friend. He too
had reared the great scaffolding of an elaborate education that he
might erect the colossal edifice of his future. His hands beat the
empty air and he had no materials wherewith to build. But there was
the scaffolding, a fine thing in itself,--wasted, perhaps. For the
sheep-farmer did not need it.

"Well, old sinner!" he exclaimed smilingly, as Cleaver entered. "Did
you tell Tom to put up your 'beastis'? He is so 'brigaty' that he might
not stand."

Were the two friends sojourning in the Cumberland Mountains on a
camp-hunt, these excerpts from the prevalent dialect might have
seemed to Cleaver a pleasantry of exquisite flavor. But they were no
sojourners; they were permanently established here. And he felt that
every concession to the customs of the region was a descent toward the
level of its inhabitants. He thought Trelawney was already degenerating
in this disheveled life,--mentally, in manner, even in speech. For with
a philologist's zest Trelawney chased verbal monstrosities to their
lair, and afterward displayed them in his daily conversation with as
much pride as a connoisseur feels in exhibiting odd old china. As
these reflections intruded themselves, Cleaver silently swore a mighty
oath--an oath he had often sworn before--that he would not go down with
him, he would not deteriorate too, he would hold hard to the traditions
of a higher sphere.

But sins against convention could not detract from the impressiveness
of the man lounging before the fire. If Trelawney only had money, how
he would adorn the state of nabob!

"Brigaty!" he reiterated. "That's a funny word. It sounds
as if it might be kin to the Italian _brigata_. Or, see
here--_briga?_--eh?--_brigare_--_brigarsi?_ I wonder how these people
come by it."

A long pause ensued, broken only by the ticking of their watches: the
waste of time asserted itself. All was silent without; no wind stirred;
no leaf nor acorn fell; the mute mists pressed close to the window.
Surely there were no other creatures in all the dreary world. And this,
thought Cleaver, was what he had come to, after all his prestige, all
his efforts!

"Trelawney," he said suddenly, "these are long evenings. Don't you
think that with all this time on our hands--I don't know--but don't you
think we might write something together?"

A frank surprise was in his friend's brown eyes. He replied doubtfully,
"Write what?"

"I don't know," said Cleaver despondently.

"And suppose we had the talent to project 'something' and the energy to
complete it, who would publish it?"

"I don't know," said the doctor, more hopelessly still.

Another pause. The foxes were barking in the moonlight, in the red
autumn woods. That a man should feel less lonely for the sound of a
wild thing's voice!

"My dear fellow," said John Cleaver, a certain passion of despair
welling up in his tones,--he leaned forward and laid his hand on
his friend's knee,--"it won't do for us to spend our lives here. We
must turn about and get back into the world of men and action. Don't
think I'm ungrateful for this haven,--you are the only one who held
out a hand,--but we must get back, and go on with the rest. Help me,
Trelawney,--help me think out some way. I'm losing faith in myself
alone. Let us help each other. Many a man has made his pen his
strongest friend; they were only men at last, just such as we are. Many
of them were poor; the _best_ of them were poor. We can try nothing
else, Fred,--so little chance is left to us."

Trelawney laid his warm strong hand upon the cold nervous hand
trembling on his knee. "Jack," he said, "I have given it all up. I am
through forever with those cursed alternations of hope and despair. I
don't believe we could write anything that would do--do any good, I
mean. I wore out all energy and afflatus--the best part of me--waiting
for the clients who never came. And all the time my appropriate sphere,
my sheep-farm, was waiting for me here. I have found contentment, the
manna from heaven, while you are still sighing for the flesh-pots of
Egypt. Ambition has thrown me once; I sha'n't back the jade again. I am
a shepherd, Jack, a shepherd.

          'Pastorem, Tityre, pingues
    Pascere oportet oves, deductum dicere carmen.'

That's it, my dear old boy. Sing a slender song! We've pitched our
voices on too high a key for our style of vocalization. We must sing
small, Jack,--sing a slender song!"

"I'll be damned if I do!" cried Cleaver, impetuously, springing to his
feet and pacing the room with a quick stride.

But his friend's words dogged him deep into the night. They would not
let him sleep. He lay staring blankly at the darkness, his thoughts
busy with his forlorn position and his forlorn prospects, and that
sense of helplessness, so terrible to a man, pressing heavily upon his
heart. In the midst of the memories of his hopes, his ambitions, and
his failures he was like a worm in the fire. The vague presence of the
majestic company of mountains without preyed upon him; they seemed
stolid, unmoved witnesses of his despair. The only human creature
who might have understood him would not understand him. He knew that
if he were writhing in pain with a broken limb, or the sentimental
spurious anguish of a broken heart, Trelawney would resolve himself
into every gracious phase of healing sympathy. But a broken life!--his
friend would not make an effort. Yet why should he crave support?
Was it true that he had pitched his voice too high? In this day of
over-education, when every man is fitted for any noble sphere of
intellectual achievement and only inborn talent survives, might it
not be that he had mistaken a cultivated aspiration for latent power?
And if indeed his purposes had outstripped his abilities, the result
was tragic--tragic. He was as dead as if he were six feet deep in the
ground. A bitter throe of shame came with these reflections. There is
something so ludicrously contemptible in a great personal ambition
and a puny capacity. Ambition is the only grand passion that does not
ennoble. We do not care that a low thing should lift its eyes. And if
it does, we laugh.

There was a movement in the hall below. He had left Trelawney reading,
but now his step was on the stairs, and with it rose the full mellow
tones of his voice. He was singing of the spring-time in the autumn
midnight. Poor Fred! It was always spring with him. He met his
misfortunes with so cordial an outstretched hand that it might have
seemed he disarmed them. It did not seem so to John Cleaver. He shifted
his attitude with a groan. His friend's fatal apathy was an added pang
to his own sorrows. And now the house was still, and he watched through
all the long hours the western moonlight silently scale the gloomy
pines, till on their plumy crests the yellow beams mingled with the red
rays of the rising sun, and the empty, lonely day broke in its useless,
wasted splendor upon the empty loneliness of the splendid night.


                                  II.

Cleaver took little note, at this period, of those who came and went in
his life; and he took little note of how he came and went in the lives
of others. He had no idea of those inexplicable circles of thought
and being that touch at a single point, and jar, perhaps. One day,
while the Indian summer was still red on the hills,--he had reason to
remember this day,--while the purple haze hovered over the landscape
and mellowed to artistic delicacy the bold, bright colors of Sunrise
Rock, he chanced to drive alone in his friend's rickety buggy along
the road that passed on the opposite bank from the painted cliff and
encircled the dreary little graveyard of the mountaineers. He became
suddenly aware that there was a figure leaning against the palings;
he recognized Selina Teake as he lifted his absorbed eyes. She held
her sun-bonnet in her hand, and her yellow hair and fair face were
unshaded; how little did he or she imagine what that face was to be to
him afterward! He drew up his horse and spoke: "Well, this is the last
place I should think you would want to come to."

She did not understand his dismal little joke at the graveyard. She
silently fixed upon him those eyes, so suggestive of deep, clear waters
in which some luminous planet has sunk a starry reflection.

"Did you intend to remain permanently?"

"I war restin' awhile," she softly replied.

He had a vague consciousness that she was the first of these proud
mountaineers whom he had ever seen embarrassed or shy. She was
indubitably blushing as he looked at her, and as she falteringly looked
at him. How bright her eyes were, how red her delicate lips, what a
faint fresh wild-rose was suddenly abloom on her cheek!

"Suppose you drive with me the remainder of the way," he suggested.

This was only the courtesy of the road in this region, and with her
grave, decorous manner she stepped lightly into the vehicle, and they
bowled away together. She was very mute and motionless as she sat
beside him, her face eloquent with some untranslated emotion of mingled
wonderment and pleasure and pain. Perhaps she drew in with the balsamic
sunlit air the sweetest experience of her short life. He was silent
too, his thoughts still hanging drearily about his blighted prospects
and this fatal false step that had led him to the mountains; wondering
whether he could have done better, whether he could have done otherwise
at all, when it would end,--when, and how.

Trelawney was lounging against the rail fence in front of Teake's
house, looking, in his negligent attire, like a prince in disguise,
and talking to the mountaineers about a prospective deer-hunt. There
was a surprised resentment on his face when Cleaver drove up, but the
return of Selina with him made not a ripple among the Teakes. It would
have been impossible to demonstrate to them that they stood on a lower
social plane. Their standard of morality and respectability could not
be questioned; there had never been a man or a woman of the humble name
who had given the others cause for shame; they had lived in this house
on their own land for a hundred years; they neither stole nor choused;
they paid as they went, and asked no favors; they took no alms,--nay,
they gave of their little! As to the artificial distinctions of money
and education,--what do the ignorant mountaineers care about money and
education!

Selina stood for a moment upon the cabin porch, her yellow hair
gleaming like an aureola upon a background of crimson sumach leaves. A
pet fawn came to the door and nibbled at her little sun-burned hands.
As she turned to go in, Trelawney spoke to her. "Shall I bring you a
fawn again? or will you have some venison from the hunt to-morrow?"

She fixed her luminous eyes upon him and laughed a little. There was
no shyness in her face and manner now. Was Trelawney so accustomed a
presence in her life, Cleaver wondered.

"Ah, I see," said Fred, laughing too. "I'll bring you some venison."

He was grave enough as he and his friend drove homeward together, and
Cleaver was roused to the perception that there was a certain unwonted
coldness slipping insidiously between them. It was not until they were
seated before the fire that Trelawney again spoke. "How did it happen
that you and she were together?" Evidently he had thought of nothing
else since.

"Who?--the Lady Selina?" said Cleaver, mockingly. Trelawney's eyes
warned him to forbear. "Oh, I met her walking, and I asked her to drive
with me the rest of the way."

Nothing more was said for a time. Cleaver was thinking of the fawn
which Fred had given her, of the patent fact that he was a familiar
visitor at the Teake house. His question, and his long dwelling upon
the subject before he asked it, seemed almost to indicate jealousy.
Jealousy! Cleaver could hardly credit his own suspicion.

Trelawney broke the silence. "Education," he said abruptly, "what
does education accomplish for women in our station of life? They
learn to write a fashionable hand that nobody can decipher. They take
a limited course of reading and remember nothing. Their study of
foreign languages goes so far sometimes as to enable them to interject
commonplace French phrases into their daily conversation, and render
their prattle an affront to good taste as well an insult to the
understanding. They have converted the piano into an instrument of
torture throughout the length and breadth of the land. Sometimes they
are learned; then they are given over to 'making an impression,' and
are prone to discuss, with a fatal tendency to misapply terms, what
they call 'philosophy.' As to their experience in society, no one will
maintain that their flirtations and husband-hunting tend greatly to
foster delicacy and refinement. What would that girl," nodding toward
the log-cabin near Sunrise Rock, "think of the girls of our world who
pursue 'society' as a man pursues a profession, who shove and jostle
each other and pull caps for the great matches, and 'put up' with
the others when no better may be had? She is my ideal of a modest,
delicate young girl,--and she is the only sincere woman I ever saw.
Upon my soul, I think the primitive woman holds her own very finely in
comparison with the resultant of feminine culture."

Cleaver listened in stunned dismay. Could Trelawney have really
fallen in love with the little mountaineer? He had adapted himself
so readily to the habits of these people. He was so far from the
world; he was dropping its chains. Many men under such circumstances,
under far happier circumstances, had fallen into the fatal error of a
_mésalliance_. Positively he might marry the girl. Cleaver felt it
an imperative duty to make an effort to avert this almost grotesque
catastrophe. In its very inception, however, he was hopeless. Trelawney
had always been so intolerant of control, so tenacious of impressions
and emotions, so careless of results and the opinion of society.
These seemed only originalities of character when he was the leader
of a clique of men of his own social position. Was Cleaver a snob
because they seemed to him, now that his friend was brought low in the
world, a bull-headed perversity, a ludicrous eccentricity, an unkempt
republicanism, a raw incapacity to appreciate the right relations of
things? In the delicately adjusted balance of life is that which is
fine when a man is up, folly when a man is down?

"She is a pretty little thing," he said, slightingly, "and no doubt a
good little thing. And, Trelawney, if I were in your place I wouldn't
hang around her. Your feelings might become involved--she is so
pretty--and she might fall in love with you, and"--

"You've said enough!" exclaimed Trelawney, fiercely.

It was monstrous! Trelawney would marry her. And he was as helpless to
prevent it as if Fred intended to hang himself.

"Your railing at the women of society in that shallow fashion suggests
the idea to me that you are trying to justify yourself in some
tremendous folly. Do you contemplate marrying her?"

"That is exactly what I propose to do," said Trelawney.

"And you are mad enough to think you are really in love with her?"

"Why should I not be? If she were differently placed in point of
wealth and station would there be any incongruity? I don't want to say
anything hard of you, Cleaver, but you would be ready to congratulate
me."

"I admit," retorted Cleaver, sharply, "that if she were your equal
in station and appropriately educated I should not have a word of
objection to say."

"And after all, is it the accident of position and fortune, or the
human creature, that a man takes to his heart?"

"But her ignorance, Fred"--

"Great God! does a man fall in love with a society girl for the sake of
what she calls her 'education?' Whatever attracts him, it is not that.
They are all ignorant; this girl's ignorance is only relative."

"Ah,--you know all that is bosh, Fred."

"In point of manner you yourself must concede that she is in many
respects superior to them. She has a certain repose and gravity and
dignity difficult to find among young ladies of high degree whose
education has not proved an antidote for flippancy. I won't be hard
enough on them to compare the loveliness of her face or her fine,
unspoiled nature. You don't want her to be learned any more than you
want an azalea to be learned. An azalea in a green-house becomes
showy and flaunting and has no fragrance, while here in the woods its
exquisite sweetness fills the air for miles."

"Trelawney, you are fit for Bedlam."

"I knew you would say so. I thought so too at first. I tried to stamp
it out, and put it down, and for a long time I fought all that is best
in me."

"Does she know anything about your feelings?"

"Not one word, as yet."

"Then I hope something--anything--may happen to put a stop to it before
she does."

This hasty wish seemed cruel to him afterward, and he regretted it.

"It would break my heart," said Trelawney, with an extreme earnestness.
"I know you think I am talking wildly, but I tell you it would break my
heart."

Cleaver fell to meditating ruefully upon the future in store for his
friend in this desolate place. King Cophetua and the beggar-maid are
a triumph of ideal contrast, eminently fascinating in an ideal point
of view. But real life presents prosaic corollaries,--the Teakes, for
example, on the familiar footing of Trelawney's brothers-in-law; the
old crone with her pipe, his wife's grandmother; that ignorant girl,
his wife--oh, these sublunary considerations are too inexorable. In his
sluggish content he would never make another effort; he would always
live here; he would sink, year by year, by virtue of his adaptability
and uncouth associations nearer to the level of the mountaineers.
This culminating folly seemed destined to complete the ruin of every
prospect in a fine man's life.

Cleaver did not know what was to come, and he brooded upon these ideas.


                                 III.

Those terrible problems of existence of which happier men at rare
intervals catch a fleeting glimpse, and are struck aghast for a moment,
pursued John Cleaver relentlessly day by day. He could not understand
this world; he could not understand the waste of himself and his friend
in this useless, purposeless way; he could not even understand the
magnificent waste of the nature about him. Sometimes he would look
with haggard eyes on the late dawns and marvel that the sun should rise
in such effulgence upon this sequestered spot; a perpetual twilight
might have sufficed for the threnody, called life, here. He would gaze
on Sunrise Rock, forever facing and reflecting the dawn, and wonder
who and what was the man that in the forgotten past had stood on these
red hills, and looked with his full heart in his eyes upon that sun,
and smote the stone to sudden speech. Were his eyes haggard too? Was
his life heavy? Were his fiery aspirations only a touch of the actual
cautery to all that was sensitive within him? Did he know how his world
was to pass away? Did he know how little he was in the world? Did he
too wring his hands, and beat his breast, and sigh for the thing that
was not?

Cleaver did the work that came to him conscientiously, although
mechanically enough. But there was little work to do. Even the career
of a humble country doctor seemed closed to him. He began to think he
saw how it would end. He would be obliged to quit the profession; in
sheer manliness he would be obliged to get to something at which he
could work. A terrible pang here. He cared nothing for money,--this
man, who was as poor as the very mountaineers. He was vowed to science
as a monk is vowed to his order.

It was an unusual occurrence, therefore, when Trelawney came in one day
and found that Cleaver had been called out professionally. He sat down
to dine alone, but before he had finished carving, his friend entered.

"Well, doctor," said Trelawney cheerily, "how is your patient?"

Cleaver was evidently out of sorts and preoccupied. "These people
are as uncivilized as the foxes that they live among," he exclaimed
irrelevantly. "A case of malignant diphtheria, a physician their
nearest neighbor, and they don't let him know till nearly the last
gasp. Then they all go frantic together, and swear they had no idea it
was serious. I could have brained that fool, Peter Teake. But it is a
hopeless thing now."

A premonition thrilled through Trelawney. "Who is ill at Teake's?"

Cleaver was stricken dumb. His professional indignation had canceled
all realization of the impending crisis. He remembered Fred's foolish
fancy an instant too late. His silence answered for him. And Trelawney,
a sudden blight upon his handsome face, rose and walked out heavily
into the splendors of the autumn sunset. Cleaver was bitter with
self-reproach. Still he felt an impotent anger that Fred should have
persuaded himself that he was in love with this girl, and laid himself
liable to this sentimental pain.

"A heart!" thought Cleaver, scornfully. "That a heart should trouble a
man in a place like this!"

And yet his own well-schooled heart was all athrob with a keen,
undreamed-of anguish when once more he had come back from the cabin in
the gorge. As he entered, Trelawney, after one swift glance, turned his
eyes away. He had learned from Cleaver's face all he feared to know. He
might have learned more, a secret too subtly bitter for his friend to
tell. King Cophetua was as naught to the beggar-maid. In her dying eyes
John Cleaver had seen the fresh and pure affection that had followed
him. In her tones he had heard it. Was she misled by that professional
tenderness of manner which speaks so soothingly and touches so
softly--as mechanical as the act of drawing off his gloves--that she
should have been moved to cry out in her huskily pathetic voice, "How
good--how good ye air!" and extend to him, amongst all her kindred who
stood about, her little sun-burned hand?

And after that she was speechless, and when the little hand was
unloosed it was cold.

She had loved him, and he had never known it until now. He felt like a
traitor as he glanced at his friend's changed face, and he was crushed
by a sense of the immense capacity of human nature for suffering. What
a great heart-drama was this, with its incongruous and humble _dramatis
personæ_: the little mountaineer, and these two poverty-stricken
stragglers from the vast army of men of action,--deserters, even,
it might seem. What chaotic sarcasm in this mysterious ordering of
events,--Trelawney, with his grand sacrificial passion; the poor little
girl, whose first fresh love had unsought followed another through
these waste places; and he, all unconscious, absorbed in himself, his
worldly considerations and the dying throes of his dear ambitions. And
now, for him, who had felt least of all, was rising a great vicarious
woe. If he had known this girl's heart-secret while she yet lived he
might have thought scornfully of it, slightingly; who can say how? But
now that she was dead it was as if he had been beloved by an angel, and
was only too obtuse, too gross, too earthly-minded to hear the rustle
of her wings. How pitiable was the thought of her misplaced affection;
how hard it was for his friend; how hard it was for him that he had
ever discovered it. Did she know that he cared nothing? Were the last
days of her short life embittered with the pangs of a consciously
unrequited love? Or did she tremble, and hope, and tremble again? Ah,
poor, poor, pretty thing!

He had no name for a certain vague, mysterious thrill which quivered
through every fibre whenever he thought of that humble, tender love
that had followed him so long, unasked and unheeded. It began to hang
about him now like a dimly-realized presence. Occasionally it occurred
to him that his nerves were disordered, his health giving way, and he
would commence a course of medicine, to forget it in his preoccupation,
and discontinue it almost as soon as begun. What happened afterward was
a natural sequence enough, although at the time it seemed wonderful
indeed.

One misty midnight, when these strong feelings were upon him, it so
chanced that he was driving from a patient's house on the summit of
the ridge, and his way lay beneath Sunrise Rock along the road which
encircled the little graveyard of the mountaineers. The moon was
bright; so bright that the wreaths of vapor, hanging motionless among
the pines, glistened like etherealized silver; so bright that the
mounds within the inclosure--Was it the mist? Was it the moonbeam? Was
it the glimmer of yellow hair? Did he see, leaning on the palings,
"restin' awhile," the graceful figure he remembered so well? He was
dreaming, surely; or were those deep, instarred eyes really fixed upon
him with that wistful gaze which he had seen only twice before?--once
here, where he had met her, and once when she died. She was approaching
him; she was so close he might have touched her hand. Was it cold, he
wondered; cold as it was when he held it last? He hardly knew,--but she
was seated beside him, as in that crimson sunset-tide, and they were
driving together at a frenzied speed through the broken shadows of the
wintry woods. He did not turn his head, and yet he saw her face, drawn
in lines of pallid light and eloquent with some untranslated emotion
of mingled wonderment and pleasure and pain. Like the wind they sped
together through the mist and the moonbeam, over the wild mountain
road, through the flashing mountain waters, down, down the steep slope
toward the red brick house, where a light still burned, and his friend
was waiting. He did not know when she slipped from his side. He did not
know when this mad pace was checked. He only regained his faculties
after he had burst into the warm home atmosphere, a ghastly horror in
his face and his frantic fright upon his lips.

Trelawney stood breathless.

"Oh, forgive me," cried Cleaver. "I have spoken sacrilege. It was only
hallucination; I know it now."

Trelawney was shaken. "Hallucination?" he faltered, with quivering lips.

"I did not reflect," said Cleaver. "I would not have jarred your
feelings. I am ill and nervous."

Trelawney was too broken to resent, to heed, or to answer. He sat
cold and shivering, unconscious of the changed eyes watching him,
unconscious of a new idea kindling there,--beginning to flicker, to
burn, to blaze,--unconscious of the motive with which his friend after
a time drew close to the table and fell to writing with furious energy,
unconscious that in this moment Cleaver's fortune was made.

And thus he wrote on day after day. So cleverly did he analyze his
own mental and nervous condition, so unsparing and insidious was this
curious introversion, that when his treatise on the "Derangement of
the Nervous Functions" was given to the world it was in no degree
remarkable that it should have attracted the favorable attention of the
medical profession; that the portion devoted to hallucinations should
have met with high praise in high quarters; that the young physician's
successful work should have brought him suddenly to the remembrance of
many people who had almost forgotten poor John Cleaver. No one knew, no
one ever knew, its romantic inspiration. No one ever knew the strange
source whence he had this keen insight; how his imperious will had held
his shaken, distraught nerves for the calm scrutiny of science; how
his senses had played him false, and that stronger, subtler critical
entity, his intellect, had marked the antics of its double self and
noted them down.

Among the men to whom his treatise brought John Cleaver to sudden
remembrance was a certain notable physician. He was growing infirm
now, his health was failing, his heavy practice was too heavy for his
weakening hands. He gave to the young fellow's work the meed of his
rare approval, cleverly gauged the cleverness behind it, and wrote to
Cleaver to come.

And so he returned to his accustomed and appropriate sphere. In his
absence his world had flattened, narrowed, dulled strangely. People
were sordid, and petty, and coarse-minded; and society--his little
clique that he called society--possessed a painfully predominating
element of snobs; men who had given him no notice before were pleased
to be noticed now, and yet the lucky partnership was covertly commented
upon as the freak of an old man in his dotage. He was suddenly
successful, he had suddenly a certain prospect of wealth, he was
suddenly bitter. He thought much in these days of his friend Trelawney
and the independent, money-scorning aristocrats of the mountains, of
the red hills of the Indian summer, and the towering splendors of
Sunrise Rock. That high air was perhaps too rare for his lungs, but he
was sensible of the density of the denser medium.

As to that vague and tender mystery, the ghost that he saw, it had been
exorcised by prosaic science. But it made his fortune, it crowned his
life, it bestowed upon him all he craved. Perhaps if she could know
the wonderful work she had wrought in his future, the mountain girl,
who had given her heart unasked, might rest more easily in her grave
than on that night when she had come from among the moonlit mounds
beneath Sunrise Rock, and once more sat beside him as he drove through
shadow and sheen. For whether it was the pallid mist, whether it was
the silver moon, whether it was the fantasy of an overwrought brain, or
whether that mysterious presence was of an essence more ethereal than
any, who can know?

In these days he carried his friend's interest close to his heart. He
opened a way in the crowd, but Trelawney held back from the hands
stretched out. He had become wedded to the place. The years since have
brought him a quiet, uneventful, not unhappy existence. After a time
he grew more cheerful, but not less gentle, and none the less beloved
of his simple neighbors. They feel vaguely sometimes that since he
first came among them he is a saddened man, and are moved to ask with
sympathetic solicitude concerning the news from his supposititious
folks "down thar in the valley whar ye hails from." The fortune in
sheep-farming still eludes his languid pursuit. The red brick house
is disorganized and dilapidated as of yore; a sense of loneliness
broods upon it, hardly less intense than the loneliness of the mighty
encompassing forest. Deep in these solitudes he often strolls for
hours, most often in the crimson and purple eventides along the road
that passes beneath Sunrise Rock and encircles the little graveyard
of the mountaineers. Here Trelawney leans on the palings while the
sun goes down, and looks, with his sore heart bleeding anew, upon one
grassy mound till the shadows and the tears together blot it from his
sight. Sometimes his heart is not sore, only sad. Sometimes it is
tender and resigned, and he turns to the sunrise emblazoned on the
rock and thinks of the rising Sun of Righteousness with healing in
his wings. For the skepticism of his college days has fallen from
him somehow, and his views have become primitive, like those of his
primitive neighbors. There is a certain calm and strength in the old
theories. With the dawn of a gentle and hopeful peace in his heart,
very like the comfort of religion, he goes his way in the misty
moon-rise.

And sometimes John Cleaver, so far away, as with a second sight becomes
subtly aware of these things. He remembers how Trelawney is deceived,
and a remorse falls on him in the still darkness, and tears and mangles
him. And yet there are no words for confession,--there is nothing to
confess. Would his conjecture, his unsupported conviction, avail aught;
would it not be cruel to re-open old wounds with the sharp torture of
a doubt? And the daybreak finds him with these questions unsolved, and
his heart turning wistfully to that true and loyal friend, with his
faithful, unrequited love still lingering about the grave of the girl
who died with her love unrequited.




                 THE DANCIN' PARTY AT HARRISON'S COVE.


"Fur ye see, Mis' Darley, them Harrison folks over yander ter the Cove
hev determinated on a dancin' party."

The drawling tones fell unheeded on old Mr. Kenyon's ear, as he sat
on the broad hotel piazza of the New Helvetia Springs, and gazed with
meditative eyes at the fair August sky. An early moon was riding, clear
and full, over this wild spur of the Alleghanies; the stars were few
and very faint; even the great Scorpio lurked, vaguely outlined, above
the wooded ranges; and the white mist, that filled the long, deep,
narrow valley between the parallel lines of mountains, shimmered with
opalescent gleams.

All the world of the watering-place had converged to that focus, the
ball-room, and the cool, moonlit piazzas were nearly deserted. The fell
determination of the "Harrison folks" to give a dancing party made no
impression on the preoccupied old gentleman. Another voice broke his
reverie,--a soft, clear, well-modulated voice,--and he started and
turned his head as his own name was called, and his niece, Mrs. Darley,
came to the window.

"Uncle Ambrose,--are you there? So glad! I was afraid you were down at
the summer-house, where I hear the children singing. Do come here a
moment, please. This is Mrs. Johns, who brings the Indian peaches to
sell,--you know the Indian peaches?"

Mr. Kenyon knew the Indian peaches, the dark crimson fruit streaked
with still darker lines, and full of blood-red juice, which he had
meditatively munched that very afternoon. Mr. Kenyon knew the Indian
peaches right well. He wondered, however, what had brought Mrs. Johns
back in so short a time, for although the principal industry of the
mountain people about the New Helvetia Springs is selling fruit to the
summer sojourners, it is not customary to come twice on the same day,
nor to appear at all after night-fall.

Mrs. Darley proceeded to explain.

"Mrs. Johns's husband is ill and wants us to send him some medicine."

Mr. Kenyon rose, threw away the stump of his cigar, and entered the
room. "How long has he been ill, Mrs. Johns?" he asked, dismally.

Mr. Kenyon always spoke lugubriously, and he was a dismal-looking old
man. Not more cheerful was Mrs. Johns; she was tall and lank, and with
such a face as one never sees except in these mountains,--elongated,
sallow, thin, with pathetic, deeply sunken eyes, and high cheek-bones,
and so settled an expression of hopeless melancholy that it must be
that naught but care and suffering had been her lot; holding out wasted
hands to the years as they pass,--holding them out always, and always
empty. She wore a shabby, faded calico, and spoke with the peculiar
expressionless drawl of the mountaineer. She was a wonderful contrast
to Mrs. Darley, all furbelows and flounces, with her fresh, smooth
face and soft hair, and plump, round arms half-revealed by the flowing
sleeves of her thin, black dress. Mrs. Darley was in mourning, and
therefore did not affect the ball-room. At this moment, on benevolent
thoughts intent, she was engaged in uncorking sundry small phials,
gazing inquiringly at their labels, and shaking their contents.

In reply to Mr. Kenyon's question, Mrs. Johns, sitting on the extreme
edge of a chair and fanning herself with a pink calico sun-bonnet,
talked about her husband, and a misery in his side and in his back,
and how he felt it "a-comin' on nigh on ter a week ago." Mr. Kenyon
expressed sympathy, and was surprised by the announcement that Mrs.
Johns considered her husband's illness "a blessin', 'kase ef he war
able ter git out'n his bed, he 'lowed ter go down ter Harrison's Cove
ter the dancin' party, 'kase Rick Pearson war a-goin' ter be thar, an'
hed said ez how none o' the Johnses should come."

"What, Rick Pearson, that terrible outlaw!" exclaimed Mrs. Darley,
with wide open blue eyes. She had read in the newspapers sundry
thrilling accounts of a noted horse thief and outlaw, who with a gang
of kindred spirits defied justice and roamed certain sparsely-populated
mountainous counties at his own wild will, and she was not altogether
without a feeling of fear as she heard of his proximity to the
New Helvetia Springs,--not fear for life or limb, because she was
practical-minded enough to reflect that the sojourners and employés of
the watering-place would far outnumber the outlaw's troop, but fear
that a pair of shiny bay ponies, Castor and Pollux, would fall victims
to the crafty wiles of the expert horse thief.

"I think I have heard something of a difficulty between your people and
Rick Pearson," said old Mr. Kenyon. "Has a peace never been patched up
between them?"

"No-o," drawled Mrs. Johns; "same as it always war. My old man'll
never believe but what Rick Pearson stole that thar bay filly we lost
'bout five year ago. But I don't believe he done it; plenty other
folks around is ez mean ez Rick, leastways mos' ez mean; plenty mean
enough ter steal a horse, ennyhow. Rick _say_ he never tuk the filly;
say he war a-goin' ter shoot off the nex' man's head ez say so. Rick
say he'd ruther give two bay fillies than hev a man say he tuk a horse
ez he never tuk. Rick say ez how he kin stand up ter what he does do,
but it's these hyar lies on him what kills him out. But ye know, Mis'
Darley, ye know yerself, he never give nobody two bay fillies in this
world, an' what's more he's never goin' ter. My old man an' my boy
Kossute talks on 'bout that thar bay filly like she war stole yestiddy,
an' 't war five year ago an' better; an' when they hearn ez how Rick
Pearson hed showed that red head o' his'n on this hyar mounting las'
week, they war fightin' mad, an' would hev lit out fur the gang sure,
'ceptin' they hed been gone down the mounting fur two days. An' my son
Kossute, he sent Rick word that he had better keep out 'n gunshot o'
these hyar woods; that he didn't want no better mark than that red head
o' his'n, an' he could hit it two mile off. An' Rick Pearson, he sent
Kossute word that he would kill him fur his sass the very nex' time he
see him, an' ef he don't want a bullet in that pumpkin head o' his'n
he hed better keep away from that dancin' party what the Harrisons
hev laid off ter give, 'kase Rick say he's a-goin' ter it hisself,
an' is a-goin' ter dance too; he ain't been invited, Mis' Darley, but
Rick don't keer fur that. He is a-goin' ennyhow, an' he say ez how he
ain't a-goin' ter let Kossute come, 'count o' Kossute's sass an' the
fuss they've all made 'bout that bay filly that war stole five year
ago,--'t war five year an' better. But Rick say ez how he is goin', fur
all he ain't got no invite, an' is a-goin' ter dance too, 'kase you
know, Mis' Darley, it's a-goin' ter be a dancin' party; the Harrisons
hev determinated on that. Them gals of theirn air mos' crazed 'bout a
dancin' party. They ain't been a bit of account sence they went ter
Cheatham's Cross-Roads ter see thar gran'mother, an' picked up all
them queer new notions. So the Harrisons hev determinated on a dancin'
party; an' Rick say ez how he is goin' ter dance too; but Jule, _she_
say ez how she know thar ain't a gal on the mounting ez would dance
with him; but I ain't so sure 'bout that, Mis' Darley; gals air cur'ous
critters, ye know yerself; thar's no sort o' countin' on 'em; they'll
do one thing one time, an' another thing nex' time; ye can't put no
dependence in 'em. But Jule say ef he kin git Mandy Tyler ter dance
with him, it's the mos' he kin do, an' the gang'll be no whar. Mebbe he
kin git Mandy ter dance with him, 'kase the other boys say ez how none
o' them is a-goin' ter ax her ter dance, 'count of the trick she played
on 'em down ter the Wilkins settlemint--las' month, war it? no, 't war
two month ago, an' better; but the boys ain't forgot how scandalous she
done 'em, an' none of 'em is a-goin' ter ax her ter dance."

"Why, what did she do?" exclaimed Mrs. Darley, surprised. "She came
here to sell peaches one day, and I thought her such a nice, pretty,
well-behaved girl."

"Waal, she hev got mighty quiet say-nuthin' sort'n ways, Mis' Darley,
but that thar gal do behave _re_diculous. Down thar ter the Wilkins
settlemint,--ye know it's 'bout two mile or two mile'n a half from
hyar,--waal, all the gals walked down thar ter the party an hour
by sun, but when the boys went down they tuk thar horses, ter give
the gals a ride home behind 'em. Waal, every boy axed his gal ter
ride while the party war goin' on, an' when 't war all over they all
set out fur ter come home. Waal, this hyar Mandy Tyler is a mighty
favo_rite_ 'mongst the boys,--they ain't got no sense, ye know, Mis'
Darley,--an' stiddier one of 'em axin' her ter ride home, thar war
five of 'em axed her ter ride, ef ye'll believe me, an' what do ye
think she done, Mis' Darley? She tole all five of 'em yes; an' when the
party war over, she war the last ter go, an' when she started out'n
the door, thar war all five of them boys a-standin' thar waitin' fur
her, an' every one a-holdin' his horse by the bridle, an' none of 'em
knowed who the others war a-waitin' fur. An' this hyar Mandy Tyler,
when she got ter the door an' seen 'em all a-standin' thar, never said
one word, jest walked right through 'mongst 'em, an' set out fur the
mounting on foot with all them five boys a-followin' an' a-leadin' thar
horses an' a-quarrelin' enough ter take off each others' heads 'bout
which one war a-goin' ter ride with her; which none of 'em did, Mis'
Darley, fur I hearn ez how the whole lay-out footed it all the way ter
New Helveshy. An' thar would hev been a fight 'mongst 'em, 'ceptin'
her brother, Jacob Tyler, went along with 'em, an' tried ter keep the
peace a-twixt 'em. An' Mis' Darley, all them married folks down thar at
the party--them folks in the Wilkins settlemint is the biggest fools,
sure--when all them married folks come out ter the door, an' see the
way Mandy Tyler hed treated them boys, they jest hollered and laffed
an' thought it war mighty smart an' funny in Mandy; but she never say
a word till she kem up the mounting, an' I never hearn ez how she say
ennything then. An' now the boys all say none of 'em is a-goin' ter ax
her ter dance, ter pay her back fur them fool airs of hern. But Kossute
say he'll dance with her ef none the rest will. Kossute he thought
't war all mighty funny too,--he's sech a fool 'bout gals, Kossute
is,--but Jule, she thought ez how 't war scandalous."

Mrs. Darley listened in amused surprise; that these mountain wilds
could sustain a first-class coquette was an idea that had not hitherto
entered her mind; however, "that thar Mandy" seemed, in Mrs. Johns's
opinion at least, to merit the unenviable distinction, and the party
at Wilkins settlement and the prospective gayety of Harrison's Cove
awakened the same sentiments in her heart and mind as do the more
ambitious germans and kettledrums of the lowland cities in the heart
and mind of Mrs. Grundy. Human nature is the same everywhere, and the
Wilkins settlement is a microcosm. The metropolitan centres, stripped
of the civilization of wealth, fashion, and culture, would present
only the bare skeleton of humanity outlined in Mrs. Johns's talk of
Harrison's Cove, the Wilkins settlement, the enmities and scandals
and sorrows and misfortunes of the mountain ridge. As the absurd
resemblance developed, Mrs. Darley could not forbear a smile. Mrs.
Johns looked up with a momentary expression of surprise; the story
presented no humorous phase to her perceptions, but she too smiled a
little as she repeated, "Scandalous, ain't it?" and proceeded in the
same lack-lustre tone as before.

"Yes,--Kossute say ez how he'll dance with her ef none the rest will,
fur Kossute say ez how he hev laid off ter dance, Mis' Darley; an'
when I ax him what he thinks will become of his soul ef he dances, he
say the devil may crack away at it, an' ef he kin hit it he's welcome.
Fur soul or no soul he's a-goin' ter dance. Kossute is a-fixin' of
hisself this very minit ter go; but I am verily afeard the boy'll be
slaughtered, Mis' Darley, 'kase thar is goin' ter be a fight, an' ye
never in all yer life hearn sech sass ez Kossute and Rick Pearson done
sent word ter each other."

Mr. Kenyon expressed some surprise that she should fear for so young a
fellow as Kossuth. "Surely," he said, "the man is not brute enough to
injure a mere boy; your son is a mere boy."

"That's so," Mrs. Johns drawled. "Kossute ain't more 'n twenty year
old, an' Rick Pearson is double that ef he is a day; but ye see it's
the fire-arms ez makes Kossute more 'n a match fur him, 'kase Kossute
is the best shot on the mounting, an' Rick knows that in a shootin'
fight Kossute 's better able ter take keer of hisself an' hurt somebody
else nor ennybody. Kossute 's more likely ter hurt Rick nor Rick is
ter hurt him in a shootin' fight; but ef Rick did n't hurt him, an' he
war ter shoot Rick, the gang would tear him ter pieces in a minit; and
'mongst 'em I'm actially afeard they 'll slaughter the boy."

Mr. Kenyon looked even graver than was his wont upon receiving this
information, but said no more; and after giving Mrs. Johns the
febrifuge she wished for her husband, he returned to his seat on the
piazza.

Mrs. Darley watched him with some little indignation as he proceeded to
light a fresh cigar. "How cold and unsympathetic uncle Ambrose is," she
said to herself. And after condoling effusively with Mrs. Johns on her
apprehensions for her son's safety, she returned to the gossips in the
hotel parlor, and Mrs. Johns, with her pink calico sun-bonnet on her
head, went her way in the brilliant summer moon light.

The clear lustre shone white upon all the dark woods and chasms and
flashing waters that lay between the New Helvetia Springs and the wide,
deep ravine called Harrison's Cove, where from a rude log hut the
vibrations of a violin, and the quick throb of dancing feet, already
mingled with the impetuous rush of a mountain stream close by and the
weird night-sounds of the hills,--the cry of birds among the tall
trees, the stir of the wind, the monotonous chanting of frogs at the
water-side, the long, drowsy drone of the nocturnal insects, the sudden
faint blast of a distant hunter's horn, and the far baying of hounds.

Mr. Harrison had four marriageable daughters, and had arrived at the
conclusion that something must be done for the girls; for, strange as
it may seem, the prudent father exists even among the "mounting folks."
Men there realize the importance of providing suitable homes for their
daughters as men do elsewhere, and the eligible youth is as highly
esteemed in those wilds as is the much scarcer animal at a fashionable
watering-place. Thus it was that Mr. Harrison had "determinated on
a dancin' party." True, he stood in bodily fear of the judgment day
and the circuit-rider; but the dancing party was a rarity eminently
calculated to please the young hunters of the settlements round about,
so he swallowed his qualms, to be indulged at a more convenient
season, and threw himself into the vortex of preparation with an ardor
very gratifying to the four young ladies, who had become imbued with
sophistication at Cheatham's Cross-Roads.

Not so Mrs. Harrison; she almost expected the house to fall and crush
them, as a judgment on the wickedness of a dancing party; for so
heinous a sin, in the estimation of the greater part of the mountain
people, had not been committed among them for many a day. Such trifles
as killing a man in a quarrel, or on suspicion of stealing a horse, or
wash-tub, or anything that came handy, of course, does not count; but a
dancing party! Mrs. Harrison could only hold her idle hands, and dread
the heavy penalty that must surely follow so terrible a crime.

It certainly had not the gay and lightsome aspect supposed to be
characteristic of such a scene of sin: the awkward young mountaineers
clogged heavily about in their uncouth clothes and rough shoes, with
the stolid-looking, lack-lustre maids of the hill, to the violin's
monotonous iteration of The Chicken in the Bread-Trough, or The Rabbit
in the Pea-Patch,--all their grave faces as grave as ever. The music
now and then changed suddenly to one of those wild, melancholy strains
sometimes heard in old-fashioned dancing tunes, and the strange
pathetic cadences seemed more attuned to the rhythmical dash of the
waters rushing over their stone barricades out in the moonlight yonder,
or to the plaintive sighs of the winds among the great dark arches
of the primeval forests, than to the movement of the heavy, coarse
feet dancing a solemn measure in the little log cabin in Harrison's
Cove. The elders, sitting in rush-bottomed chairs close to the walls,
and looking on at the merriment, well-pleased despite their religious
doubts, were somewhat more lively; every now and then a guffaw mingled
with the violin's resonant strains and the dancers' well-marked pace;
the women talked to each other with somewhat more animation than was
their wont, under the stress of the unusual excitement of a dancing
party, and from out the shed-room adjoining came an anticipative
odor of more substantial sin than the fiddle or the grave jiggling
up and down the rough floor. A little more cider too, and a very bad
article of illegally-distilled whiskey, were ever and anon circulated
among the pious abstainers from the dance; but the sinful votaries of
Terpsichore could brook no pause nor delay, and jogged up and down
quite intoxicated with the mirthfulness of the plaintive old airs and
the pleasure of other motion than following the plow or hoeing the corn.

And the moon smiled right royally on her dominion: on the long, dark
ranges of mountains and mist-filled valleys between; on the woods and
streams, and on all the half-dormant creatures either amongst the
shadow-flecked foliage or under the crystal waters; on the long,
white, sandy road winding in and out through the forest; on the
frowning crags of the wild ravine; on the little bridge at the entrance
of the gorge, across which a party of eight men, heavily armed and
gallantly mounted, rode swiftly and disappeared amid the gloom of the
shadows.

The sound of the galloping of horses broke suddenly on the music and
the noise of the dancing; a moment's interval, and the door gently
opened and the gigantic form of Rick Pearson appeared in the aperture.
He was dressed, like the other mountaineers, in a coarse suit of brown
jeans somewhat the worse for wear, the trowsers stuffed in the legs of
his heavy boots; he wore an old soft felt hat, which he did not remove
immediately on entering, and a pair of formidable pistols at his belt
conspicuously challenged attention. He had auburn hair, and a long full
beard of a lighter tint reaching almost to his waist; his complexion
was much tanned by the sun, and roughened by exposure to the inclement
mountain weather; his eyes were brown, deep-set, and from under his
heavy brows they looked out with quick, sharp glances, and occasionally
with a roguish twinkle; the expression of his countenance was rather
good-humored,--a sort of imperious good-humor, however,--the
expression of a man accustomed to have his own way and not to be
trifled with, but able to afford some amiability since his power is
undisputed.

He stepped slowly into the apartment, placed his gun against the
wall, turned, and solemnly gazed at the dancing, while his followers
trooped in and obeyed his example. As the eight guns, one by one,
rattled against the wall, there was a startled silence among the pious
elders of the assemblage, and a sudden disappearance of the animation
that had characterized their intercourse during the evening. Mrs.
Harrison, who by reason of flurry and a housewifely pride in the
still unrevealed treasures of the shed-room had well-nigh forgotten
her fears, felt that the anticipated judgment had even now descended,
and in what terrible and unexpected guise! The men turned the quids
of tobacco in their cheeks and looked at each other in uncertainty;
but the dancers bestowed not a glance upon the new-comers, and the
musician in the corner, with his eyes half-closed, his head bent low
upon the instrument, his hard, horny hand moving the bow back and forth
over the strings of the crazy old fiddle, was utterly rapt by his own
melody. At the supreme moment when the great red beard had appeared
portentously in the door-way and fear had frozen the heart of Mrs.
Harrison within her at the ill-omened apparition, the host was in
the shed-room filling a broken-nosed pitcher from the cider-barrel.
When he re-entered, and caught sight of the grave sun-burned face with
its long red beard and sharp brown eyes, he too was dismayed for an
instant, and stood silent at the opposite door with the pitcher in
his hand. The pleasure and the possible profit of the dancing party,
for which he had expended so much of his scanty store of this world's
goods and risked the eternal treasures laid up in heaven, were a mere
phantasm; for, with Rick Pearson among them, in an ill frame of mind
and at odds with half the men in the room, there would certainly be
a fight, and in all probability one would be killed, and the dancing
party at Harrison's Cove would be a text for the bloody-minded sermons
of the circuit-rider for all time to come. However, the father of four
marriageable daughters is apt to become crafty and worldly-wise; only
for a moment did he stand in indecision; then, catching suddenly the
small brown eyes, he held up the pitcher with a grin of invitation.
"Rick!" he called out above the scraping of the violin and the clatter
of the dancing feet, "slip round hyar ef ye kin, I've got somethin' for
ye;" and he shook the pitcher significantly.

Not that Mr. Harrison would for a moment have thought of Rick
Pearson in a matrimonial point of view, for even the sophistication
of the Cross-Roads had not yet brought him to the state of mind to
consider such a half loaf as this better than no bread, but he felt
it imperative from every point of view to keep that set of young
mountaineers dancing in peace and quiet, and their guns idle and out
of mischief against the wall. The great red beard disappeared and
reappeared at intervals, as Rick Pearson slipped along the gun-lined
wall to join his host and the cider-pitcher, and after he had disposed
of the refreshment, in which the gang shared, he relapsed into silently
watching the dancing and meditating a participation in that festivity.

Now, it so happened that the only young girl unprovided with a partner
was "that thar Mandy Tyler," of Wilkins settlement renown; the young
men had rigidly adhered to their resolution to ignore her in their
invitations to dance, and she had been sitting since the beginning of
the festivities, quite neglected, among the married people, looking on
at the amusement which she had been debarred sharing by that unpopular
bit of coquetry at Wilkins settlement. Nothing of disappointment or
mortification was expressed in her countenance; she felt the slight
of course,--even a "mounting" woman is susceptible of the sting of
wounded pride; all her long-anticipated enjoyment had come to naught
by this infliction of penance for her ill-timed jest at the expense of
those five young fellows dancing with their triumphant partners and
bestowing upon her not even a glance; but she looked the express image
of immobility as she sat in her clean pink calico, so carefully gotten
up for the occasion, her short black hair curling about her ears, and
watched the unending reel with slow, dark eyes. Rick's glance fell
upon her, and without further hesitation he strode over to where she
was sitting and proffered his hand for the dance. She did not reply
immediately, but looked timidly about her at the shocked pious ones on
either side, who were ready but for mortal fear to aver that "dancin'
ennyhow air bad enough, the Lord knows, but dancin' with a horse thief
air jest scandalous!" Then, for there is something of defiance to
established law and prejudice in the born flirt everywhere, with a
sudden daring spirit shining in her brightening eyes, she responded,
"Don't keer ef I do," with a dimpling half-laugh; and the next minute
the two outlaws were flying down the middle together.

While Rick was according grave attention to the intricacies of the mazy
dance and keeping punctilious time to the scraping of the old fiddle,
finding it all a much more difficult feat than galloping from the
Cross Roads to the "Snake's Mouth" on some other man's horse with the
sheriff hard at his heels, the solitary figure of a tall gaunt man had
followed the long winding path leading deep into the woods, and now
began the steep descent to Harrison's Cove. Of what was old Mr. Kenyon
thinking, as he walked on in the mingled shadow and sheen? Of St.
Augustin and his Forty Monks, probably, and what they found in Britain.
The young men of his acquaintance would gladly have laid you any odds
that he could think of nothing but his antique hobby, the ancient
church. Mr. Kenyon was the most prominent man in St. Martin's church
in the city of B----, not excepting the rector. He was a lay-reader,
and officiated upon occasions of "clerical sore-throat," as the profane
denominate the ministerial summer exodus from heated cities. This
summer, however, Mr. Kenyon's own health had succumbed, and he was
having a little "sore-throat" in the mountains on his own account. Very
devout was Mr. Kenyon. Many people wondered that he had never taken
orders. Many people warmly congratulated themselves that he never had;
for drier sermons than those he selected were surely never heard, and
a shuddering imagination shrinks appalled from the problematic mental
drought of his ideal original discourse. But he was an integrant part
of St. Martin's; much of his piety, materialized into contributions,
was built up in its walls and shone before men in the costliness of
its decorations. Indeed, the ancient name had been conferred upon the
building as a sort of tribute to Mr. Kenyon's well-known enthusiasm
concerning apostolic succession and kindred doctrines.

Dull and dismal was Mr. Kenyon, and therefore it may be considered a
little strange that he should be a notable favorite with men. They were
of many different types, but with one invariable bond of union: they
had all at one time served as soldiers; for the war, now ten years
passed by, its bitterness almost forgotten, had left some traces that
time can never obliterate. What a friend was the droning old churchman
in those days of battle and blood-shed and suffering and death! Not
a man sat within the walls of St. Martin's who had not received some
signal benefit from the hand stretched forth to impress the claims of
certain ante-Augustin British clergy to consideration and credibility;
not a man who did not remember stricken fields where a good Samaritan
went about under shot and shell, succoring the wounded and comforting
the dying; not a man who did not applaud the indomitable spirit and
courage that cut his way from surrender and safety, through solid
barriers of enemies, to deliver the orders on which the fate of
an army depended; not a man whose memory did not harbor fatiguing
recollections of long, dull sermons read for the souls' health of the
soldiery. And through it all,--by the camp-fires at night, on the long
white country-roads in the sunshiny mornings; in the mountains and
the morasses; in hilarious advance and in cheerless retreat; in the
heats of summer and by the side of frozen rivers, the ancient British
clergy went through it all. And, whether the old churchman's premises
and reasoning were false, whether his tracings of the succession were
faulty, whether he dropped a link here or took in one there, he had
caught the spirit of those staunch old martyrs, if not their falling
churchly mantle.

The mountaineers about the New Helvetia Springs supposed that Mr.
Kenyon was a regularly ordained preacher, and that the sermons which
they had heard him read were, to use the vernacular, out of his own
head. For many of them were accustomed on Sunday mornings to occupy
humble back benches in the ball-room, where on week-day evenings the
butterflies sojourning at New Helvetia danced, and on the Sabbath
metaphorically beat their breasts, and literally avowed that they were
"miserable sinners," following Mr. Kenyon's lugubrious lead.

The conclusion of the mountaineers was not unnatural, therefore, and
when the door of Mr. Harrison's house opened and another uninvited
guest entered, the music suddenly ceased. The half-closed eyes of the
fiddler had fallen upon Mr. Kenyon at the threshold, and, supposing him
a clergyman, he immediately imagined that the man of God had come all
the way from New Helvetia Springs to stop the dancing and snatch the
revelers from the jaws of hell. The rapturous bow paused shuddering on
the string, the dancing feet were palsied, the pious about the walls
were racking their slow brains to excuse their apparent conniving at
sin and bargaining with Satan, and Mr. Harrison felt that this was
indeed an unlucky party and it would undoubtedly be dispersed by the
direct interposition of Providence before the shed-room was opened and
the supper eaten. As to his soul--poor man! these constantly recurring
social anxieties were making him callous to immortality; this life was
about to prove too much for him, for the fortitude and tact even of
a father of four marriageable young ladies has a limit. Mr. Kenyon,
too, seemed dumb as he hesitated in the door-way, but when the host,
partially recovering himself, came forward and offered a chair, he
said with one of his dismal smiles that he hoped Mr. Harrison had no
objection to his coming in and looking at the dancing for a while.
"Don't let me interrupt the young people, I beg," he added, as he
seated himself. The astounded silence was unbroken for a few moments.
To be sure he was not a circuit-rider, but even the sophistication of
Cheatham's Cross-Roads had never heard of a preacher who did not object
to dancing. Mr. Harrison could not believe his ears, and asked for a
more explicit expression of opinion.

"Ye say ye don't keer ef the boys an' gals dance?" he inquired. "Ye
don't think it's sinful?"

And after Mr. Kenyon's reply, in which the astonished "mounting folks"
caught only the surprising statement that dancing if properly conducted
was an innocent, cheerful, and healthful amusement, supplemented by
something about dancing in the fear of the Lord, and that in all
charity he was disposed to consider objections to such harmless
recreations a tithing of mint and anise and cummin, whereby might ensue
a neglect of weightier matters of the law; that clean hands and clean
hearts--hands clean of blood and ill-gotten goods, and hearts free from
falsehood and cruel intention--these were the things well-pleasing
to God,--after his somewhat prolix reply, the gayety recommenced.
The fiddle quavered tremulously at first, but soon resounded with its
former vigorous tones, and the joy of the dance was again exemplified
in the grave joggling back and forth.

Meanwhile Mr. Harrison sat beside this strange new guest and asked
him questions concerning his church, being instantly, it is needless
to say, informed of its great antiquity, of the journeying of St.
Augustin and his Forty Monks to Britain, of the church they found
already planted there, of its retreat to the hills of Wales under its
oppressors' tyranny, of many cognate themes, side issues of the main
branch of the subject, into which the talk naturally drifted, the
like of which Mr. Harrison had never heard in all his days. And as he
watched the figures dancing to the violin's strains, and beheld as in
a mental vision the solemn gyrations of those renowned Forty Monks to
the monotone of old Mr. Kenyon's voice, he abstractedly hoped that the
double dance would continue without interference till a peaceable dawn.

His hopes were vain. It so chanced that Kossuth Johns, who had by no
means relinquished all idea of dancing at Harrison's Cove and defying
Rick Pearson, had hitherto been detained by his mother's persistent
entreaties, some necessary attentions to his father, and the many
trials which beset a man dressing for a party who has very few clothes,
and those very old and worn. Jule, his sister-in-law, had been most
kind and complaisant, putting on a button here, sewing up a slit there,
darning a refractory elbow, and lending him the one bright ribbon she
possessed as a neck-tie. But all these things take time, and the moon
did not light Kossuth down the gorge until she was shining almost
vertically from the sky, and the Harrison Cove people and the Forty
Monks were dancing together in high feather. The ecclesiastic dance
halted suddenly, and a watchful light gleamed in old Mr. Kenyon's eyes
as he became silent and the boy stepped into the room. The moonlight
and the lamp-light fell mingled on the calm, inexpressive features
and tall, slender form of the young mountaineer. "Hy're, Kossute!" A
cheerful greeting from many voices met him. The next moment the music
ceased once again, and the dancing came to a stand-still, for as the
name fell on Pearson's ear he turned, glanced sharply toward the door,
and drawing one of his pistols from his belt advanced to the middle
of the room. The men fell back; so did the frightened women, without
screaming, however, for that indication of feminine sensibility had
not yet penetrated to Cheatham's Cross-Roads, to say nothing of the
mountains.

"I told ye that ye warn't ter come hyar," said Rick Pearson
imperiously, "and ye've got ter go home ter yer mammy, right off, or
ye'll never git thar no more, youngster."

"I've come hyar ter put _you_ out, ye cussed red-headed horse thief!"
retorted Kossuth, angrily; "ye hed better tell me whar that thar bay
filly is, or light out, one."

It is not the habit in the mountains to parley long on these occasions.
Kossuth had raised his gun to his shoulder as Rick, with his pistol
cocked, advanced a step nearer. The outlaw's weapon was struck upward
by a quick, strong hand, the little log cabin was filled with flash,
roar, and smoke, and the stars looked in through a hole in the roof
from which Rick's bullet had sent the shingles flying. He turned in
mortal terror and caught the hand that had struck his pistol,--in
mortal terror, for Kossuth was the crack shot of the mountains and he
felt he was a dead man. The room was somewhat obscured by smoke, but as
he turned upon the man who had disarmed him, for the force of the blow
had thrown the pistol to the floor, he saw that the other hand was over
the muzzle of young Johns's gun, and Kossuth was swearing loudly that
by the Lord Almighty if he didn't take it off he would shoot it off.

"My young friend," Mr. Kenyon began, with the calmness appropriate to
a devout member of the one catholic and apostolic church; but then,
the old Adam suddenly getting the upper-hand, he shouted out in irate
tones, "If you don't stop that noise, I'll break your head! Well, Mr.
Pearson," he continued, as he stood between the combatants, one hand
still over the muzzle of young Johns's gun, the other, lean and sinewy,
holding Pearson's powerful right arm with a vise-like grip, "well, Mr.
Pearson, you are not so good a soldier as you used to be; you didn't
fight boys in the old times."

Rick Pearson's enraged expression suddenly gave way to a surprised
recognition. "Ye may drag me through hell an' beat me with a soot-bag
ef hyar ain't the old fightin' preacher agin!" he cried.

"I have only one thing to say to you," said Mr. Kenyon. "You must go. I
will not have you here shooting boys and breaking up a party."

Rick demurred. "See hyar, now," he said, "ye've got no business
meddlin'."

"You must go," Mr. Kenyon reiterated.

"Preachin's yer business," Rick continued; "pears like ye don't 'tend
to it, though."

"You must go."

"S'pose I say I won't," said Rick, good-humoredly; "I s'pose ye'd say
ye'd make me."

"You must go," repeated Mr. Kenyon. "I am going to take the boy home
with me, but I intend to see you off first."

Mr. Kenyon had prevented the hot-headed Kossuth from firing by keeping
his hand persistently over the muzzle of the gun; and young Johns had
feared to try to wrench it away lest it should discharge in the effort.
Had it done so, Mr. Kenyon would have been in sweet converse with the
Forty Monks in about a minute and a quarter. Kossuth had finally let
go the gun, and made frantic attempts to borrow a weapon from some of
his friends, but the stern authoritative mandate of the belligerent
peace-maker had prevented them from gratifying him, and he now stood
empty-handed beside Mr. Kenyon, who had shouldered the old rifle in an
absent-minded manner, although still retaining his powerful grasp on
the arm of the outlaw.

"Waal, parson," said Rick at length, "I'll go, jest ter pleasure
you-uns. Ye see, I ain't forgot Shiloh."

"I am not talking about Shiloh now," said the old man. "You must get
off at once,--all of you," indicating the gang, who had been so
whelmed in astonishment that they had not lifted a finger to aid their
chief.

"Ye say ye'll take that--that"--Rick looked hard at Kossuth while he
racked his brains for an injurious epithet--"that sassy child home ter
his mammy?"

"Come, I am tired of this talk," said Mr. Kenyon; "you must go."

Rick walked heavily to the door and out into the moonlight. "Them was
good old times," he said to Mr. Kenyon, with a regretful cadence in
his peculiar drawl; "good old times, them War days. I wish they was
back agin,--I wish they was back agin. I ain't forgot Shiloh yit,
though, and I ain't a-goin' ter. But I'll tell ye one thing, parson,"
he added, his mind reverting from ten years ago to the scene just past,
as he unhitched his horse and carefully examined the saddle-girth and
stirrups, "ye're a mighty queer preacher, ye air, a-sittin' up an'
lookin' at sinners dance an' then gittin' in a fight that don't consarn
ye,--ye're a mighty queer preacher! Ye ought ter be in my gang, that's
whar _ye_ ought ter be," he exclaimed with a guffaw, as he put his foot
in the stirrup; "ye've got a damned deal too much grit fur a preacher.
But I ain't forgot Shiloh yit, an' I don't mean ter, nuther."

A shout of laughter from the gang, an oath or two, the quick tread
of horses' hoofs pressing into a gallop, and the outlaw's troop were
speeding along the narrow paths that led deep into the vistas of the
moonlit summer woods.

As the old churchman, with the boy at his side and the gun still on his
shoulder, ascended the rocky, precipitous slope on the opposite side
of the ravine above the foaming waters of the wild mountain stream, he
said but little of admonition to his companion; with the disappearance
of the flame and smoke and the dangerous ruffian his martial spirit had
cooled; the last words of the outlaw, the highest praise Rick Pearson
could accord to the highest qualities Rick Pearson could imagine--he
had grit enough to belong to the gang--had smitten a tender conscience.
He, at his age, using none of the means rightfully at his command, the
gentle suasion of religion, must needs rush between armed men, wrench
their weapons from their hands, threatening with such violence that an
outlaw and desperado, recognizing a parallel of his own belligerent and
lawless spirit, should say that he ought to belong to the gang! And the
heaviest scourge of the sin-laden conscience was the perception that,
so far as the unsubdued old Adam went, he ought indeed.

He was not so tortured, though, that he did not think of others. He
paused on reaching the summit of the ascent, and looked back at the
little house nestling in the ravine, the lamp-light streaming through
its open doors and windows across the path among the laurel bushes,
where Rick's gang had hitched their horses.

"I wonder," said the old man, "if they are quiet and peaceable again;
can you hear the music and dancing?"

"Not now," said Kossuth. Then, after a moment, "Now, I kin," he added,
as the wind brought to their ears the oft-told tale of the rabbit's
gallopade in the pea-patch. "They're a-dancin' now, and all right agin."

As they walked along, Mr. Kenyon's racked conscience might have been
in a slight degree comforted had he known that he was in some sort a
revelation to the impressible lad at his side, that Kossuth had begun
dimly to comprehend that a Christian may be a man of spirit also, and
that bravado does not constitute bravery. Now that the heat of anger
was over, the young fellow was glad that the fearless interposition of
the warlike peace-maker had prevented any killing, "'kase ef the old
man hedn't hung on ter my gun like he done, I'd have been a murderer
like he said, an' Rick would hev been dead. An' the bay filly ain't
sech a killin' matter nohow; ef it war the roan three-year-old now,
'twould be different."




                     OVER ON THE T'OTHER MOUNTING.


Stretching out laterally from a long oblique line of the Southern
Alleghanies are two parallel ranges, following the same course through
several leagues, and separated by a narrow strip of valley hardly half
a mile in width. As they fare along arm in arm, so to speak, sundry
differences between the close companions are distinctly apparent. One
is much the higher, and leads the way; it strikes out all the bold
curves and angles of the course, meekly attended by the lesser ridge;
its shadowy coves and sharp ravines are repeated in miniature as its
comrade falls into the line of march; it seems to have its companion
in charge, and to conduct it away from the majestic procession of
mountains that traverses the State.

But, despite its more imposing appearance, all the tangible advantages
are possessed by its humble neighbor. When Old Rocky-Top, as the lower
range is called, is fresh and green with the tender verdure of spring,
the snow still lies on the summit of the T'other Mounting, and drifts
deep into treacherous rifts and chasms, and muffles the voice of the
singing pines; and all the crags are hung with gigantic glittering
icicles, and the woods are gloomy and bleak. When the sun shines bright
on Old Rocky-Top, clouds often hover about the loftier mountain, and
storms brew in that higher atmosphere; the all-pervading winter winds
surge wildly among the groaning forests, and wrench the limbs from
the trees, and dash huge fragments of cliffs down deep gorges, and
spend their fury before they reach the sheltered lower spur. When the
kindly shades of evening slip softly down on drowsy Rocky-Top, and the
work is laid by in the rough little houses, and the simple home-folks
draw around the hearth, day still lingers in a weird, paralytic life
among the tree-tops of the T'other Mounting; and the only remnant of
the world visible is that stark black line of its summit, stiff and
hard against the faint green and saffron tints of the sky. Before the
birds are well awake on Old Rocky-Top, and while the shadows are still
thick, the T'other Mounting has been called up to a new day. Lonely
dawns these: the pale gleam strikes along the October woods, bringing
first into uncertain twilight the dead yellow and red of the foliage,
presently heightened into royal gold and crimson by the first ray of
sunshine; it rouses the timid wild-fowl; it drives home the plundering
fox; it meets, perhaps, some lumbering bear or skulking mountain wolf;
it flecks with light and shade the deer, all gray and antlered; it
falls upon no human habitation, for the few settlers of the region
have a persistent predilection for Old Rocky-Top. Somehow, the T'other
Mounting is vaguely in ill repute among its neighbors,--it has a bad
name.

"It's the onluckiest place ennywhar nigh about," said Nathan White, as
he sat one afternoon upon the porch of his log-cabin, on the summit
of Old Rocky-Top, and gazed up at the heights of the T'other Mounting
across the narrow valley. "I hev hearn tell all my days ez how, ef ye
go up thar on the T'other Mounting, suthin' will happen ter ye afore
ye kin git away. An' I knows myself ez how--'twar ten year ago an'
better--I went up thar, one Jan'ry day, a-lookin' fur my cow, ez hed
strayed off through not hevin' enny calf ter our house; an' I fund the
cow, but jes' tuk an' slipped on a icy rock, an' bruk my ankle-bone.
'Twar sech a job a-gittin' off'n that thar T'other Mounting an' back
over hyar, it hev l'arned me ter stay away from thar."

"Thar war a man," piped out a shrill, quavering voice from within the
door,--the voice of Nathan White's father, the oldest inhabitant of
Rocky-Top,--"thar war a man hyar, nigh on ter fifty year ago,--he
war mightily gin ter thievin' horses; an' one time, while he war
a-runnin' away with Pete Dilks's dapple-gray mare,--they called her
Luce, five year old she war,--Pete, he war a-ridin' a-hint him on his
old sorrel mare,--_her_ name 'twar Jane, an'--the Jeemes boys, they
war a-ridin' arter the horse-thief too. Thar, now! I clar forgits what
horses them Jeemes boys war a-ridin' of." He paused for an instant in
anxious reflection. "Waal, sir! it do beat all that I can't remember
them Jeemes boys' horses! Anyways, they got ter that thar tricky ford
through Wild-Duck River, thar on the side o' the T'other Mounting, an'
the horse-thief war ahead, an' he hed ter take it fust. An' that thar
river,--it rises yander in them pines, nigh about," pointing with a
shaking fore-finger,--"an' that thar river jes' spun him out 'n the
saddle like a top, an' he warn't seen no more till he hed floated
nigh ter Colbury, ez dead ez a door-nail, nor Pete's dapple-gray mare
nuther; she bruk her knees agin them high stone banks. But he war a
good swimmer, an' he war drowned. He war witched with the place, ez
sure ez ye air born."

A long silence ensued. Then Nathan White raised his pondering eyes
with a look of slow curiosity. "What did Tony Britt say he war a-doin'
of, when ye kem on him suddint in the woods on the T'other Mounting?"
he asked, addressing his son, a stalwart youth, who was sitting upon
the step, his hat on the back of his head, and his hands in the pockets
of his jeans trousers.

"He said he war a-huntin', but he hedn't hed no sort'n luck. It 'pears
ter me ez all the game thar is witched somehow, an' ye can't git no
good shot at nuthin'. Tony tole me to-day that he got up three deer,
an' hed toler'ble aim; an' he missed two, an' the t'other jes' trotted
off with a rifle-ball in his flank, ez onconsarned ez ef he hed hit him
with an acorn."

"I hev always hearn ez everything that belongs on that thar T'other
Mounting air witched, an' ef ye brings away so much ez a leaf, or a
stone, or a stick, ye fotches a curse with it," chimed in the old man,
"'kase thar hev been sech a many folks killed on the T'other Mounting."

"I tole Tony Britt that thar word," said the young fellow, "an' 'lowed
ter him ez how he hed tuk a mighty bad spot ter go a-huntin'."

"What did he say?" demanded Nathan White.

"He say he never knowed ez thar war murders commit on T'other
Mounting, an' ef that war he 'spects 'twar nuthin' but Injuns, long
time ago. But he 'lowed the place war powerful onlucky, an' he believed
the mounting war witched."

"Ef Tony Britt's arter enny harm," said the octogenarian, "he'll never
come off 'n that thar T'other Mounting. It's a mighty place fur bad
folks ter make thar eend. Thar's that thar horse thief I war a-tellin'
'bout, an' that dapple-gray mare,--her name 'twar Luce. An' folks ez
is a-runnin' from the sheriff jes' takes ter the T'other Mounting ez
nateral ez ef it war home; an' ef they don't git cotched, they is
never hearn on no more." He paused impressively. "The rocks falls on
'em, an' kills 'em; an' I'll tell ye jes' how I knows," he resumed,
oracularly. "'Twar sixty year ago, nigh about, an' me an' them Jeemes
boys war a-burnin' of lime tergether over on the T'other Mounting. We
hed a lime-kiln over thar, jes' under Piney Notch, an' never hed no
luck, but jes' stuck ter it like fools, till Hiram Jeemes got one of
his eyes put out. So we quit burnin' of lime on the T'other Mounting,
'count of the place bein' witched, an' kem over hyar ter Old Rocky-Top,
an' got along toler'ble well, cornsiderin'. But one day, whilst we war
a-workin on the T'other Mounting, what d' ye think I fund in the rock?
The print of a bare foot in the solid stone, ez plain an' ez nateral
ez ef the track hed been lef' in the clay yestiddy. Waal, I knowed it
war the track o' Jeremiah Stubbs, what shot his step-brother, an' gin
the sheriff the slip, an' war las' seen on the T'other Mounting, 'kase
his old shoe jes' fit the track, fur we tried it. An' a good while
arterward I fund on that same T'other Mounting--in the solid stone,
mind ye--a fish, what he had done br'iled fur supper, jes' turned ter a
stone."

"So thar's the Bible made true," said an elderly woman, who had come
to the door to hear this reminiscence, and stood mechanically stirring
a hoe-cake batter in a shallow wooden bowl. "Ax fur a fish, an' ye 'll
git a stone."

The secret history of the hills among which they lived was indeed as a
sealed book to these simple mountaineers.

"The las' time I war ter Colbury," said Nathan White, "I hearn the
sheriff a-talkin' 'bout how them evil-doers an' sech runs fur the
T'other Mounting fust thing; though he 'lowed ez it war powerful foxy
in 'em ter try ter hide thar, kase he said, ef they wunst reaches it,
he mought ez well look fur a needle in a hay-stack. He 'lowed ef he hed
a posse a thousand men strong he couldn't git 'em out."

"He can't find 'em, 'kase the rocks falls on 'em, or swallers 'em in,"
said the old man. "Ef Tony Britt is up ter mischief he'll never come
back no more. He'll git into worser trouble than ever he see afore."

"He hev done seen a powerful lot of trouble, fust one way an' another,
'thout foolin' round the T'other Mounting," said Nathan White. "They
tells me ez he got hisself indicted, I believes they calls it, or
suthin', down yander ter the court at Colbury,--that war year afore
las',--an' he hed ter pay twenty dollars fine; 'kase when he war
overseer of the road he jes' war constant in lettin' his friends, an'
folks ginerally, off 'thout hevin' 'em fined, when they didn't come an'
work on the road,--though that air the way ez the overseers hev always
done, without nobody a-tellin' on 'em an' sech. But them ez warn't
Tony Britt's friends seen a mighty differ. He war dead sure ter fine
Caleb Hoxie seventy-five cents, 'cordin' ter the law, fur every day
that he war summonsed ter work an' never come; 'kase Tony an' Caleb
hed some sort 'n grudge agin one another 'count of a spavined horse
what Caleb sold ter Tony, makin' him out to be a sound critter,--though
Caleb swears he never knowed the horse war spavined when he sold him
ter Tony, no more 'n nuthin'. Caleb war mightily worked up 'bout this
hyar finin' business, an' him an' Tony hed a tussle 'bout it every
time they kem tergether. But Caleb war always sure ter git the worst
of it, 'kase Tony, though he air toler'ble spindling sort o' build, he
air somehow or other sorter stringy an' tough, an' makes a right smart
show in a reg'lar knock-down an' drag-out fight. So Caleb he war beat
every time, an' fined too. An' he tried wunst ter shoot Tony Britt, but
he missed his aim. An' when he war a-layin' off how ter fix Tony, fur
treatin' him that way, he war a-stoppin', one day, at Jacob Green's
blacksmith's shop, yander, a mile down the valley, an' he war a-talkin'
'bout it ter a passel o' folks thar. An' Lawyer Rood from Colbury war
thar, an' Jacob war a-shoein' of his mare; an' he heard the tale, an'
axed Caleb whyn't he report Tony ter the court, an' git him fined
fur neglect of his duty, bein' overseer of the road. An' Caleb never
knowed before that it war the law that everybody what war summonsed an'
didn't come must be fined, or the overseer must be fined hisself; but
he knowed that Tony hed been a-lettin' of his friends off, an' folks
ginerally, an' he jes' 'greed fur Lawyer Rood ter stir up trouble fur
Tony. An' he done it. An' the court fined Tony twenty dollars fur them
ways o' his'n. An' it kept him so busy a-scufflin' ter raise the twenty
dollars that he never hed a chance ter give Caleb Hoxie more'n one or
two beatin's the whole time he war a-scrapin' up the money."

This story was by no means unknown to the little circle, nor did its
narrator labor under the delusion that he was telling a new thing.
It was merely a verbal act of recollection, and an attentive silence
reigned as he related the familiar facts. To people who live in lonely
regions this habit of retrospection (especially noticeable in them) and
an enduring interest in the past may be something of a compensation for
the scanty happenings of the present. When the recital was concluded,
the hush for a time was unbroken, save by the rush of the winds,
bringing upon their breath the fragrant woodland odors of balsams and
pungent herbs, and a fresh and exhilarating suggestion of sweeping over
a volume of falling water. They stirred the fringed shadow of a great
pine that stood, like a sentinel, before Nathan White's door and threw
its colorless simulacrum, a boastful lie twice its size, far down the
sunset road. Now and then the faint clangor of a cow-bell came from out
the tangled woods about the little hut, and the low of homeward-bound
cattle sounded upon the air, mellowed and softened by the distance.
The haze that rested above the long, narrow valley was hardly visible,
save in the illusive beauty with which it invested the scene,--the
tender azure of the far-away ranges; the exquisite tones of the gray
and purple shadows that hovered about the darkening coves and along
the deep lines marking the gorges; the burnished brilliance of the
sunlight, which, despite its splendor, seemed lonely enough, lying
motionless upon the lonely landscape and on the still figures clustered
about the porch. Their eyes were turned toward the opposite steeps,
gorgeous with scarlet oak and sumac, all in autumnal array, and their
thoughts were busy with the hunter on the T'other Mounting and vague
speculations concerning his evil intent.

"It 'pears ter me powerful strange ez Tony goes a-foolin' round that
thar T'other Mounting, cornsiderin' what happened yander in its
shadow," said the woman, coming again to the door, and leaning idly
against the frame; the bread was baking over the coals. "That thar wife
o' his'n, afore she died, war always frettin' 'kase way down thar on
the backbone, whar her house war, the shadow o' the T'other Mounting
laid on it fur an hour an' better every day of the worl'. She 'lowed ez
it always put her in mind o' the shadow o' death. An' I thought 'bout
that thar sayin' o' hern the day when I see her a-lyin' stiff an' cold
on the bed, an' the shadow of the T'other Mounting drapping in at
the open door, an' a-creepin' an' a-creepin' over her face. An' I war
plumb glad when they got that woman under ground, whar, ef the sunshine
can't git ter her, neither kin the shadow. Ef ever thar war a murdered
woman, she war one. Arter all that hed come an' gone with Caleb Hoxie,
fur Tony Britt ter go arter him, 'kase he war a yerb-doctor, ter
git him ter physic his wife, who war nigh about dead with the lung
fever, an' gin up by old Dr. Marsh!--it looks ter me like he war plumb
crazy,--though him an' Caleb hed sorter made friends 'bout the spavined
horse an' sech afore then. Jes' ez soon ez she drunk the stuff that
Caleb fixed fur her she laid her head back an' shet her eyes, an' never
opened 'em no more in this worl'. She war a murdered woman, an' Caleb
Hoxie done it through the yerbs he fixed fur her."

A subtile amethystine mist had gradually overlaid the slopes of the
T'other Mounting, mellowing the brilliant tints of the variegated
foliage to a delicious hazy sheen of mosaics; but about the base the
air seemed dun-colored, though transparent; seen through it, even the
red of the crowded trees was but a sombre sort of magnificence, and
the great masses of gray rocks, jutting out among them here and there,
wore a darkly frowning aspect. Along the summit there was a blaze
of scarlet and gold in the full glory of the sunshine; the topmost
cliffs caught its rays, and gave them back in unexpected gleams of
green or grayish-yellow, as of mosses, or vines, or huckleberry bushes,
nourished in the heart of the deep fissures.

"Waal," said Nathan White, "I never did believe ez Caleb gin her
ennythink ter hurt,--though I knows thar is them ez does. Caleb is the
bes' yerb-doctor I ever see. The rheumatiz would nigh on ter hev killed
me, ef it warn't fur him, that spell I hed las' winter. An' Dr. Marsh,
what they hed up afore the gran' jury, swore that the yerbs what Caleb
gin her war nuthin' ter hurt; _he_ said, though, they couldn't holp nor
hender. An' but fur Dr. Marsh they would hev jailed Caleb ter stand his
trial, like Tony wanted 'em ter do. But Dr. Marsh said she died with
the consumption, jes' the same, an' Caleb's yerbs war wholesome, though
they warn't no 'count at all."

"I knows I ain't a-goin' never ter tech nuthin' he fixes fur me no
more," said his wife, "an' I'll be bound nobody else in these hyar
mountings will, nuther."

"Waal," drawled her son, "I knows fur true ez he air tendin' now on old
Gideon Croft, what lives over yander in the valley on the t'other side
of the T'other Mounting, an' is down with the fever. He went over thar
yestiddy evening, late; I met him when he war goin', an' he tole me."

"He hed better look out how he comes across Tony Britt," said Nathan
White; "fur I hearn, the las' time I war ter the Settlemint, how
Tony hev swore ter kill him the nex' time he see him, fur a-givin'
of pizenous yerbs ter his wife. Tony air mightily outdone 'kase the
gran' jury let him off. Caleb hed better be sorter keerful how he goes
a-foolin' round these hyar dark woods."

The sun had sunk, and the night, long held in abeyance, was coming
fast. The glooms gathered in the valley; a soft gray shadow hung over
the landscape, making familiar things strange. The T'other Mounting was
all a dusky, sad purple under the faintly pulsating stars, save that
high along the horizontal line of its summit gleamed the strange red
radiance of the dead and gone sunset. The outline of the foliage was
clearly drawn against the pure lapis lazuli tint of the sky behind it;
here and there the uncanny light streamed through the bare limbs of an
early leafless tree, which looked in the distance like some bony hand
beckoning, or warning, or raised in horror.

"_Anythink_ mought happen thar!" said the woman, as she stood on
night-wrapped Rocky-Top and gazed up at the alien light, so red in
the midst of the dark landscape. When she turned back to the door of
the little hut, the meagre comforts within seemed almost luxury, in
their cordial contrast to the desolate, dreary mountain yonder and the
thought of the forlorn, wandering hunter. A genial glow from the hearth
diffused itself over the puncheon floor; the savory odor of broiling
venison filled the room as a tall, slim girl knelt before the fire and
placed the meat upon the gridiron, her pale cheeks flushing with the
heat; there was a happy suggestion of peace and unity when the four
generations trooped in to their supper, grandfather on his grandson's
arm, and a sedate two-year-old bringing up the rear. Nathan White's
wife paused behind the others to bar the door, and once more, as she
looked up at the T'other Mounting, the thought of the lonely wanderer
smote her heart. The red sunset light had died out at last, but a
golden aureola heralded the moon-rise, and a gleaming thread edged the
masses of foliage; there was no faint suggestion now of mist in the
valley, and myriads of stars filled a cloudless sky. "He hev done gone
home by this time," she said to her daughter-in-law, as she closed the
door, "an' ef he ain't, he'll hev a moon ter light him."

"Air ye a-studyin' 'bout Tony Britt yit?" asked Nathan White. "He hev
done gone home a good hour by sun, I'll be bound. Jes' ketch Tony
Britt a-huntin' till sundown, will ye! He air a mighty pore hand ter
work. 'Stonishes me ter hear he air even a-huntin' on the T'other
Mounting."

"I don't believe he's up ter enny harm," said the woman; "he hev jes'
tuk ter the woods with grief."

"'Pears ter me," said the daughter-in-law, rising from her kneeling
posture before the fire, and glancing reproachfully at her
husband,--"'pears ter me ez ye mought hev brought him hyar ter eat his
supper along of we-uns, stiddier a-leavin' him a-grievin' over his dead
wife in them witched woods on the T'other Mounting."

The young fellow looked a trifle abashed at this suggestion. "I never
wunst thought of it," he said. "Tony never stopped ter talk more'n a
minit, nohow."

The evening wore away; the octogenarian and the sedate two-year-old
fell asleep in their chairs shortly after supper; Nathan White and his
son smoked their cob-pipes, and talked fitfully of the few incidents
of the day; the women sat in the firelight with their knitting, silent
and absorbed, except that now and then the elder, breaking from her
reverie, declared, "I can't git Tony Britt out'n my head nohow in the
worl'."

The moon had come grandly up over the T'other Mounting, casting long
silver lights and deep black shadows through all the tangled recesses
and yawning chasms of the woods and rocks. In the vast wilderness
the bright rays met only one human creature, the belated hunter
making his way homeward through the dense forest with an experienced
woodman's craft. For no evil intent had brought Tony Britt to the
T'other Mounting; he had spent the day in hunting, urged by that strong
necessity without which the mountaineer seldom makes any exertion. Dr.
Marsh's unavailing skill had cost him dear; his only cow was sold to
make up the twenty dollars fine which his revenge on Caleb Hoxie had
entailed upon him; without even so much as a spavined horse tillage
was impossible, and the bounteous harvest left him empty-handed,
for he had no crops to gather. The hardships of extreme poverty had
reinforced the sorrows that came upon him in battalions, and had
driven him far through long aisles of the woods, where the night fell
upon him unaware. The foliage was all embossed with exquisite silver
designs that seemed to stand out some little distance from the dark
masses of leaves; now and then there came to his eyes that emerald
gleam never seen upon verdure in the daytime,--only shown by some
artificial light, or the moon's sweet uncertainty. The wind was strong
and fresh, but not cold; here and there was a glimmer of dew. Once,
and once only, he thought of the wild traditions which peopled the
T'other Mounting with evil spirits. He paused with a sudden chill; he
glanced nervously over his shoulder down the illimitable avenues of
the lonely woods. The grape-vines, hanging in festoons from tree to
tree, were slowly swinging back and forth, stirred by the wind. There
was a dizzy dance of shadows whirling on every open space where the
light lay on the ground. The roar and fret of Wild-Duck River, hidden
there somewhere in the pines, came on the breeze like a strange, weird,
fitful voice, crying out amid the haunted solitudes of the T'other
Mounting. He turned abruptly, with his gun on his shoulder, and pursued
his way through the trackless desert in the direction of his home. He
had been absorbed in his quest and his gloomy thoughts, and did not
realize the distance he had traversed until it lay before him to be
retraced; but his superstitious terror urged him to renewed exertions.
"Ef ever I gits off'n this hyar witched mounting," he said to himself,
as he tore away the vines and brambles that beset his course, "I'll
never come back agin while I lives." He grew calmer when he paused on
a huge projecting crag, and looked across the narrow valley at the
great black mass opposite, which he knew was Old Rocky-Top; its very
presence gave him a sense of companionship and blunted his fear, and
he sat down to rest for a few minutes, gazing at the outline of the
range he knew so well, so unfamiliar from a new stand-point. How low it
seemed from the heights of the T'other Mounting! Could that faint gleam
be the light in Nathan White's house? Tony Britt glanced further down
the indistinct slope, where he knew his own desolate, deserted hut was
crouched. "Jes' whar the shadow o' the T'other Mounting can reach it,"
he thought, with a new infusion of bitterness. He averted his eyes;
he would look no longer; he threw himself at full length among the
ragged clumps of grass and fragments of rock, and turned his face to
the stars. It all came back to him then. Sometimes, in his sordid cares
and struggles for his scanty existence, his past troubles were dwarfed
by the present. But here on the lonely cliff, with the infinite spaces
above him and the boundless forest below, he felt anew his isolation.
No light on earth save the far gleam from another man's home, and in
heaven only the drowning face of the moon, drifting slowly through the
blue floods of the skies. He was only twenty-five; he had youth and
health and strength, but he felt that he had lived his life; it seemed
long, marked as it was by cares and privation and persistent failure.
Little as he knew of life, he knew how hard his had been, even meted by
those of the poverty-stricken wretches among whom, his lot was cast.
"An' sech luck!" he said, as his sad eyes followed the drifting dead
face of the moon. "Along o' that thar step-mother o' mine till I war
growed; an' then when I war married, an' we hed got the house put up,
an' war beginnin' ter git along like other folks kin, an' Caroline's
mother gin her that thar calf what growed ter a cow, an' through
pinchin' an' savin' we made out ter buy that thar horse from Caleb
Hoxie, jes' ez we war a-startin' ter work a crap he lays down an' dies;
an' that cussed twenty dollars ez I hed ter pay ter the court; an'
Car'line jes' a-gittin' sick, an' a-wastin' an' a-wastin' away, till I,
like a fool, brung Caleb thar, an' he pizens her with his yerbs--God
A'mighty! ef I could jes' lay my hands wunst on that scoundrel I
wouldn't leave a mite of him, ef he war pertected by a hundred lyin',
thievin' gran' juries! But he can't stay a-hidin' forevermo'. He's got
ter 'count ter me, ef he ain't ter the law; an' he'll see a mighty
differ a-twixt us. I swear he'll never draw another breath!"

He rose with a set, stern face, and struck a huge bowlder beside him
with his hard clenched hand as he spoke. He had not even an ignorant
idea of an impressive dramatic pose; but if the great gaunt cliff had
been the stage of a theatre his attitude and manner at that instant
would have won him applause. He was all alone with his poverty and his
anguished memories, as men with such burdens are apt to be.

The bowlder on which, in his rude fashion, he had registered his oath
was harder than his hard hand, and the vehemence of the blow brought
blood; but he had scarcely time to think of it. His absorbed reverie
was broken by a rustling other than that of the eddying wind. He raised
his head and looked about him, half expecting to see the antlers of a
deer. Then there came to his ears the echo of the tread of man. His
eyes mechanically followed the sound. Forty feet down the face of the
crag a broad ledge jutted out, and upon it ran a narrow path, made by
stray cattle, or the feet of their searching owners; it was visible
from the summit for a distance of a hundred yards or so, and the white
glamour of the moonbeams fell full upon it. Before a speculation had
suggested itself, a man walked slowly into view along the path, and
with starting eyes the hunter recognized his dearest foe. Britt's
hand lay upon the bowlder; his oath was in his mind; his unconscious
enemy had come within his power. Swifter than a flash the temptation
was presented. He remembered the warnings of his lawyer at Colbury
last week, when the grand jury had failed to find a true bill against
Caleb Hoxie,--that he was an innocent man, and must go unscathed, that
any revenge for fancied wrongs would be dearly rued; he remembered,
too, the mountain traditions of the falling rocks burying evil-doers
in the heart of the hills. Here was his opportunity. He would have a
life for a life, and there would be one more legend of the very stones
conspiring to punish malefactors escaped from men added to the terrible
"sayin's" of the T'other Mounting. A strong belief in the supernatural
influences of the place was rife within him; he knew nothing of Gideon
Croft's fever and the errand that had brought the herb-doctor through
the "witched mounting;" had he not been transported thither by some
invisible agency, that the rocks might fall upon him and crush him?

The temptation and the resolve were simultaneous. With his hand upon
the bowlder, his hot heart beating fast, his distended eyes burning
upon the approaching figure, he waited for the moment to come. There
lay the long, low, black mountain opposite, with only the moon beams
upon it, for the lights in Nathan White's house were extinguished;
there was the deep, dark gulf of the valley; there, forty feet below
him, was the narrow, moon-flooded path on the ledge, and the man
advancing carelessly. The bowlder fell with a frightful crash, the
echoes rang with a scream of terror, and the two men--one fleeing from
the dreadful danger he had barely escaped, the other from the hideous
deed he thought he had done--ran wildly in opposite directions through
the tangled autumnal woods.

Was every leaf of the forest endowed with a woful voice, that the echo
of that shriek might never die from Tony Britt's ears? Did the storied,
retributive rocks still vibrate with this new victim's frenzied cry?
And what was this horror in his heart! Now,--so late,--was coming a
terrible conviction of his enemy's innocence, and with it a fathomless
remorse.

All through the interminable night he fled frantically along the
mountain's summit, scarcely knowing whither, and caring for nothing
except to multiply the miles between him and the frightful object
that he believed lay under the bowlder which he had dashed down the
precipice. The moon sank beneath the horizon; the fantastic shadows
were merged in the darkest hour of the night; the winds died, and
there was no voice in all the woods, save the wail o' Wild-Duck
River and the forever-resounding screams in the flying wretch's ears.
Sometimes he answered them in a wild, hoarse, inarticulate cry;
sometimes he flung his hands above his head and wrung them in his
agony; never once did he pause in his flight. Panting, breathless,
exhausted, he eagerly sped through the darkness; tearing his face upon
the brambles; plunging now and then into gullies and unseen quagmires;
sometimes falling heavily, but recovering himself in an instant, and
once more struggling on; striving to elude the pursuing voices, and to
distance forever his conscience and his memory.

And then came that terrible early daylight that was wont to dawn upon
the T'other Mounting when all the world besides was lost in slumber;
the wan, melancholy light showed dimly the solemn trees and dense
undergrowth; the precarious pitfalls about his path; the long deep
gorges; the great crags and chasms; the cascades, steely gray, and
white; the huge mass, all hung about with shadows, which he knew
was Old Rocky-Top, rising from the impenetrably dark valley below.
It seemed wonderful to him, somehow, that a new day should break at
all. If, in a revulsion of nature, that utter blackness had continued
forever and ever it would not have been strange, after what had
happened. He could have borne it better than the sight of the familiar
world gradually growing into day, all unconscious of his secret. He
had begun the descent of the T'other Mounting, and he seemed to carry
that pale dawn with him; day was breaking when he reached the foot of
Old Rocky-Top, and as he climbed up to his own deserted, empty little
shanty, it too stood plainly defined in the morning light. He dragged
himself to the door, and impelled by some morbid fascination he glanced
over his shoulder at the T'other Mounting. There it was, unchanged,
with the golden largess of a gracious season blazing upon every
autumnal leaf. He shuddered, and went into the fireless, comfortless
house. And then he made an appalling discovery. As he mechanically
divested himself of his shot-pouch and powder-horn he was stricken
by a sudden consciousness that he did not have his gun! One doubtful
moment, and he remembered that he had laid it upon the crag when he had
thrown himself down to rest. Beyond question, it was there yet. His
conscience was still now,--his remorse had fled. It was only a matter
of time when his crime would be known. He recollected his meeting with
young White while he was hunting, and then Britt cursed the gun which
he had left on the cliff. The discovery of the weapon there would be
strong evidence against him, taken in connection with all the other
circumstances. True, he could even yet go back and recover it, but he
was mastered by the fear of meeting some one on the unfrequented road,
or even in the loneliness of the T'other Mounting, and strengthening
the chain of evidence against him by the fact of being once more seen
in the fateful neighborhood. He resolved that he would wait until
night-fall, and then he would retrace his way, secure his gun, and all
might yet be well with him. As to the bowlder,--were men never before
buried under the falling rocks of the T'other Mounting?

Without food, without rest, without sleep, his limbs rigid with the
strong tension of his nerves, his eyes bloodshot, haggard, and eager,
his brain on fire, he sat through the long morning hours absently
gazing across the narrow valley at the solemn, majestic mountain
opposite, and that sinister jutting crag with the indistinctly defined
ledges of its rugged surface.

After a time, the scene began to grow dim; the sun was still shining,
but through a haze becoming momently more dense. The brilliantly
tinted foliage upon the T'other Mounting was fading; the cliffs showed
strangely distorted faces through the semi-transparent blue vapor, and
presently they seemed to recede altogether; the valley disappeared, and
all the country was filled with the smoke of distant burning woods. He
was gasping when he first became sensible of the smoke-laden haze, for
he had seen nothing of the changing aspect of the landscape. Before his
vision was the changeless picture of a night of mingled moonlight and
shadow, the ill-defined black mass where Old Rocky-Top rose into the
air, the impenetrable gloom of the valley, the ledge of the crag, and
the unconscious figure slowly coming within the power of his murderous
hand. His eyes would look on no other scene, no other face, so long as
he should live.

He had a momentary sensation of stifling, and then a great weight
was lifted. For he had begun to doubt whether the unlucky locality
would account satisfactorily for the fall of that bowlder and the
horrible object beneath it; a more reasonable conclusion might be
deduced from the fact that he had been seen in the neighborhood, and
the circumstance of the deadly feud. But what wonder would there be if
the dry leaves on the T'other Mounting should be ignited and the woods
burned! What explanations might not such a catastrophe suggest!--a
frantic flight from the flames toward the cliff and an accidental
fall. And so he waited throughout the long day, that was hardly day
at all, but an opaque twilight, through which could be discerned only
the stony path leading down the slope from his door, only the blurred
outlines of the bushes close at hand, only the great gaunt limbs of a
lightning-scathed tree, seeming entirely severed from the unseen trunk,
and swinging in the air sixty feet above the earth.

Toward night-fall the wind rose and the smoke-curtain lifted, once
more revealing to the settlers upon Old Rocky-Top the sombre T'other
Mounting, with the belated evening light still lurid upon the
trees,--only a strange, faint resemblance of the sunset radiance,
rather the ghost of a dead day. And presently this apparition was gone,
and the deep purple line of the witched mountain's summit grew darker
against the opaline skies, till it was merged in a dusky black, and the
shades of the night fell thick on the landscape.

The scenic effects of the drama, that serve to widen the mental vision
and cultivate the imagination of even the poor in cities, were denied
these primitive, simple people; but that magnificent pageant of the
four seasons, wherein was forever presented the imposing splendor of
the T'other Mounting in an ever-changing grandeur of aspect, was a
gracious recompense for the spectacular privileges of civilization. And
this evening the humble family party on Nathan White's porch beheld a
scene of unique impressiveness.

The moon had not yet risen; the winds were awhirl; the darkness
draped the earth as with a pall. Out from the impenetrable gloom of
the woods on the T'other Mounting there started, suddenly, a scarlet
globe of fire; one long moment it was motionless, but near it the
spectral outline of a hand appeared beckoning, or warning, or raised
in horror,--only a leafless tree, catching in the distance a semblance
of humanity. Then from the still ball of fire there streamed upward a
long, slender plume of golden light, waving back and forth against the
pale horizon. Across the dark slope of the mountain below, flashes of
lightning were shooting in zigzag lines, and wherever they gleamed were
seen those frantic skeleton hands raised and wrung in anguish. It was
cruel sport for the cruel winds; they maddened over gorge and cliff and
along the wooded steeps, carrying far upon their wings the sparks of
desolation. From the summit, myriads of jets of flame reached up to the
placid stars; about the base of the mountain lurked a lake of liquid
fire, with wreaths of blue smoke hovering over it; ever and anon,
athwart the slope darted the sudden lightning, widening into sheets of
flame as it conquered new ground.

The astonishment on the faces grouped about Nathan White's door
was succeeded by a startled anxiety. After the first incoherent
exclamations of surprise came the pertinent inquiry from his wife, "Ef
Old Rocky-Top war ter ketch too, whar would we-uns run ter?"

Nathan White's countenance had in its expression more of astounded
excitement than of bodily fear. "Why, bless my soul!" he said at
length, "the woods away over yander, what hev been burnin' all day,
ain't nigh enough ter the T'other Mounting ter ketch it,--nuthin' like
it."

"The T'other Mounting would burn, though, ef fire war put ter it," said
his son. The two men exchanged a glance of deep significance.

"Do ye mean ter say," exclaimed Mrs. White, her fire-lit face agitated
by a sudden superstitious terror, "that that thar T'other Mounting is
fired by witches an' sech?"

"Don't talk so loud, Matildy," said her husband. "Them knows best ez
done it."

"Thar's one thing sure," quavered the old man: "that thar fire will
never tech a leaf on Old Rocky-Top. Thar's a church on this hyar
mounting,--bless the Lord fur it!--an' we lives in the fear o' God."

There was a pause, all watching with distended eyes the progress of the
flames.

"It looks like it mought hev been kindled in torment," said the young
daughter-in-law.

"It looks down thar," said her husband, pointing to the lake of fire,
"like the pit itself."

The apathetic inhabitants of Old Rocky-Top were stirred into an
activity very incongruous with their habits and the hour. During
the conflagration they traversed long distances to reach each
other's houses and confer concerning the danger and the questions of
supernatural agency provoked by the mysterious firing of the woods.
Nathan White had few neighbors, but above the crackling of the timber
and the roar of the flames there rose the quick beat of running
footsteps; the undergrowth of the forest near at hand was in strange
commotion; and at last, the figure of a man burst forth, the light of
the fire showing the startling pallor of his face as he staggered to
the little porch and sank, exhausted, into a chair.

"Waal, Caleb Hoxie!" exclaimed Nathan White, in good-natured raillery;
"ye're skeered, fur true! What ails ye, ter think Old Rocky-Top air
a-goin' ter ketch too? 'Tain't nigh dry enough, I'm a-thinkin'."

"Fire kindled that thar way can't tech a leaf on Old Rocky-Top,"
sleepily piped out the old man, nodding in his chair, the glare of
the flames which rioted over the T'other Mounting gilding his long
white hair and peaceful, slumberous face. "Thar's a church on Old
Rocky-Top,--bless the"--The sentence drifted away with his dreams.

"Does ye believe--them--them"--Caleb Hoxie's trembling white lips could
not frame the word--"them--done it?"

"Like ez not," said Nathan White. "But that ain't a-troublin' of ye
an' me. I ain't never hearn o' them witches a-tormentin' of honest
folks what ain't done nuthin' hurtful ter nobody," he added, in cordial
reassurance.

His son was half hidden behind one of the rough cedar posts, that his
mirth at the guest's display of cowardice might not be observed. But
the women, always quick to suspect, glanced meaningly at each other
with widening eyes, as they stood together in the door-way.

"I dunno,--I dunno," Caleb Hoxie declared huskily. "I ain't never done
nuthin' ter nobody, an' what do ye s'pose them witches an' sech done
ter me las' night, on that T'other Mounting? I war a-goin' over yander
to Gideon Croft's fur ter physic him, ez he air mortal low with the
fever; an' ez I war a-comin' alongside o' that thar high bluff"--it was
very distinct, with the flames wreathing fantastically about its gray,
rigid features--"they throwed a bowlder ez big ez this hyar porch down
on ter me. It jes' grazed me, an' knocked me down, an' kivered me with
dirt. An' I run home a-hollerin'; an' it seemed ter me ter-day ez I war
a-goin' ter screech an' screech all my life, like some onsettled crazy
critter. It 'peared like 'twould take a bar'l o' hop tea ter git me
quiet. An' now look yander!" and he pointed tremulously to the blazing
mountain.

There was an expression of conviction on the women's faces. All their
lives afterward it was there whenever Caleb Hoxie's name was mentioned;
no more to be moved or changed than the stern, set faces of the crags
among the fiery woods.

"Thar's a church on this hyar mounting," said the old man feebly,
waking for a moment, and falling asleep the next.

Nathan White was perplexed and doubtful, and a superstitious awe had
checked the laughing youngster behind the cedar post.

A great cloud of flame came rolling through the sky toward them,
golden, pellucid, spangled through and through with fiery red stars;
poising itself for one moment high above the valley, then breaking into
myriads of sparks, and showering down upon the dark abysses below.

"Look-a-hyar!" said the elder woman in a frightened under-tone to
her daughter-in-law; "this hyar wicked critter air too onlucky ter
be a-sittin' 'longside of us; we'll all be burnt up afore he gits
hisself away from hyar. An' who is that a-comin' yander?" For from the
encompassing woods another dark figure had emerged, and was slowly
approaching the porch. The wary eyes near Caleb Hoxie saw that he fell
to trembling, and that he clutched at a post for support. But the hand
pointing at him was shaken as with a palsy, and the voice hardly seemed
Tony Britt's as it cried out, in an agony of terror, "What air ye
a-doin' hyar, a-sittin' 'longside o' livin' folks? Yer bones air under
a bowlder on the T'other Mounting, an' ye air a dead man!"

       *       *       *       *       *

They said ever afterward that Tony Britt had lost his mind "through
goin' a-huntin' jes' one time on the T'other Mounting. His spirit
air all broke, an' he's a mighty tame critter nowadays." Through his
persistent endeavor he and Caleb Hoxie became quite friendly, and he
was even reported to "'low that he war sati'fied that Caleb never
gin his wife nuthin' ter hurt." "Though," said the gossips of Old
Rocky-Top, "them women up ter White's will hev it no other way but that
Caleb pizened her, an' they wouldn't take no yerbs from him no more 'n
he war a rattlesnake. But Caleb always 'pears sorter skittish when he
an' Tony air tergether, like he didn't know when Tony war a-goin' ter
fotch him a lick. But law! Tony air that changed that ye can't make him
mad 'thout ye mind him o' the time he called Caleb a ghost."

A dark, gloomy, deserted place was the charred T'other Mounting through
all the long winter. And when spring came, and Old Rocky-Top was green
with delicate fresh verdure, and melodious with singing birds and
chorusing breezes, and bedecked as for some great festival with violets
and azaleas and laurel-blooms, the T'other Mounting was stark and
wintry and black with its desolate, leafless trees. But after a while
the spring came for it, too: the buds swelled and burst; flowering
vines festooned the grim gray crags; and the dainty freshness of the
vernal season reigned upon its summit, while all the world below was
growing into heat and dust. The circuit-rider said it reminded him of a
tardy change in a sinner's heart: though it come at the eleventh hour,
the glorious summer is before it, and a full fruition; though it work
but an hour in the Lord's vineyard, it receives the same reward as
those who labored through all the day.

"An' it always did 'pear ter me ez thar war mighty little jestice in
that," was Mrs. White's comment.

But at the meeting when that sermon was preached Tony Britt told his
"experience." It seemed a confession, for according to the gossips he
"'lowed that he hed flung that bowlder down on Caleb Hoxie,--what the
witches flung, ye know,--'kase he believed then that Caleb hed killed
his wife with pizenous yerbs; an' he went back the nex' night an' fired
the woods, ter make folks think when they fund Caleb's bones that he
war a-runnin' from the blaze an' fell off'n the bluff." And everybody
on Old Rocky-Top said incredulously, "Pore Tony Britt! He hev los' his
mind through goin' a-huntin' jes' one time on the T'other Mounting."




                   THE "HARNT" THAT WALKS CHILHOWEE.


June had crossed the borders of Tennessee. Even on the summit of
Chilhowee Mountain the apples in Peter Giles's orchard were beginning
to redden, and his Indian corn, planted on so steep a declivity that
the stalks seemed to have much ado to keep their footing, was crested
with tassels and plumed with silk. Among the dense forests, seen by no
man's eye, the elder was flying its creamy banners in honor of June's
coming, and, heard by no man's ear, the pink and white bells of the
azalea rang out melodies of welcome.

"An' it air a toler'ble for'ard season. Yer wheat looks likely; an'
yer gyarden truck air thrivin' powerful. Even that cold spell we-uns
hed about the full o' the moon in May ain't done sot it back none, it
'pears like ter me. But, 'cording ter my way o' thinkin', ye hev got
chickens enough hyar ter eat off every pea-bloom ez soon ez it opens."
And Simon Burney glanced with a gardener's disapproval at the numerous
fowls, lifting their red combs and tufted top-knots here and there
among the thick clover under the apple-trees.

"Them's Clarsie's chickens,--my darter, ye know," drawled Peter Giles,
a pale, listless, and lank mountaineer. "An' she hev been gin ter
onderstand ez they hev got ter be kep' out 'n the gyarden; 'thout,"
he added indulgently,--"'thout I'm a-plowin', when I lets 'em foller
in the furrow ter pick up worms. But law! Clarsie is so spry that she
don't ax no better 'n ter be let ter run them chickens off 'n the peas."

Then the two men tilted their chairs against the posts of the little
porch in front of Peter Giles's log cabin, and puffed their pipes in
silence. The panorama spread out before them showed misty and dreamy
among the delicate spiral wreaths of smoke. But was that gossamer-like
illusion, lying upon the far horizon, the magic of nicotian, or the
vague presence of distant heights? As ridge after ridge came down
from the sky in ever-graduating shades of intenser blue, Peter Giles
might have told you that this parallel system of enchantment was only
"the mountings:" that here was Foxy, and there was Big Injun, and
still beyond was another, which he had "hearn tell ran spang up into
Virginny." The sky that bent to clasp this kindred blue was of varying
moods. Floods of sunshine submerged Chilhowee in liquid gold, and
revealed that dainty outline limned upon the northern horizon; but over
the Great Smoky mountains clouds had gathered, and a gigantic rainbow
bridged the valley.

Peter Giles's listless eyes were fixed upon a bit of red clay road,
which was visible through a gap in the foliage far below. Even a tiny
object, that ant-like crawled upon it, could be seen from the summit of
Chilhowee. "I reckon that's my brother's wagon an' team," he said, as
he watched the moving atom pass under the gorgeous triumphal arch. "He
'lowed he war goin' ter the Cross-Roads ter-day."

Simon Burney did not speak for a moment. When he did, his words seemed
widely irrelevant. "That's a likely gal o' yourn," he drawled, with an
odd constraint in his voice,--"a likely gal, that Clarsie."

There was a quick flash of surprise in Peter Giles's dull eyes. He
covertly surveyed his guest, with an astounded curiosity rampant in
his slow brains. Simon Burney had changed color; an expression of
embarrassment lurked in every line of his honest, florid, hard-featured
face. An alert imagination might have detected a deprecatory
self-consciousness in every gray hair that striped the black beard
raggedly fringing his chin.

"Yes," Peter Giles at length replied, "Clarsie air a likely enough gal.
But she air mightily sot ter hevin' her own way. An' ef 't ain't give
ter her peaceable-like, she jes' takes it, whether or no."

This statement, made by one presumably fully informed on the subject,
might have damped the ardor of many a suitor,--for the monstrous truth
was dawning on Peter Giles's mind that suitor was the position to which
this slow, elderly widower aspired. But Simon Burney, with that odd,
all-pervading constraint still prominently apparent, mildly observed,
"Waal, ez much ez I hev seen of her goin's-on, it 'pears ter me ez her
way air a mighty good way. An' it ain't comical that she likes it."

Urgent justice compelled Peter Giles to make some amends to the absent
Clarissa. "That's a fac'," he admitted. "An' Clarsie ain't no hand
ter jaw. She don't hev no words. But then," he qualified, truth and
consistency alike constraining him, "she air a toler'ble hard-headed
gal. That air a true word. Ye mought ez well try ter hender the sun
from shining ez ter make that thar Clarsie Giles do what she don't want
ter do."

To be sure, Peter Giles had a right to his opinion as to the hardness
of his own daughter's head. The expression of his views, however,
provoked Simon Burney to wrath; there was something astir within him
that in a worthier subject might have been called a chivalric thrill,
and it forbade him to hold his peace. He retorted: "Of course ye kin
say that, ef so minded; but ennybody ez hev got eyes kin see the
change ez hev been made in this hyar place sence that thar gal hev
been growed. I ain't a-purtendin' ter know that thar Clarsie ez well
ez you-uns knows her hyar at home, but I hev seen enough, an' a deal
more'n enough, of her goin's-on, ter know that what she does ain't done
fur _herself_. An' ef she will hev her way, it air fur the good of the
whole tribe of ye. It 'pears ter me ez thar ain't many gals like that
thar Clarsie. An' she air a merciful critter. She air mighty savin'
of the feelin's of everything, from the cow an' the mare down ter the
dogs, an' pigs, an' chickens; always a-feedin' of 'em jes' ter the
time, an' never draggin', an' clawin', an' beatin' of 'em. Why, that
thar Clarsie can't put her foot out'n the door, that every dumb beastis
on this hyar place ain't a-runnin' ter git nigh her. I hev seen them
pigs mos' climb the fence when she shows her face at the door. 'Pears
ter me ez that thar Clarsie could tame a b'ar, ef she looked at him a
time or two, she's so savin' o' the critter's feelin's! An' thar's that
old yaller dog o' yourn," pointing to an ancient cur that was blinking
in the sun, "he's older'n Clarsie, an' no 'count in the worl'. I hev
hearn ye say forty times that ye would kill him, 'ceptin' that Clarsie
purtected him, an' hed sot her heart on his a-livin' along. An' all the
home-folks, an' everybody that kems hyar to sot an' talk awhile, never
misses a chance ter kick that thar old dog, or poke him with a stick,
or cuss him. But Clarsie!--I hev seen that gal take the bread an' meat
off'n her plate, an' give it ter that old dog, ez 'pears ter me ter be
the worst dispositionest dog I ever see, an' no thanks lef' in him.
He hain't hed the grace ter wag his tail fur twenty year. That thar
Clarsie air surely a merciful critter, an' a mighty spry, likely young
gal, besides."

Peter Giles sat in stunned astonishment during this speech, which
was delivered in a slow, drawling monotone, with frequent meditative
pauses, but nevertheless emphatically. He made no reply, and as they
were once more silent there rose suddenly the sound of melody upon the
air. It came from beyond that tumultuous stream that raced with the
wind down the mountain's side; a great log thrown from bank to bank
served as bridge. The song grew momentarily more distinct; among the
leaves there were fugitive glimpses of blue and white, and at last
Clarsie appeared, walking lightly along the log, clad in her checked
homespun dress, and with a pail upon her head.

She was a tall, lithe girl, with that delicately transparent complexion
often seen among the women of these mountains. Her lustreless black
hair lay along her forehead without a ripple or wave; there was
something in the expression of her large eyes that suggested those of
a deer,--something free, untamable, and yet gentle. "'Tain't no wonder
ter me ez Clarsie is all tuk up with the wild things, an' critters
ginerally," her mother was wont to say. "She sorter looks like 'em, I'm
a-thinkin'."

As she came in sight there was a renewal of that odd constraint in
Simon Burney's face and manner, and he rose abruptly. "Waal," he said,
hastily, going to his horse, a raw-boned sorrel, hitched to the fence,
"it's about time I war a-startin' home, I reckons."

He nodded to his host, who silently nodded in return, and the old horse
jogged off with him down the road, as Clarsie entered the house and
placed the pail upon a shelf.

"Who d'ye think hev been hyar a-speakin' of compli_mints_ on ye,
Clarsie?" exclaimed Mrs. Giles, who had overheard through the open door
every word of the loud, drawling voice on the porch.

Clarsie's liquid eyes widened with surprise, and a faint tinge of rose
sprang into her pale face, as she looked an expectant inquiry at her
mother.

Mrs. Giles was a slovenly, indolent woman, anxious, at the age of
forty-five, to assume the prerogatives of advanced years. She had
placed all her domestic cares upon the shapely shoulders of her willing
daughter, and had betaken herself to the chimney-corner and a pipe.

"Yes, thar hev been somebody hyar a-speakin' of compli_mints_ on ye,
Clarsie," she reiterated, with chuckling amusement. "He war a mighty
peart, likely boy,--that he war!"

Clarsie's color deepened.

"Old Simon Burney!" exclaimed her mother, in great glee at the
incongruity of the idea. "_Old Simon Burney!_--jes' a-sittin' out thar,
a-wastin' the time, an' a-burnin' of daylight--jes' ez perlite an'
smilin' ez a basket of chips--a-speakin' of compli_mints_ on ye!"

There was a flash of laughter among the sylvan suggestions of Clarsie's
eyes,--a flash as of sudden sunlight upon water. But despite her mirth
she seemed to be unaccountably disappointed. The change in her manner
was not noticed by her mother, who continued banteringly,--

"Simon Burney air a mighty pore old man. Ye oughter be sorry fur
him, Clarsie. Ye mustn't think less of folks than ye does of the
dumb beastis,--that ain't religion. Ye knows ye air sorry fur mos'
everything; why not fur this comical old consarn? Ye oughter marry him
ter take keer of him. He said ye war a merciful critter; now is yer
chance ter show it! Why, air ye a-goin' ter weavin', Clarsie, jes' when
I wants ter talk ter ye 'bout'n old Simon Burney? But law! I knows ye
kerry him with ye in yer heart."

The girl summarily closed the conversation by seating herself before a
great hand-loom; presently the persistent thump, thump, of the batten
and the noisy creak of the treadle filled the room, and through all
the long, hot afternoon her deft, practiced hands lightly tossed the
shuttle to and fro.

The breeze freshened, after the sun went down, and the hop and gourd
vines were all astir as they clung about the little porch where Clarsie
was sitting now, idle at last. The rain clouds had disappeared, and
there bent over the dark, heavily wooded ridges a pale blue sky, with
here and there the crystalline sparkle of a star. A halo was shimmering
in the east, where the mists had gathered about the great white moon,
hanging high above the mountains. Noiseless wings flitted through the
dusk; now and then the bats swept by so close as to wave Clarsie's
hair with the wind of their flight. What an airy, glittering, magical
thing was that gigantic spider-web suspended between the silver moon
and her shining eyes! Ever and anon there came from the woods a
strange, weird, long-drawn sigh, unlike the stir of the wind in the
trees, unlike the fret of the water on the rocks. Was it the voiceless
sorrow of the sad earth? There were stars in the night besides those
known to astronomers: the stellular fireflies gemmed the black shadows
with a fluctuating brilliancy; they circled in and out of the porch,
and touched the leaves above Clarsie's head with quivering points of
light. A steadier and an intenser gleam was advancing along the road,
and the sound of languid footsteps came with it; the aroma of tobacco
graced the atmosphere, and a tall figure walked up to the gate.

"Come in, come in," said Peter Giles, rising, and tendering the guest
a chair. "Ye air Tom Pratt, ez well ez I kin make out by this light.
Waal, Tom, we hain't furgot ye sence ye done been hyar."

As Tom had been there on the previous evening, this might be considered
a joke, or an equivocal compliment. The young fellow was restless and
awkward under it, but Mrs. Giles chuckled with great merriment.

"An' how air ye a-comin' on, Mrs. Giles?" he asked propitiatorily.

"Jes' toler'ble, Tom. Air they all well ter yer house?"

"Yes, they're toler'ble well, too." He glanced at Clarsie, intending
to address to her some polite greeting, but the expression of her shy,
half-startled eyes, turned upon the far-away moon, warned him. "Thar
never war a gal so skittish," he thought. "She'd run a mile, skeered
ter death, ef I said a word ter her."

And he was prudently silent.

"Waal," said Peter Giles, "what's the news out yer way, Tom? Ennything
a-goin' on?"

"Thar war a shower yander on the Backbone; it rained toler'ble hard fur
a while, an' sot up the corn wonderful. Did ye git enny hyar?"

"Not a drap."

"'Pears ter me ez I kin see the clouds a-circlin' round Chilhowee, an'
a-rainin' on everybody's corn-field 'ceptin' ourn," said Mrs. Giles.
"Some folks is the favored of the Lord, an' t'others hev ter work fur
everything an' git nuthin'. Waal, waal; we-uns will see our reward in
the nex' worl'. Thar's a better worl' than this, Tom."

"That's a fac'," said Tom, in orthodox assent.

"An' when we leaves hyar once, we leaves all trouble an' care behind
us, Tom; fur we don't come back no more." Mrs. Giles was drifting into
one of her pious moods.

"I dunno," said Tom. "Thar hev been them ez hev."

"Hev what?" demanded Peter Giles, startled.

"Hev come back ter this hyar yearth. Thar's a harnt that walks
Chilhowee every night o' the worl'. I know them ez hev seen him."

Clarsie's great dilated eyes were fastened on the speaker's face. There
was a dead silence for a moment, more eloquent with these looks of
amazement than any words could have been.

"I reckons ye remember a puny, shriveled little man, named Reuben
Crabb, ez used ter live yander, eight mile along the ridge ter that
thar big sulphur spring," Tom resumed, appealing to Peter Giles. "He
war born with only one arm."

"I 'members him," interpolated Mrs. Giles, vivaciously. "He war a
mighty porely, sickly little critter, all the days of his life. 'Twar
a wonder he war ever raised ter be a man,--an' a pity, too. An' 'twar
powerful comical, the way of his takin' off; a stunted, one-armed
little critter a-ondertakin' ter fight folks an' shoot pistols. He hed
the use o' his one arm, sure."

"Waal," said Tom, "his house ain't thar now, 'kase Sam Grim's brothers
burned it ter the ground fur his a-killin' of Sam. That warn't all that
war done ter Reuben fur killin' of Sam. The sheriff run Reuben Crabb
down this hyar road 'bout a mile from hyar,--mebbe less,--an' shot him
dead in the road, jes' whar it forks. Waal, Reuben war in company with
another evil-doer,--_he_ war from the Cross-Roads, an' I furgits what
he hed done, but he war a-tryin' ter hide in the mountings, too; an'
the sheriff lef' Reuben a-lying thar in the road, while he tries ter
ketch up with the t'other; but his horse got a stone in his hoof, an'
he los' time, an' hed ter gin it up. An' when he got back ter the forks
o' the road whar he had lef' Reuben a-lyin' dead, thar war nuthin' thar
'ceptin' a pool o' blood. Waal, he went right on ter Reuben's house,
an' them Grim boys hed burnt it ter the ground; but he seen Reuben's
brother Joel. An' Joel, he tole the sheriff that late that evenin' he
hed tuk Reuben's body out'n the road an' buried it, 'kase it hed been
lyin' thar in the road ever sence early in the mornin', an' he couldn't
leave it thar all night, an' he hedn't no shelter fur it, sence the
Grim boys hed burnt down the house. So he war obleeged ter bury it. An'
Joel showed the sheriff a new-made grave, an' Reuben's coat whar the
sheriff's bullet hed gone in at the back an' kem out'n the breast.
The sheriff 'lowed ez they'd fine Joel fifty dollars fur a-buryin' of
Reuben afore the cor'ner kem; but they never done it, ez I knows on.
The sheriff said that when the cor'ner kem the body would be tuk up
fur a 'quest. But thar hed been a powerful big frishet, an' the river
'twixt the cor'ner's house an' Chilhowee couldn't be forded fur three
weeks. The cor'ner never kem, an' so thar it all stayed. That war four
year ago."

"Waal," said Peter Giles, dryly, "I ain't seen no harnt yit. I knowed
all that afore."

Clarsie's wondering eyes upon the young man's moonlit face had elicited
these facts, familiar to the elders, but strange, he knew, to her.

"I war jes' a-goin' on ter tell," said Tom, abashed. "Waal, ever sence
his brother Joel died, this spring, Reuben's harnt walks Chilhowee.
He war seen week afore las', 'bout daybreak, by Ephraim Blenkins,
who hed been a-fishin', an' war a-goin' home. Eph happened ter stop
in the laurel ter wind up his line, when all in a minit he seen the
harnt go by, his face white, an' his eye-balls like fire, an' puny an'
one-armed, jes' like he lived. Eph, he owed me a haffen day's work; I
holped him ter plow las' month, an' so he kem ter-day an' hoed along
cornsider'ble ter pay fur it. He say he believes the harnt never seen
him, 'kase it went right by. He 'lowed ef the harnt hed so much ez cut
one o' them blazin' eyes round at him he couldn't but hev drapped dead.
Waal, this mornin', 'bout sunrise, my brother Bob's little gal, three
year old, strayed off from home while her mother war out milkin' the
cow. An' we went a-huntin' of her, mightily worked up, 'kase thar hev
been a b'ar prowlin' round our corn-field twict this summer. An' I went
to the right, an' Bob went to the lef'. An' he say ez he war a-pushin'
'long through the laurel, he seen the bushes ahead of him a-rustlin'.
An' he jes' stood still an' watched 'em. An' fur a while the bushes war
still too; an' then they moved jes' a little, fust this way an' then
that, till all of a suddint the leaves opened, like the mouth of hell
mought hev done, an' thar he seen Reuben Crabb's face. He say he never
seen sech a face! Its mouth war open, an' its eyes war a-startin' out'n
its head, an' its skin war white till it war blue; an' ef the devil hed
hed it a-hangin' over the coals that minit it couldn't hev looked no
more skeered. But that war all that Bob seen, 'kase he jes' shet his
eyes an' screeched an' screeched like he war _de_stracted. An' when he
stopped a second ter ketch his breath he hearn su'thin' a-answerin' him
back, sorter weak-like, an' thar war little Peggy a-pullin' through
the laurel. Ye know she's too little ter talk good, but the folks down
ter our house believes she seen the harnt, too."

"My Lord!" exclaimed Peter Giles. "I 'low I couldn't live a minit ef I
war ter see that thar harnt that walks Chilhowee!"

"I know _I_ couldn't," said his wife.

"Nor me, nuther," murmured Clarsie.

"Waal," said Tom, resuming the thread of his narrative, "we hev all
been a-talkin' down yander ter our house ter make out the reason why
Reuben Crabb's harnt hev sot out ter walk _jes' sence his brother Joel
died_,--'kase it war never seen afore then. An' ez nigh ez we kin make
it out, the reason is 'kase thar's nobody lef' in this hyar worl' what
believes he warn't ter blame in that thar killin' o' Sam Grim. Joel
always swore ez Reuben never killed him no more'n nuthin'; that Sam's
own pistol went off in his own hand, an' shot him through the heart
jes' ez he war a-drawin' of it ter shoot Reuben Crabb. An' I hev hearn
other men ez war a-standin' by say the same thing, though them Grims
tells another tale; but ez Reuben never owned no pistol in his life,
nor kerried one, it don't 'pear ter me ez what them Grims say air
reasonable. Joel always swore ez Sam Grim war a mighty mean man,--a
great big feller like him a-rockin' of a deformed little critter,
an' a-mockin' of him, an' a hittin' of him. An' the day of the fight
Sam jes' knocked him down fur nuthin' at all; an' afore ye could wink
Reuben jumped up suddint, an' flew at him like an eagle, an' struck him
in the face. An' then Sam drawed his pistol, an' it went off in his own
hand, an' shot him through the heart, an' killed him dead. Joel said
that ef he could hev kep' that pore little critter Reuben still, an'
let the sheriff arrest him peaceable-like, he war sure the jury would
hev let him off; 'kase how war Reuben a-goin ter shoot ennybody when
Sam Grim never left a-holt of the only pistol between 'em, in life,
or in death? They tells me they hed ter bury Sam Grim with that thar
pistol in his hand; his grip war too tight fur death to unloose it. But
Joel said that Reuben war sartain they'd hang him. He hedn't never seen
no jestice from enny one man, an' he couldn't look fur it from twelve
men. So he jes' sot out ter run through the woods, like a painter or
a wolf, ter be hunted by the sheriff, an' he war run down an' kilt in
the road. Joel said _he_ kep' up arter the sheriff ez well ez he could
on foot,--fur the Crabbs never hed no horse,--ter try ter beg fur
Reuben, ef he war cotched, an' tell how little an' how weakly he war. I
never seen a young man's head turn white like Joel's done; he said he
reckoned it war his troubles. But ter the las' he stuck ter his rifle
faithful. He war a powerful hunter; he war out rain or shine, hot or
cold, in sech weather ez other folks would think thar warn't no use in
tryin' ter do nuthin' in. I'm mightily afeard o' seein' Reuben, now,
that's a fac'," concluded Tom, frankly; "'kase I hev hearn tell, an' I
believes it, that ef a harnt speaks ter ye, it air sartain ye're bound
ter die right then."

"'Pears ter me," said Mrs. Giles, "ez many mountings ez thar air round
hyar, he mought hev tuk ter walkin' some o' them, stiddier Chilhowee."

There was a sudden noise close at hand: a great inverted splint-basket,
from which came a sound of flapping wings, began to move slightly
back and forth. Mrs. Giles gasped out an ejaculation of terror, the
two men sprang to their feet, and the coy Clarsie laughed aloud in an
exuberance of delighted mirth, forgetful of her shyness. "I declar' ter
goodness, you-uns air all skeered fur true! Did ye think it war the
harnt that walks Chilhowee?"

"What's under that thar basket?" demanded Peter Giles, rather
sheepishly, as he sat down again.

"Nuthin' but the duck-legged Dominicky," said Clarsie, "what air bein'
broke up from settin'." The moonlight was full upon the dimpling
merriment in her face, upon her shining eyes and parted red lips, and
her gurgling laughter was pleasant to hear. Tom Pratt edged his chair a
trifle nearer, as he, too, sat down.

"Ye oughtn't never ter break up a duck-legged hen, nor a Dominicky,
nuther," he volunteered, "'kase they air sech a good kind o' hen ter
kerry chickens; but a hen that is duck-legged an' Dominicky too oughter
be let ter set, whether or no."

Had he been warned in a dream, he could have found no more secure road
to Clarsie's favor and interest than a discussion of the poultry. "I'm
a-thinkin'," she said, "that it air too hot fur hens ter set now, an'
'twill be till the las' of August."

"It don't 'pear ter me ez it air hot much in June up hyar on
Chilhowee,--thar's a differ, I know, down in the valley; but till July,
on Chilhowee, it don't 'pear ter me ez it air too hot ter set a hen.
An' a duck-legged Dominicky air mighty hard ter break up."

"That's a fac'," Clarsie admitted; "but I'll hev ter do it, somehow,
'kase I ain't got no eggs fur her. All my hens air kerryin' of
chickens."

"Waal!" exclaimed Tom, seizing his opportunity, "I'll bring ye some
ter-morrer night, when I come agin. We-uns hev got eggs ter our house."

"Thanky," said Clarsie, shyly smiling.

This unique method of courtship would have progressed very prosperously
but for the interference of the elders, who are an element always more
or less adverse to love-making. "Ye oughter turn out yer hen now,
Clarsie," said Mrs. Giles, "ez Tom air a-goin' ter bring ye some eggs
ter-morrer. I wonder ye don't think it's mean ter keep her up longer'n
ye air obleeged ter. Ye oughter remember ye war called a merciful
critter jes' ter-day."

Clarsie rose precipitately, raised the basket, and out flew the
"duck-legged Dominicky," with a frantic flutter and hysterical
cackling. But Mrs. Giles was not to be diverted from her purpose; her
thoughts had recurred to the absurd episode of the afternoon, and with
her relish of the incongruity of the joke she opened upon the subject
at once.

"Waal, Tom," she said, "we'll be hevin' Clarsie married, afore long,
I'm a-thinkin'." The young man sat bewildered. He, too, had entertained
views concerning Clarsie's speedy marriage, but with a distinctly
personal application; and this frank mention of the matter by Mrs.
Giles had a sinister suggestion that perhaps her ideas might be
antagonistic. "An' who d'ye think hev been hyar ter-day, a-speakin'
of compli_mints_ on Clarsie?" He could not answer, but he turned his
head with a look of inquiry, and Mrs. Giles continued, "He is a mighty
peart, likely boy,--_he_ is."

There was a growing anger in the dismay on Tom Pratt's face; he leaned
forward to hear the name with a fiery eagerness, altogether incongruous
with his usual lack-lustre manner.

"Old Simon Burney!" cried Mrs. Giles, with a burst of laughter. "_Old
Simon Burney!_ Jes' a-speakin' of compli_mints_ on Clarsie!"

The young fellow drew back with a look of disgust. "Why, he's a old
man; he ain't no fit husband fur Clarsie."

"Don't ye be too sure ter count on that. I war jes' a-layin' off ter
tell Clarsie that a gal oughter keep mighty clar o' widowers, 'thout
she wants ter marry one. Fur I believes," said Mrs. Giles, with a wild
flight of imagination, "ez them men hev got some sort'n trade with the
Evil One, an' he gives 'em the power ter witch the gals, somehow, so's
ter git 'em ter marry; 'kase I don't think that any gal that's got
good sense air a-goin' ter be a man's second ch'ice, an' the mother
of a whole pack of step-chil'ren, 'thout she air under some sort'n
spell. But them men carries the day with the gals ginerally, an' I'm
a-thinkin' they're banded with the devil. Ef I war a gal, an' a smart,
peart boy like Simon Burney kem around a-speakin' of compli_mints_, an'
sayin' I war a merciful critter, I'd jes' give it up, an' marry him
fur second ch'ice. Thar's one blessin'," she continued, contemplating
the possibility in a cold-blooded fashion positively revolting to Tom
Pratt: "he ain't got no tribe of chil'ren fur Clarsie ter look arter;
nary chick nor child hev old Simon Burney got. He hed two, but they
died."

The young man took leave presently, in great depression of spirit,--the
idea that the widower was banded with the powers of evil was
rather overwhelming to a man whose dependence was in merely mortal
attractions; and after he had been gone a little while Clarsie ascended
the ladder to a nook in the roof, which she called her room.

For the first time in her life her slumber was fitful and restless,
long intervals of wakefulness alternating with snatches of fantastic
dreams. At last she rose and sat by the rude window, looking out
through the chestnut leaves at the great moon, which had begun to
dip toward the dark uncertainty of the western ridges, and at the
shimmering, translucent, pearly mists that filled the intermediate
valleys. All the air was dew and incense; so subtle and penetrating
an odor came from that fir-tree beyond the fence that it seemed as
if some invigorating infusion were thrilling along her veins; there
floated upward, too, the warm fragrance of the clover, and every
breath of the gentle wind brought from over the stream a thousand
blended, undistinguishable perfumes of the deep forests beyond. The
moon's idealizing glamour had left no trace of the uncouthness of the
place which the daylight revealed; the little log house, the great
overhanging chestnut-oaks, the jagged precipice before the door, the
vague outlines of the distant ranges, all suffused with a magic sheen,
might have seemed a stupendous alto-rilievo in silver repoussé. Still,
there came here and there the sweep of the bat's dusky wings; even they
were a part of the night's witchery. A tiny owl perched for a moment
or two amid the dew-tipped chestnut-leaves, and gazed with great round
eyes at Clarsie as solemnly as she gazed at him.

"I'm thankful enough that ye hed the grace not ter screech while ye war
hyar," she said, after the bird had taken his flight. "I ain't ready
ter die yit, an' a screech-ow_el_ air the sure sign."

She felt now and then a great impatience with her wakeful mood. Once
she took herself to task: "Jes' a-sittin' up hyar all night, the same
ez ef I war a fox, or that thar harnt that walks Chilhowee!"

And then her mind reverted to Tom Pratt, to old Simon Burney, and to
her mother's emphatic and oracular declaration that widowers are in
league with Satan, and that the girls upon whom they cast the eye of
supernatural fascination have no choice in the matter. "I wish I knowed
ef that thar sayin' war true," she murmured, her face still turned to
the western spurs, and the moon sinking so slowly toward them.

With a sudden resolution she rose to her feet. She knew a way of
telling fortunes which was, according to tradition, infallible, and she
determined to try it, and ease her mind as to her future. Now was the
propitious moment. "I hev always hearn that it won't come true 'thout
ye try it jes' before daybreak, an' a-kneelin' down at the forks of the
road." She hesitated a moment and listened intently. "They'd never git
done a-laffin' at me, ef they fund it out," she thought.

There was no sound in the house, and from the dark woods arose only
those monotonous voices of the night, so familiar to her ears that
she accounted their murmurous iteration as silence too. She leaned
far out of the low window, caught the wide-spreading branches of the
tree beside it, and swung herself noiselessly to the ground. The road
before her was dark with the shadowy foliage and dank with the dew;
but now and then, at long intervals, there lay athwart it a bright
bar of light, where the moonshine fell through a gap in the trees.
Once, as she went rapidly along her way, she saw speeding across the
white radiance, lying just before her feet, the ill-omened shadow of
a rabbit. She paused, with a superstitious sinking of the heart, and
she heard the animal's quick, leaping rush through the bushes near at
hand; but she mustered her courage, and kept steadily on. "'T ain't no
use a-goin' back ter git shet o' bad luck," she argued. "Ef old Simon
Burney air my fortune, he'll come whether or no,--ef all they say air
true."

The serpentine road curved to the mountain's brink before it forked,
and there was again that familiar picture of precipice, and far-away
ridges, and shining mist, and sinking moon, which was visibly turning
from silver to gold. The changing lustre gilded the feathery ferns that
grew in the marshy dip. Just at the angle of the divergent paths there
rose into the air a great mass of indistinct white blossoms, which she
knew were the exquisite mountain azaleas, and all the dark forest was
starred with the blooms of the laurel.

She fixed her eyes upon the mystic sphere dropping down the sky,
knelt among the azaleas at the forks of the road, and repeated the
time-honored invocation:--

"Ef I'm a-goin' ter marry a young man, whistle, Bird, whistle. Ef I'm
a-goin' ter marry an old man, low, Cow, low. Ef I ain't a-goin' ter
marry nobody, knock, Death, knock."

There was a prolonged silence in the matutinal freshness and perfume
of the woods. She raised her head, and listened attentively. No chirp
of half-awakened bird, no tapping of woodpecker, or the mysterious
death-watch; but from far along the dewy aisles of the forest, the
ungrateful Spot, that Clarsie had fed more faithfully than herself,
lifted up her voice, and set the echoes vibrating. Clarsie, however,
had hardly time for a pang of disappointment. While she still knelt
among the azaleas her large, deer-like eyes were suddenly dilated
with terror. From around the curve of the road came the quick beat
of hastening footsteps, the sobbing sound of panting breath, and
between her and the sinking moon there passed an attenuated, one-armed
figure, with a pallid, sharpened face, outlined for a moment on its
brilliant disk, and dreadful starting eyes, and quivering open mouth.
It disappeared in an instant among the shadows of the laurel, and
Clarsie, with a horrible fear clutching at her heart, sprang to her
feet.

Her flight was arrested by other sounds. Before her reeling senses
could distinguish them, a party of horsemen plunged down the road. They
reined in suddenly as their eyes fell upon her, and their leader, an
eager, authoritative man, was asking her a question. Why could she not
understand him? With her nerveless hands feebly catching at the shrubs
for support, she listened vaguely to his impatient, meaningless words,
and saw with helpless deprecation the rising anger in his face. But
there was no time to be lost. With a curse upon the stupidity of the
mountaineer, who couldn't speak when she was spoken to, the party sped
on in a sweeping gallop, and the rocks and the steeps were hilarious
with the sound.

When the last faint echo was hushed, Clarsie tremblingly made her way
out into the road; not reassured, however, for she had a frightful
conviction that there was now and then a strange stir in the laurel,
and that she was stealthily watched. Her eyes were fixed upon the
dense growth with a morbid fascination, as she moved away; but she was
once more rooted to the spot when the leaves parted and in the golden
moonlight the ghost stood before her. She could not nerve herself to
run past him, and he was directly in her way homeward. His face was
white, and lined, and thin; that pitiful quiver was never still in
the parted lips; he looked at her with faltering, beseeching eyes.
Clarsie's merciful heart was stirred. "What ails ye, ter come back
hyar, an' foller me?" she cried out, abruptly. And then a great horror
fell upon her. Was not one to whom a ghost should speak doomed to
death, sudden and immediate?

The ghost replied in a broken, shivering voice, like a wail of pain, "I
war a-starvin',--I war a-starvin'," with despairing iteration.

It was all over, Clarsie thought. The ghost had spoken, and she was a
doomed creature. She wondered that she did not fall dead in the road.
But while those beseeching eyes were fastened in piteous appeal on
hers, she could not leave him. "I never hearn that 'bout ye," she said,
reflectively. "I knows ye hed awful troubles while ye war alive, but I
never knowed ez ye war starved."

Surely that was a gleam of sharp surprise in the ghost's prominent
eyes, succeeded by a sly intelligence.

"Day is nigh ter breakin'," Clarsie admonished him, as the lower rim of
the moon touched the silver mists of the west. "What air ye a-wantin'
of me?"

There was a short silence. Mind travels far in such intervals.
Clarsie's thoughts had overtaken the scenes when she should have died
that sudden terrible death: when there would be no one left to feed
the chickens; when no one would care if the pigs cried with the pangs
of hunger, unless, indeed, it were time for them to be fattened before
killing. The mare,--how often would she be taken from the plow, and
shut up for the night in her shanty without a drop of water, after her
hard day's work! Who would churn, or spin, or weave? Clarsie could not
understand how the machinery of the universe could go on without her.
And Towse, poor Towse! He was a useless cumberer of the ground, and it
was hardly to be supposed that after his protector was gone he would
be spared a blow or a bullet, to hasten his lagging death. But Clarsie
still stood in the road, and watched the face of the ghost, as he, with
his eager, starting eyes, scanned her open, ingenuous countenance.

"Ye do ez ye air bid, or it'll be the worse for ye," said the "harnt,"
in the same quivering, shrill tone. "Thar's hunger in the nex' worl'
ez well ez in this, an' ye bring me some vittles hyar this time
ter-morrer, an' don't ye tell nobody ye hev seen me, nuther, or it'll
be the worse for ye."

There was a threat in his eyes as he disappeared in the laurel, and
left the girl standing in the last rays of moonlight.

A curious doubt was stirring in Clarsie's mind when she reached home,
in the early dawn, and heard her father talking about the sheriff and
his posse, who had stopped at the house in the night, and roused its
inmates, to know if they had seen a man pass that way.

"Clarsie never hearn none o' the noise, I'll be bound, 'kase she always
sleeps like a log," said Mrs. Giles, as her daughter came in with the
pail, after milking the cow. "Tell her 'bout'n it."

"They kem a-bustin' along hyar a while afore daybreak, a-runnin' arter
the man," drawled Mr. Giles, dramatically. "An' they knocked me up,
ter know ef ennybody hed passed. An' one o' them men--I never seen
none of 'em afore; they's all valley folks, I'm a-thinkin'--an' one of
'em bruk his saddle-girt' a good piece down the road, an' he kem back
ter borrer mine; an' ez we war a-fixin' of it, he tole me what they
war all arter. He said that word war tuk ter the sheriff down yander
in the valley--'pears ter me them town-folks don't think nobody in
the mountings hev got good sense--word war tuk ter the sheriff 'bout
this one-armed harnt that walks Chilhowee; an' he sot it down that
Reuben Crabb warn't dead at all, an' Joel jes' purtended ter hev buried
him, an' it air Reuben hisself that walks Chilhowee. An' thar air two
hunderd dollars blood-money reward fur ennybody ez kin ketch him. These
hyar valley folks air powerful cur'ous critters,--two hunderd dollars
blood-money reward fur that thar harnt that walks Chilhowee! I jes' sot
myself ter laffin' when that thar cuss tole it so solemn. I jes' 'lowed
ter him ez he couldn't shoot a harnt nor hang a harnt, an' Reuben Crabb
hed about got done with his persecutions in this worl'. An' he said
that by the time they hed scoured this mounting, like they hed laid off
ter do, they would find that that thar puny little harnt war nuthin'
but a mortal man, an' could be kep' in a jail ez handy ez enny other
flesh an' blood. He said the sheriff 'lowed ez the reason Reuben hed
jes' taken ter walk Chilhowee sence Joel died is 'kase thar air nobody
ter feed him, like Joel done, mebbe, in the nights; an' Reuben always
war a pore, one-armed, weakly critter, what can't even kerry a gun, an'
he air driv by hunger out'n the hole whar he stays, ter prowl round
the cornfields an' hencoops ter steal suthin',--an' that's how he kem
ter be seen frequent. The sheriff 'lowed that Reuben can't find enough
roots an' yerbs ter keep him up; but law!--a harnt eatin'! It jes' sot
me off ter laffin'. Reuben Crabb hev been too busy in torment fur the
las' four year ter be a-studyin' 'bout eatin'; an' it air his harnt
that walks Chilhowee."

The next morning, before the moon sank, Clarsie, with a tin pail in her
hand, went to meet the ghost at the appointed place. She understood
now why the terrible doom that falls upon those to whom a spirit may
chance to speak had not descended upon her, and that fear was gone; but
the secrecy of her errand weighed heavily. She had been scrupulously
careful to put into the pail only such things as had fallen to
her share at the table, and which she had saved from the meals of
yesterday. "A gal that goes a-robbin' fur a hongry harnt," was her
moral reflection, "oughter be throwed bodaciously off'n the bluff."

She found no one at the forks of the road. In the marshy dip were only
the myriads of mountain azaleas, only the masses of feathery ferns,
only the constellated glories of the laurel blooms. A sea of shining
white mist was in the valley, with glinting golden rays striking
athwart it from the great cresset of the sinking moon; here and there
the long, dark, horizontal line of a distant mountain's summit rose
above the vaporous shimmer, like a dreary, sombre island in the midst
of enchanted waters. Her large, dreamy eyes, so wild and yet so
gentle, gazed out through the laurel leaves upon the floating gilded
flakes of light, as in the deep coverts of the mountain, where the
fulvous-tinted deer were lying, other eyes, as wild and as gentle,
dreamily watched the vanishing moon. Overhead, the filmy, lace-like
clouds, fretting the blue heavens, were tinged with a faint rose.
Through the trees she caught a glimpse of the red sky of dawn, and the
glister of a great lucent, tremulous star. From the ground, misty blue
exhalations were rising, alternating with the long lines of golden
light yet drifting through the woods. It was all very still, very
peaceful, almost holy. One could hardly believe that these consecrated
solitudes had once reverberated with the echoes of man's death-dealing
ingenuity, and that Reuben Crabb had fallen, shot through and through,
amid that wealth of flowers at the forks of the road. She heard
suddenly the far-away baying of a hound. Her great eyes dilated, and
she lifted her head to listen. Only the solemn silence of the woods,
the slow sinking of the noiseless moon, the voiceless splendor of that
eloquent day-star.

Morning was close at hand, and she was beginning to wonder that the
ghost did not appear, when the leaves fell into abrupt commotion,
and he was standing in the road, beside her. He did not speak, but
watched her with an eager, questioning intentness, as she placed the
contents of the pail upon the moss at the roadside. "I'm a-comin' agin
ter-morrer," she said, gently. He made no reply, quickly gathered the
food from the ground, and disappeared in the deep shades of the woods.

She had not expected thanks, for she was accustomed only to the
gratitude of dumb beasts; but she was vaguely conscious of something
wanting, as she stood motionless for a moment, and watched the
burnished rim of the moon slip down behind the western mountains. Then
she slowly walked along her misty way in the dim light of the coming
dawn. There was a footstep in the road behind her; she thought it was
the ghost once more. She turned, and met Simon Burney, face to face.
His rod was on his shoulder, and a string of fish was in his hand.

"Ye air a-doin' wrongful, Clarsie," he said, sternly. "It air agin the
law fur folks ter feed an' shelter them ez is a-runnin' from jestice.
An' ye'll git yerself inter trouble. Other folks will find ye out,
besides me, an' then the sheriff'll be up hyar arter ye."

The tears rose to Clarsie's eyes. This prospect was infinitely more
terrifying than the awful doom which follows the horror of a ghost's
speech.

"I can't holp it," she said, however, doggedly swinging the pail back
and forth. "I can't gin my consent ter starvin' of folks, even ef they
air a-hidin' an' a-runnin' from jestice."

"They mought put ye in jail, too,--I dunno," suggested Simon Burney.

"I can't holp that, nuther," said Clarsie, the sobs rising, and
the tears falling fast. "Ef they comes an' gits me, and puts me in
the pen'tiary away down yander, somewhars in the valley, like they
done Jane Simpkins, fur a-cuttin' of her step-mother's throat with
a butcher-knife, while she war asleep,--though some said Jane war
crazy,--I can't gin my consent ter starvin' of folks."

A recollection came over Simon Burney of the simile of "hendering the
sun from shining."

"She hev done sot it down in her mind," he thought, as he walked on
beside her and looked at her resolute face. Still he did not relinquish
his effort.

"Doin' wrong, Clarsie, ter aid folks what air a-doin' wrong, an' mebbe
_hev_ done wrong, air powerful hurtful ter everybody, an' henders the
law an' jestice."

"I can't holp it," said Clarsie.

"It 'pears toler'ble comical ter me," said Simon Burney, with a sudden
perception of a curious fact which has proved a marvel to wiser men,
"that no matter how good a woman is, she ain't got no respect fur
the laws of the country, an' don't sot no store by jestice." After
a momentary silence he appealed to her on another basis. "Somebody
will ketch him arter a while, ez sure ez ye air born. The sheriff's
a-sarchin' now, an' by the time that word gits around, all the mounting
boys'll turn out, 'kase thar air two hunderd dollars blood-money fur
him. An' then he'll think, when they ketches him,--an' everybody'll
say so, too,--ez ye war constant in feedin' him jes' ter 'tice him ter
comin' ter one place, so ez ye could tell somebody whar ter go ter
ketch him, an' make them gin ye haffen the blood-money, mebbe. That's
what the mounting will say, mos' likely."

"I can't holp it," said Clarsie, once more.

He left her walking on toward the rising sun, and retraced his way to
the forks of the road. The jubilant morning was filled with the song of
birds; the sunlight flashed on the dew; all the delicate enameled bells
of the pink and white azaleas were swinging tremulously in the wind;
the aroma of ferns and mint rose on the delicious fresh air. Presently
he checked his pace, creeping stealthily on the moss and grass beside
the road rather than in the beaten path. He pulled aside the leaves
of the laurel with no more stir than the wind might have made, and
stole cautiously through its dense growth, till he came suddenly upon
the puny little ghost, lying in the sun at the foot of a tree. The
frightened creature sprang to his feet with a wild cry of terror, but
before he could move a step he was caught and held fast in the strong
grip of the stalwart mountaineer beside him. "I hev kem hyar ter tell
ye a word, Reuben Crabb," said Simon Burney. "I hev kem hyar ter tell
ye that the whole mounting air a-goin' ter turn out ter sarch fur
ye; the sheriff air a-ridin' now, an' ef ye don't come along with me
they'll hev ye afore night, 'kase thar air two hunderd dollars reward
fur ye."

What a piteous wail went up to the smiling blue sky, seen through the
dappling leaves above them! What a horror, and despair, and prescient
agony were in the hunted creature's face! The ghost struggled no
longer; he slipped from his feet down upon the roots of the tree, and
turned that woful face, with its starting eyes and drawn muscles and
quivering parted lips, up toward the unseeing sky.

"God A'mighty, man!" exclaimed Simon Burney, moved to pity. "Whyn't ye
quit this hyar way of livin' in the woods like ye war a wolf? Whyn't ye
come back an' stand yer trial? From all I've hearn tell, it 'pears ter
me ez the jury air obleeged ter let ye off, an' I'll take keer of ye
agin them Grims."

"I hain't got no place ter live in," cried out the ghost, with a keen
despair.

Simon Barney hesitated. Reuben Crabb was possibly a murderer,--at the
best could but be a burden. The burden, however, had fallen in his way,
and he lifted it.

"I tell ye now, Reuben Crabb," he said, "I ain't a-goin' ter holp no
man ter break the law an' hender jestice; but ef ye will go an' stand
yer trial, I'll take keer of ye agin them Grims ez long ez I kin fire a
rifle. An' arter the jury hev done let ye off, ye air welcome ter live
along o' me at my house till ye die. Ye air no-'count ter work, I know,
but I ain't a-goin' ter grudge ye fur a livin' at my house."

And so it came to pass that the reward set upon the head of the harnt
that walked Chilhowee was never claimed.

With his powerful ally, the forlorn little spectre went to stand his
trial, and the jury acquitted him without leaving the box. Then he came
back to the mountains to live with Simon Burney. The cruel gibes of his
burly mockers that had beset his feeble life from his childhood up, the
deprivation and loneliness and despair and fear that had filled those
days when he walked Chilhowee, had not improved the harnt's temper. He
was a helpless creature, not able to carry a gun or hold a plow, and
the years that he spent smoking his cob-pipe in Simon Burney's door
were idle years and unhappy. But Mrs. Giles said she thought he was "a
mighty lucky little critter: fust, he hed Joel ter take keer of him an'
feed him, when he tuk ter the woods ter pertend he war a harnt; an'
they do say now that Clarsie Pratt, afore she war married, used ter
kerry him vittles, too; an' then old Simon Burney tuk him up an' fed
him ez plenty ez ef he war a good workin' hand, an' gin him clothes an'
house-room, an' put up with his jawin' jes' like he never hearn a word
of it. But law! some folks dunno when they air well off."

There was only a sluggish current of peasant blood in Simon Burney's
veins, but a prince could not have dispensed hospitality with a more
royal hand. Ungrudgingly he gave of his best; valiantly he defended
his thankless guest at the risk of his life; with a moral gallantry
he struggled with his sloth, and worked early and late, that there
might be enough to divide. There was no possibility of a recompense
for him, not even in the encomiums of discriminating friends, nor
the satisfaction of tutored feelings and a practiced spiritual
discernment; for he was an uncouth creature, and densely ignorant.

The grace of culture is, in its way, a fine thing, but the best that
art can do--the polish of a gentleman--is hardly equal to the best that
Nature can do in her higher moods.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation left as printed.]



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74759 ***