XXII.
Conscience, the great moral inquisitor, whose sessions are held in secret, whose absolute justice is untempered by mercy, whose processes are unrelated and superior to the laws of the land, makes manifest its decrees only at such long intervals that we are prone to consider their results exceptional. Although its measures are invariably meted, they are seldom so plainly set forth as in Peter Rood’s fate. Alethea, listening to ’Gustus Tom’s story, saw in aghast dismay how he had been pursued by those terrible potencies of the right which he had sought to disregard. Many things that had been vague were made distinct. She understood suddenly the meaning of the strange words he had spoken at the camp-meeting, when his spiritual struggles had nearly betrayed him. She divined the mingled fear and self-reproach, and at the same time the cowardly gratulation he experienced because of his fancied security, when entrapped to serve on the jury. She remembered with a new comprehension his joyous excitement when it appeared that the idiot boy had not been drowned, and the pallid anguish on his face as the lawyer dexterously reversed the probabilities. It might seem that he had expiated his deed, but the extremest penalties were not abated. He had been a pillar in the church, renowned for a certain insistent piety, and zealous to foster good repute among men; and this last possession that he held dear upon earth, which may be maintained even by a dead man, who can carry naught out of the world, was wrested from him.
The truth which he had so feared, which he had so labored to hide, over which the grave had seemed to close, was at last brought to light by very simple means.
On the eventful morning, the miller’s erratic grandson, awaking early, he knew not why, had sought to utilize the occurrence by robbing an owl’s nest in the hollow of a tree beside the mill. The day had not yet dawned, and he hoped that one or the other of the great birds would be away on its nocturnal foragings, so that he might the more easily secure the owlet, which he had long wanted for a pet. It was very still, ’Gustus Tom said. The frogs by the water had ceased their croaking; the katydids were silenced long ago; he heard only the surging monotone of the gleaming cascade falling over the natural dam. He had climbed the tree to the lower limbs, and had perched on one of them to rest for a moment, when there broke upon the air the sound of the galloping of a horse far away, approaching at a tremendous rate of speed. Presently he came into view, his head stretched forward, his coat flecked with foam, his rider plying both heel and whip.
This rider was Peter Rood, whom ’Gustus Tom knew well, as he often came to the mill. He dismounted hastily, close to the water-side. He walked uncertainly, even pausing sometimes to steady himself by holding to the supports of the old mill. He was evidently very drunk, and thus it appeared to ’Gustus Tom the less surprising that he should drag two or three fence rails stranded on the margin of the river,—which was high and full of floating rubbish,—and laboriously place them in a position to cumber the wheel; an empty barrel, too, he found and put to this use, some poles, drift-wood. He paused after a careful survey of his work, and held up his head, looking away toward the east, as if he were listening. It seemed to ’Gustus Tom, all veiled by the dew-tipped chestnut leaves, that Rood was strangely intent of purpose for a drunken man. He heard, long before the boy did, some monition of approach in the distance, for he caught eagerly at his horse’s bridle. Yet he was drunk enough to find difficulty in mounting. As the animal swerved, he was obliged to grasp the stirrup with one hand in order to steady it, so that he could put his foot in it; then he flung his right leg over the saddle, and away he went along the grassy margin of the road,—noiseless, swift, dark, like some black shadow, some noxious exhalation of the night.
’Gustus Tom explained at this point, with tears and many anxious twistings of the button on his shirt front,—which was quite useless, the correlative button-hole being torn out,—that he understood so little of what all this meant at the time that it seemed to him the only important point involved was to remember to tell his grandfather early in the day of Pete Rood’s drunken freak of clogging the mill-wheel. He did not call out and make his presence known, because he was frightened by the man’s strange conduct and terrible look. As he still sat meditating on the limb of the tree, the sound which had aroused Peter Rood again broke upon the silence. Once more the regular thud of hoofs—of many hoofs. The pace was far slower than the rattling gallop at which Pete Rood had come. There were several men in the group that presently appeared. ’Gustus Tom knew some of them,—he couldn’t help knowing Mink Lorey from far off; he looked so wild and gamesome; the moonlight was on his face and all his hair was flying. He knew Mink well. Mink it was who climbed the timbers of the race and lifted the gate. And once more ’Gustus Tom, with quivering lips and twisting the futile button on his shirt front, began to exculpate himself. He did not understand what Mink was about to do until the gate was lifted and the water surged through. The wheel, turning with its curiously contrived clogs, jerked spasmodically, gave sudden violent wrenches, finally breaking and crashing against the shanty, that itself tottered and careened and fell. He heard Tad scream, for the idiot, having incurred the miller’s displeasure during the day, had been locked in the mill, supperless, to sleep. ’Gustus Tom did not see the boy in the river, because of the falling timbers, the clouds of dust and flour and meal, and the commotion of the water. The men galloped away, Mink among them. For the house had been alarmed by the noise; old Griff ran out, wringing his hands and crying aloud, first for the loss of the mill, then for the fate of the idiot. The others of the family came, too. ’Gustus Tom easily slipped down unobserved from the tree, in the midst of the excitement, and no one was aware, except sister Eudory, that he knew more than the rest. Lately she had noticed that he was afraid of the dark and would not sit alone; and she had begun to say so much of this that he was alarmed lest she might excite the suspicions of others. And so, thinking she would keep his secret,—he would have divulged it to no one else,—he told her that he was afraid of Peter Rood, who was dead, and who perhaps had found out in the other world that he knew the secret, and would come and haunt him to make sure that he did not reveal it. And at the renewal of these ghastly terrors ’Gustus Tom bent his head upon his arm, and began to sob afresh.
“Why didn’t ye tell at fust, ’Gustus Tom?” asked Alethea, her mind futilely reviewing the complications that circumstance had woven about Mink Lorey.
’Gustus Tom lifted his head, a gleam of this world’s acumen shining through the tears in his eyes.
“He’d hev walloped the life out’n me, ef I hed told. He kem nigh every day ter the mill arterward, whenst they war a-s’archin’ fur the body. An’ his eyes looked so black an’ mad an’ cur’ous whenst he cut ’em round at me, I ’lowed he knowed what I knowed. An’ I war afeard o’ him.”
Aunt Dely could not be altogether repressed. “Waal, ’Gustus Tom, ye air a bad aig,” she remarked, politely. “Ye ter know all that whenst ye war down thar at Shaftesville, along o’ yer gran’dad, an’ seen them men a-talkin’ by the yard-medjure, an’ a-cavortin’ ’bout in the court, ez prideful ez ef thar brains war ez nimble ez thar tongues; an’ ye look at ’em try Mink fur bustin’ down the mill an’ drowndin’ Tad, an’ ye ter know ez Pete Rood done it,—an’ ye say nuthin’!”
“Waal,” said ’Gustus Tom, sorely beset, “he war a-settin’ thar in the cheer; he could hev told hisself.”
“Whyn’t ye tell arter he drapped dead?” suggested the politic Mrs. Purvine.
The boy winced at the recollection. “He looked so awful!” he said, putting up his hand to his eyes as if to shut out the image presented. “I war ’feared he’d harnt me.”
It occurred to sister Eudora that this investigation was degenerating into a persecution of ’Gustus Tom. She had looked from one to the other in grave excitement and with a flushing face, as she stood on the hearth, the breath from the fire waving her flaxen hair, hanging upon her shoulders.
Suddenly, with an accession of color, she stepped across the broad, ill-joined stones, and, fixing a threatening eye on Mrs. Purvine’s moon-face, she lifted her fat hand, and retributively smote that lady on the knee.
’Gustus Tom had never manifested any special desire to suit his own conduct to a high standard of deportment, but he appeared to entertain the most sedulous solicitude concerning sister Eudory’s manners, and to be jealous that she should be esteemed the pink of juvenile propriety. His mortification at the present lapse was very great. It expressed itself in such unequivocal phrase, such energetic shakings of his tow-head, which seemed communicated, with diminished rigor, however, to her plump little shoulders,—for he went through all the motions of discipline,—that Mrs. Purvine, beaming with injudicious laughter, was forced to interfere. Her indulgence did not serve to reassure sister Eudory, who stood dismayed at the fullness of fraternal displeasure. She presently put her hands before her eyes, although she did not shed tears, and thus she was led toward the door, to be taken home as unfit for polite society. Mrs. Purvine hurried after her, carrying the roasted egg—which was very hot, in its shell—between two chips, and further pressing upon her a present of a sweet-potato, an ear of pop-corn, and a young kitten, all of which sister Eudory, regardless of the animate and the inanimate, the hot and the cold, carried together in her apron. The affront was but a slight matter to aunt Dely, whose lenient temperament precluded her from viewing it as an enormity; but as the brother and sister went away in humiliation, one could well guess that sister Eudora would be a woman grown before she would be allowed to contemplate with indifference the dreadful day when she “hit Mis’ Purvine.”
In whatever manner it might have seemed judicious to make use, in Mink’s interest, of the disclosures of Peter Rood’s agency in the destruction of the mill, anything like caution, or reserve, or secrecy was rendered impossible by the circumstance that it was Mrs. Purvine who shared in the discovery of the fact. For weeks no one passed the house, going or coming on the winding road, whom she did not descry through the worldly glass windows,—which thus demonstrated an additional justification for their existence,—and whom she did not hail with a loud outcry from the unsteady flight of steps, and bring to a not unwilling pause as she hurried out to the fence, with her glib tongue full of words. There was no weather too cold for the indulgence of this gossip. Sometimes aunt Dely would merely fling her apron over her head, if the exigency suggested haste; or she would hood herself with her shawl, like a cowled friar, and stand in the snow, defiant of the rigors of the temperature. More often, however, the passer-by would suffer himself to be persuaded to come in and sit down by aunt Dely’s fire, and discuss with her all the details so tardily elicited. Pete Rood’s death, considered as a judgment upon him, was a favorite point of contemplation, offering that symmetrical exposition of cause and effect, sin and retribution, peculiarly edifying to the obdurate in heart and acceptable to the literalist in religion. So much was said on this subject at the store, and the blacksmith-shop, and the saw-mill,—those places where the mountain cronies most congregated,—that it came to the ear of Rood’s relatives with all the added poignancy of comment. They indignantly maintained that only the ingenuity of malice could feign to attach any special meaning to the moment or manner of his death, for it was widely known that he had for years suffered from a serious affection of the heart; they stigmatized the whole story as an effort to blacken his name in order to clear Mink Lorey. Their attitude and sentiment enlisted a certain sympathy, and it was only when they were not of the company that the counter-replication was made that it was a supremely significant moment when Peter Rood’s doom fell upon him, and that it behooves those who sit in the shadow of death to be not easily diverted from the true interpretation of the darkling signs of the wrath of God.
It was a scene of pathetic interest when his aged mother, resolved upon forcing a recantation, came herself to the miller’s home. A dark, withered, white-haired crone she was, with a hooked nose and a keen, fierce, intent eye that suggested strength of mind and purpose defying age and ailments. She shrewdly questioned the boy, and sought to involve him in discrepancies and to elicit some admission that the story had been prompted by Alethea Sayles. Her dark-browed sons stood about the great white-covered ox-wagon, their bemired boots drawn high over their trousers, their broad hats pulled down to their lowering eyes, maintaining a sedulous silence. So strong a family resemblance existed between them and the dead man that ’Gustus Tom was greatly perturbed as from time to time he glanced at them; looking away instantly with a resolution to see them no more, and yet again with a morbid fascination turning his eyes to meet theirs, before whose dark and solemn anger he quailed. Now and then the sobs would burst from him, and he would lay his head on his arm against the rails, as he cowered in the fence corner; for the old woman would not enter the miller’s house, but stood upon the frozen crust of snow by the roadside, and looked upon the denuded site of the mill, and the turbulent river, and the austere bleak bluffs on the opposite bank. The miller peered out from his door, himself the impersonation of winter, his snowy locks and beard falling about his rugged face; the desolate little shanty was plainly to be seen among the naked and writhen boughs of the orchard, that bore only snow and icicles in the stead of the bloom and fruit they had known.
Cross-questioning, threats, all the devices of suggestion, availed naught. The terrible story once told, ’Gustus Tom found the pluck somehow to stand by it without other support than the uncognizant affection of sister Eudory; for the shallow Sophy cared for none of it. She came to the door once to lead the old man within from the piercing wind, and she lingered for a moment, her golden hair flying in the blast; her placid blue eyes and superficial smile underwent no change when the old woman turned away, baffled and hopeless and stricken.
“I ’lowed my son war dead,” she said to the cluster of gossips who had assisted at the colloquy. She shook her head as she leaned upon her stick, and hobbled down across the frozen ruts of the road toward the wagon. “I ’lowed my son war dead, an’ I mourned him. But I said the words of a fool, for he war alive; the best part of him, his good name, war lef’ ter me. An’ now he air beset, an’ druv, an’ run down ter death,—fur ye air a-murderin’ of him in takin’ his good name. Lemme know, neighbors,”—she turned, with her hand upon the wheel,—“when the deed air fairly done, so ez I kin gin myself ter mournin’ my son, fur then he’ll be plumb dead.”
The two dark-browed brothers said never a word; the slow oxen started; the wagon moved creaking down the road toward the snowy mountains, with their whitened slopes and black trees, and gray shadows.
The public sentiment excited in favor of Mink Lorey by the developments during his trial, and which had expressed itself in the riot and attempt at a rescue, had sustained a rebuff consequent upon his assault on Judge Gwinnan. Nevertheless, it is difficult to nullify a popular prepossession, and the discovery that the young mountaineer had been the victim of the machinations of the true criminal, that he had been placed in jeopardy, had suffered many months’ imprisonment, had still longer duress in prospect, served to justify him in some sort, and reinstated him in the feelings of the people, never very logical. All the details of the trial were canvassed anew with reviviscent interest. Now that the veil of mystery was torn from it, there seemed still other inculpations involved. It would appear to imply some gross negligence, some intentional spite, some grotesque perversion of justice, that the criminal should have been one of the jury impaneled to try an innocent man. The fact itself was shocking. It was significant that only through accident had it come to light, and it augured grievous insecurity of liberty, life and property.
Mr. Harshaw, who had returned to Shaftesville upon the adjournment, for a few days, of the Legislature, was not slow to note the direction and progress of popular favor. In the state of his feelings toward Gwinnan, he had no great impulse to combat the position taken by the unlearned that it was a grave dereliction on the part of the court that Pete Rood had been admitted to the panel. Why should he expound the theory of judicial challenges, the conclusiveness of the voir dire, in instances of general eligibility? He truly believed that in the incarceration of the jury Gwinnan had sacrificed the interests of the defense and a favorable verdict, and as he felt much reminiscent interest in the details of his cases, he could listen with all the relish of mental affirmation to the denunciations of the stranger judge, who was often profanely apostrophized and warned to show his head no more in Cherokee County.
“Somebody besides Mink Lorey’ll try ter beat some sense inter it, ef he do,” said Bylor. The bitterness of the affront offered to the jury by their imprisonment had grown more poignant as time went on, for while the general excitement had gradually subsided, the fact remained. Not one of the unlucky panel, venturing from time to time into town with peltry, or game, or produce for sale, could escape the gibes and laughter of retrospective ridicule. The dignity of the interests involved had ceased to be a shield to them. Even the acrimony excited by their failure to agree had yielded to light sarcasm and jocose scorn,—not ill-natured, perhaps, but sufficiently nettling to proud and sensitive men whom accident had succeeded in immuring behind the bars. Everywhere the subject lurked in ambuscade,—in the stores, at the tavern, on the streets. The jailer was the most hospitable man alive. “When’ll ye kem an’ take pot-luck agin, gentlemen?” he would hail them in chance encounters. “My door air easy ter open—from the outside.” Or he would call out, with a roguish twinkle in his brown eyes, “How’s ’rithmetic up in the cove?” in allusion to the unlucky thirteen on the panel. It seemed to them that humiliation was their portion, and the festive and gala occasion known as “goin’ ter town,” which had hitherto been so replete with excitement and interest, and was in the nature of a tour and a recompense of toil, had resolved itself into a series of mortifications.
Harshaw’s law-office proved in some sort a refuge to the coterie, as it had always been more or less a resort. It had some of the functions of a club-house, and its frequenters felt hardly less at home than its proprietor. He was a man difficult to be taken amiss by his country friends. He had a sonorous, hearty greeting for whoever came. If he were at work, half a dozen sprawling fellows talking about his fireside were no hindrance to the flow of his thought, the scratch of his pen, or the chase of some elusive bit of legal game through the pages of a law-book. More often he bore a part in the conversation. The bare floor defied the red clay mire that came in with the heavy boots; the broken bricks in the hearth were not more unsightly in his eyes for the stains of tobacco juice. The high mantelpiece was ornamented by a box of tobacco, a can of kerosene, and an untrimmed lamp that asserted its presence in unctuous odors. There were some of the heavy books of his profession in a case, and many more lying in piles on the floor, near the walls, defenseless against the borrower. There was a window on one side of the office, and another opening upon the street. At this a face was often applied, with a pair of hands held above the eyes to shut out the light, that the passer-by might scan the interior, perchance to see if someone sought were within; perchance merely to regale an idle curiosity. The unique proceeding occasioned no comment and gave no offense. An open door showed an inner apartment, where consultations were held when too important for the ear of the indiscriminate groups in the main office, and where there was a lounge, on which he slept during court week, or when political business was too brisk to admit of his driving out to his home on his farm, some miles from the town.
“Well,” said Harshaw, tilting his chair back upon its hind legs until it creaked and quaked with the weight, and clasping both hands behind his yellow head, “I wonder you ain’t willing for Gwinnan to be a fool, considering what Mink got for beating his skull into a different shape.”
The county boasted no weekly newspaper, and without it the news was a laggard. Ben Doaks looked up with interest; Bylor paused expectant. Jerry Price, too, was present, for there was an unusual number from the coves in town—this was county court week, and the crowd assembled offered special facilities for trading stock and small commodities.
The hickory logs crackled on the hearth above the gleaming coals, and the white and yellow flames were broadly flaring; great beds of gray ashes lay beneath, for they were seldom removed; the murmurous monotone of the fire filled the pause.
“Yes, sir,” said Harshaw, taking his pipe from his lips and knocking the ashes from the bowl, “Mink got a sentence for twenty years in the penitentiary for assault with intent to commit murder.”
There was dead silence. The clay pipe that Jerry Price was smoking fell from his hands unheeded, and broke into fragments on the hearth. This knowledge affected the group more than the news of Mink’s death might have done. That at least was uncertain. The mind flags and fails to follow in the journey to the unknown the spirit that has quitted the familiar flesh,—the entity for which it has merely a name, an impression, an illusion of acquaintance. But this sordid, definite fact, this measure of desolation bounded by four walls, this hopeless rage, this mental revulsion from ignominy, all were of mortal experience and easily imagined.
“Yes, sir,” resumed Harshaw, his florid face grave but firm. He had the air of a man whose feelings have been schooled to calmness, but who protests against a fact. “I did what I could for Mink. I couldn’t defend him myself,—couldn’t leave the interests of my constituents in the House for the sake of an individual; but I put the case in Jerome Maupert’s hands. Maupert couldn’t help it. Mink was locking the door of the state prison and double-locking it every time he lifted his hand to strike Gwinnan. A judge, you know,”—he rolled his eyes significantly at the group,—“a judge is a mighty big man, and Mink is just a poor mountain boy.”
He stuck his pipe into his mouth again, and vigorously puffed it into a glow.
“The crowd in court cheered when the jury gave their verdict,” he said.
The group looked at each other with quick, offended glances; then lapsed into gazing at the fire and contemplating the circumstances.
“’Pears like ez nobody kin git even with Gwinnan right handy,” said Bylor. “Ef ’twarn’t fur makin’ bad wuss fur Mink, I’d wisht ez he hed killed him.”
“Shucks!” said Harshaw scornfully. “Gwinnan thinks he’s mighty popular with the people. He’s always doing the humbugging and bamboozling dodge. Just before I left Glaston the attorney-general—Kenbigh, you know—showed me a letter from Judge Gwinnan asking him to take no notice of Mink’s assault, as he wasn’t willing to prosecute.”
He brought his chair down with a thump on its forelegs, and looked about the circle, his roseate plump face full of bantering sarcasm.
“What war his notion fur that?” demanded Doaks, slowly possessing himself of the facts.
“To impose on the people—so good—so lenient”——
“Mighty lenient, sure!” interpolated Bylor. He rubbed his wrist mechanically; he never was quite sure that he had not been shackled.
“Letter dated just about two weeks after Mink was sentenced,” Harshaw sneered.
“Waal, who war the prosecutor, then?” demanded Jerry Price, at a loss.
“Why, of course they didn’t wait for a prosecutor. Mink was tried on a presentment by the grand jury; and as the criminal court came on right straight, Kenbigh just hurried him through. He’s a regular blood-hound, Kenbigh is.”
There was a silence for a few moments. Several of the sticks of wood had burned in two and fallen apart, and were sending up dull columns of smoke, some of which puffed into the room,—an old trick of the chimney’s, if the testimony of the blackened ceiling be admitted.
“As if,” cried Harshaw, suddenly uncrossing and crossing his legs, reversing their position, “Gwinnan, of all the men in the world, wouldn’t know and think of that! But Kenbigh seemed to take it all in,—seemed to think ’twas Gwinnan’s modesty. He showed me the answer he wrote to the judge.” Harshaw cast up his eyes meditatively to the ceiling, as if seeking to recall the words. “He begged to express his admiration of Judge Gwinnan’s modesty in thinking that so serious an injury to one of the most brilliant ornaments of the State judiciary could fail to be summarily punished, or would need his personal interposition as prosecutor.”
They all listened with an absent air, as if the refusal to hear the compliments nullified them.
Harshaw gave a short, satirical laugh, showing his strong white teeth.
“I wisht ter Gawd that thar Gwinnan wanted ter go ter Congress, or sech, ez would fling him ’fore the vote o’ Cher’kee County,—it be in the same congressional deestric’ whar he hails from,—I’d show him,” said Bylor, shaking his head with the savagery of supposititious revenge, and in the full delusion of unbridled power characteristic of the free and independent American unit. “I’d show him.”
“I reckon everybody don’t feel like we-uns do,” said Jerry Price, who, although he smarted under the unmerited disgrace he had experienced at the hands of Gwinnan, had submitted to it as a judicial necessity. Its rankling pangs were manifested only when, chancing to meet the foreman, Jerry would ask, in a manner charged with interest and an affectation of mystery, whether he had had his tongue measured yet, and how many joints it had been ascertained to have.
“They’re a little more disgruntled over in Kildeer than you are here,” Harshaw declared. “You’d allow the court-room was a distric’ school, if you could know the way he domineers over there. I always look to see the learned counsel put his finger in his mouth and whine when Gwinnan gets on the rampage.”
“Why, look-a-hyar, Mr. Harshaw,” demanded Bylor, “do you-uns call this a free country? Ain’t thar no way o’ stoppin’ him off? Goin’ ter hev five mo’ years o’ him on the bench?”
“He’ll be impeached some day, mark my words,” Harshaw declared; and then he fell to eying the smoking fire with slow, sullen, vengeful speculation, and for the rest of the day he was not such jovial company as his general repute for good-fellowship might promise.
In this interval of leisure which the recess afforded him, both as legislator and lawyer, Harshaw devoted himself to furthering his political prospects and strengthening his hold upon the predilections of the people. He was a man of many mental and moral phases: he sang loud and long at the revival at the cross-roads church; he attended rural merry-makings; he connived at having his own house “stormed” by a surprise party, the preparations being profuse and exhilarating, and the flavor of his hospitality was not impaired by his shaking hands with his guests, and violently promising to vote for them at the next election, each enlightened and independent citizen being himself not quite clear as to who was the prospective candidate: but the whole episode faded from recollection with the evening, mingling with the vain phantasmagoria of wild elation, and subsequent drowsiness, and retributive headache, and physical repentance. He went on a camp hunt with a party of roaring blades. The weather in the changeful Southern winter had turned singularly fine and dry; the air had all the crisp buoyancy of autumn and all the freshness of spring; fires drowsed on hearths; doors stood ajar; the sunshine was pervasive, warm, languorous, imbued with pensive vernal illusions. One might wonder to see the silent sere grass; were there indeed no whirring songs, no skittering points of light, hovering in mazy tangles, and telling the joy that existence might prove to the tiniest insect life? Birds? The trees were empty, but one must look to make sure: only the rising quail from the clumps of withered weeds; only the infrequent cry of the wild turkey down the bare, sunny vistas of the woods. The shadows of the deciduous trees were spare and linear, distinctly traced on the brown ground or upon the gray rock. In these fine curves and strokes of dendritic scripture a graceful sylvan idyl might perchance be deciphered by the curious. But the dense masses of laurel and the darkling company of pines cloaked themselves in their encompassing gloom, in these bright days as ever, and in their shade the dank smell and the depressing chill attested the winter. Vague shimmers hung about the mountains, blue in the distance, garnet and brown and black close at hand. The terrible heights and unexplored depths, the vast, sheer, precipitous descents, the titanic cliffs, the breadth, the muscle, the tremendous velocity of the torrents hurling down the gorges, gave august impressions of space unknown to the redundant richness of the summer woods. There were vistas of incomparable amplitude, as still, with the somnolent sunshine and the sparse shadow, as if they were some luminous effect on a canvas, painted in dark and light browns, graduated through the tints of the sere leaf in ascendant transition to the pale gold of the sunbeams; affording, despite the paucity of detail, an ecstasy to the sense of color.
It was a moment of preëminent consequence to Harshaw one day, when far up a stately avenue a deer appeared with the suddenness of an illusion, yet giving so complete a realization of its presence that the very fullness and splendor of its surprised eyes left their impression. Then, as in some jugglery of the senses, the animal with consummate grace and lightness, vanished, bounding through the laurel.
The wind was adverse and the hounds did not readily catch the scent. A few tentative, melancholy yelps of uncertainty arose; then a deep, musical, bell-like bay, another, and the pack opened with a great swelling, oscillating cry, that the mountains echoed as with a thousand voices, and in a vast compass of tone. The mounted men, hallooing to one another, dashed off in different directions, making through the woods towards various “stands” which the deer might be expected to pass. Now and then the horn sounded to recall the stragglers,—inexpressibly stirring tones, launched from crag to crag, from height to height; far-away ravines repeated the summons with a fine and delicate mystery of resonance, rendered elusive and idealized, till one might believe that never yet did such sound waves float from the prosaic cow-horn of the mountaineer.
Harshaw’s pursuits had not been those of a Nimrod, and although a good horseman and a fair marksman, he had found himself at a grievous disadvantage with others of the party who were mountaineers and crack shots. Stimulated by rivalry, they had achieved prodigies in instances of quickness of sight and unerring aim in unpropitious, almost impossible circumstances. They had already had some good sport, in which he had acquitted himself creditably enough; but his inexperience and ignorance of the topography of the country had given him some occasion to perceive that without more familiarity with the localities he could not fully enjoy a camp hunt. He was not surprised when, becoming involved in an almost impenetrable tangle of the laurel, he lost his companions, who got over the broken ground with an amazing swiftness, divination of direction, and quickness of resource. He drew rein upon emerging, and listened to the baying hounds: now loud, now faint and far away; now sharply yelping for the lost trail, and again lifting the exultant, bell-like cry of bated triumph. He despaired of rejoining his friends till the deer was lost or killed, and, remembering the pluck of the personnel of the diversion, of the deer, the hounds, and the mountaineers, he reflected that this result might not soon ensue.
The echoes infinitely confused the sounds, giving no reliable suggestion of the direction which the hunt was taking. He pushed on for a time—a long time, his watch told him—in the complete silence of the wintry woods. He began to experience a dull growing apprehensiveness. He had no faint approximative conjecture concerning the locality; there was no path, not even a herders’ trail. He could himself establish no landmark by which he might be guided. There was a lavish repetitiousness in the scene: grand as it might be with scarred cliffs and sudden chasms and stupendous trees, it was presented anew with prolific magnificence forty yards further, and ride as he might he seemed to make no progress. As time passed, there recurred to his recollection instances—rare, it is true, but as uninviting to the imagination as infrequent—of men who have been lost in these fastnesses, trained woodsmen, herders, the familiars of the wild nature into whose penetralia even they had ventured too far. A handful of bleaching bones might tell the story, or perhaps the mysterious disappearance would be explained by much circling of birds of prey. Mr. Harshaw felt a sudden violent appreciation of the methods and interests and affluent attractiveness of the civilized world. He could not sufficiently condemn his folly in venturing out of its beaten track; in leaving, even for a space, the things he loved for the things he cared not for. The scene was inexpressibly repugnant to him; the woods closed him in so frowningly; his mind recoiled from the stern, Gorgon-like faces of the crags on every hand. The wintry sunlight was reddening; he could see only the zenith through the dense forest, and upon its limited section were interposed many interlacing outlines of the bare boughs; nevertheless, he was aware that the sky was clouding. The wind did not stir; the woods were appallingly still; there was no sound of horn or hounds; the chase had gone like a phantom hunt,—suddenly evoked, as suddenly disappearing.