XXIII.
As Harshaw paused to let his mare breathe, an abrupt sound smote his ear; he lifted his head to listen. It was the fitful clank of a cow-bell—and again; nearer than he had thought at first. He experienced infinite relief. The prosaic jangling had a welcome significance. It intimated the vicinity of some dwelling-place, for at this season the cattle are not at large in the withered pasturage of the mountain. He heard the bushes cracking at a little distance; he pressed his reluctant mare in that direction, through a briery tangle, over the trunks of fallen trees, pausing now and then to listen to the sound. Suddenly there was a great thwack; a thick human tongue stammered a curse. There was something strange and repellent and unnatural in the mouthing tones. The next moment he understood. The laurel gave way into the open aisles of the brown woods; a red suffusion of the sunset lingered among the dark boles on the high slopes, contending with, rather than illuminating, the lucent yellow tints on the dead leaves. A red cow shambled along at a clumsy run amidst the pervasive duskiness, that was rather felt than seen; and driving her with a long hickory sprout was a tall mountain boy, who turned his head at the sound of the hoofs behind him, showing under the bent and drooping brim of an old white hat a pale and flabby face, on which pitiless nature had fixed the stamp of denied intelligence. He gazed, with open mouth and starting eyes, at the horseman; then, regardless of Harshaw’s friendly hail, he dropped his stick, and with a strange, unearthly howl he fled along the woodland ways like a frightened deer. He plunged into the laurel, and was out of sight in a moment.
Harshaw began to drive the cow along, hoping she would take the familiar barn-yard way. He could hardly gauge his relief when, almost immediately, he saw before him a rail-fence; and yet he had an accession of irritation because of the folly, the futility, of the whole mishap. His consciousness was so schooled to the exactions of political life that he experienced a sort of grotesque shame as if the misadventure were already added to the capital of a political opponent expert in the art of ridicule.
No one was visible in the little clearing. Smoke, however, was curling briskly from the chimney of a log hut; there was a barn of poles hard by, evidently well filled. Harshaw hallooed, with no response save that his hearty voice roused the dogs; they came trooping from under the house and from out of it, sharply barking, although two or three, still drowsy, paused to stretch themselves to a surprising length and to yawn with a vast dental display. The cow went in by the way, doubtless, that she had come out, stepping over the fence, where a number of rails had been thrown off. Harshaw, thinking it as well to encounter the dogs within the inclosure as without, followed her example, the mare resisting slightly, and stumbling over those of the rails that lay upon the ground. He saw that his approach had occasioned a commotion within the house; there was a vague flutter of skirts elusively appearing and disappearing. Across the doorway, low down, were nailed wooden slats, doubtless to restrain the excursiveness of a small child, who suddenly thrust his head over them, and was instantly snatched back by some invisible hand.
Nevertheless, the inhabitants were presently induced to hold a parley, perhaps because of Harshaw’s manifest determination to force an entrance, despite the dogs that leaped and yelped about his stirrup irons, their vocal efforts more shrilly keyed as his whip descended among them; for although he held his revolver cocked, he was too shrewd a politician to present its muzzle to a mountaineer’s dog save in the direst emergency. A woman suddenly appeared at the door. She looked at him with so keen and doubtful a gaze, with a gravity so forbidding, a silence so significant, that, accustomed as he was to the hospitable greeting and smile of welcome that graces the threshold of every home of the region, however humble, he lost for the moment his ready assurance. When he told her of his plight, she received the statement with the chilling silence of incredulity. Nevertheless, upon his request for shelter for the night and a guide the next morning, she did not refuse, as he had feared, but told him in a spiritless way to “’light and hitch,” and that the boy would look after his horse. He strode up to the house, the dogs, suddenly all very friendly, at his heels, and stepped over the barricade that restrained the adventurous juvenile who was now hanging upon it, looking with eager interest at the world of the door-yard, which was a very wide world to him. He followed Harshaw to his seat by the fire, eying with great persistence his boots and his spurs. The latter exerted upon him special fascinations, and he presently stooped down and applied a small inquisitive finger to the rowel. The interior was not unlike the other homes of the region,—two high beds, a ladder ascending to a chamber in the roof, a rude table, a spinning-wheel, at which a gaunt, half-grown girl was working as industriously as if oblivious of the stranger’s presence. The woman sat with her arms folded, her eyes on the fire, pondering deeply. A young man came to the back door, glanced in, and turned away.
When the woman fixed her grave, wide, prominent eyes upon Harshaw, there was something in their expression so unnerving that his refuge seemed hardly more comfortable than the savage wilderness without. But he said bluffly to himself that he had not stumped Kildeer and Cherokee for nothing; he rallied his traditions as a politician. Surely, he reflected, he who could so beguile other men’s adherents to vote for him could win his way to a simple woman’s friendship, if he tried.
He looked at the child and smiled, and said that the boy was “mighty peart.” He dropped into the vernacular as a conscious concession to the habits of the “plain people.”
The woman’s fierce face was transfigured. “That’s a true word, stranger,” she said, beamingly. “An’ Philetus ain’t three year old yit, air he, Sereny?”
The girl in an abrupt, piping way confirmed the marvel, and Harshaw looked again at Philetus, who had no sort of hesitancy in seeking to take off the spurs and convert them to his own use.
His mother went on: “Philetus, though, ain’t nigh so pretty ez three others I hed ez died. Yes, sir, we-uns lived up higher than this, on a mounting over yander thar.”
“You haven’t been living here long?” said Harshaw, merely by way of making talk.
The woman instantly resumed her stony, impassive manner. “’Tain’t long nor short by some folkses’ medjure,” she said equivocally. She looked watchfully at him from time to time. An old gray cat that sat on the warm stones in the corner of the hearth, purring, and feigning to lift now one of her fore-paws and then the other, eyed him with a round, yellow, somnolent stare, as if she too had a charge to keep him under surveillance. She got up suddenly, arching her back, to affectionately rub against the great booted feet of the idiot, who came and leaned on the chimney and gazed solemnly at the stranger. He was overgrown and overfat, and had a big, puffy, important face and a cavalier, arrogant manner.
“Don’ wanter,” he said, in his thick, mouthing utterance, as the woman, once more seeming flustered and anxious, told him to take the basket and go out to the wood pile and fill it with chips.
The whir of the spinning-wheel was suddenly silent, and the girl, who officiated as a sort of echo of her mother’s words, a reflection of her actions, came and emptied the basket of the few bits of bark within it, and handed it to him.
“G’ way, Sereny,” he said good-naturedly, but declining the duty.
The unfathomable dispensation of idiocy, its irreconcilability with mundane theories of divine justice or mercy, its presentment at once repellent and grotesque, has its morbid effect when confronted with sanity. Harshaw was a man neither of delicate instincts nor of any subtle endowment, but the contemplation of the great vacant face grimacing at him, coupled with the singular influences of his reception, required a recollection of the anguished anxiety he had experienced, the sound of the rising wind without, the sight of the whirling dead leaves, the gathering gloom of the cloudy dusk, to reconcile him to the conditions of his refuge.
“Well, my man,” he said, looking at the boy, “what’s your name?”
The idiot grinned importantly. “Tad,” he stuttered thickly,—“Tad Simpkins. What’s yourn?”
Harshaw sat for a moment in stunned surprise. Then all the discomforts of the situation vanished before the triumphs of this discovery. This—this great, well-fed, hearty creature, the forlorn, maltreated idiot depicted by the evidence in Mink Lorey’s trial; this, the pitiable boy drowned in the mill like a rat in a trap; this, the elusive spectre of the attorney-general’s science! The next moment it occurred to him that he must use special caution here; the motives that had led these people to harbor the idiot, if not to conceal him, were suspicious, and favored his theory in the trial—which he had adopted more from the poverty of his resources than a full credulity—that the retirement of the boy reputed drowned was prompted by a deep-seated enmity to Mink Lorey.
He turned to the woman, all his normal faculties on the alert.
“Well, that’s a fact, Mrs. Simpkins; your son ain’t plumb bright,—I can see that,—but he’s right there. I ought to tell you my name.”
“Mine ain’t Simpkins,” said the woman suddenly, responding quickly to his clever touch, “an’ Tad thar ain’t my son.” She was mixing corn-meal batter for bread in a wooden bowl; she stirred it energetically as she went on with a sort of partisan acrimony: “Mebbe he ain’t bright, ez ye call it, but I ain’t never hearn o’ Tad doin’ a mean thing yit,—not ter the chill’n, nor dogs, nor cats, nor nuthin’. He may be lackin’ in the head, but he ain’t lackin’ in the heart; thar’s whar’s the complaint o’ mos’ folks ez ain’t idjits. I dunno which air held gifted in the sight o’ the Lord. ’Tain’t in human wisdom ter say. Tad’ll make a better show at the jedgmint day’n many folks ez ’low they hev hed thar senses through life.”
“Ain’t no idjit, nuther,” protested Tad, gruffly.
“Well, my name’s Harshaw—Bob Harshaw.” The guest leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, looking steadily at her as he talked. She held her head on one side, listening eagerly, almost laboriously, sedulous that she should lose no point, showing how sharp had been her desire for him to give an account of himself. As he noticed this, he was more than ever sure that the household had some cause to fear the law. His vanity received a slight shock in the self-evident fact that she had never before heard of him. “I’m a lawyer from Shaftesville. I defended Mink Lorey when he was tried for drowning that chap.”
“Flung me in the water!” exclaimed Tad parenthetically.
“I hearn ’bout that,” said the woman. She had knelt on the broad hearth-stone, depositing the bowl beside her while she made up the pones in her hands, tossing them from one palm to the other, then placing them upon the hoe which smoked upon the hot live coals drawn out from the bed of the fire. “I war glad the rescuers tuk him out,” she continued, “fur Tad ain’t drownded.”
“The rescuers didn’t take him out,” said Harshaw, sharply.
The woman looked up, surprised; her hand shook a little with the bread in it; she was evidently capable of appreciating the weight of responsibility.
“Why, Lethe Sayles told me so,” she said.
“Lethe Sayles!” he exclaimed, perplexed. Her name instantly recalled Gwinnan—incongruous association of ideas!—and Mink’s persuasion of Gwinnan’s enmity toward him for her sake. Had she known the judge before? he wondered. Had Mink some foundation for his jealousy beyond the disasters of the trial? Somehow, this false representation to the people who knew that the lad was not drowned had, he thought, an undeveloped significance in view of that fact. Harshaw resolved that there should be no question of the substantiality of Tad’s apparition when the case should come up to be tried anew. He forgot himself for the moment. “I’ll produce you in open court, my fine fellow,” he said, swaggering to his feet and striking the boy on his fat shoulder. “That’s what I’m bound for!”
He had naught in mind save the details of his case. He regarded the incident only as the symmetrical justification of his conduct of the evidence and his evolution of the theory of the crime. He did not pause to reflect on its slight and ineffective value to Mink himself, to whom an acquittal could only mean that a few years were not to be added to the long term of imprisonment which already impended for him. He did not even notice that the woman rose suddenly from her knees, went toward the door, and beckoned in the burly young fellow who had appeared on the porch at intervals, covertly surveying the scene within.
“Naw, sir,” she exclaimed, with an agitated, accelerated method of speech and a fierce eye, “ye won’t! Ye ain’t a-goin’ ter kem in hyar an’ spy us out an’ perduce us in court, fur yer profit an’ our destruction.” Harshaw turned and gazed at her, with a flushing, indignant face. The young man had his rifle in his hand; she herself was taking down a gun which lay in a rack above the fireplace. “Ye warn’t axed ter kem in hyar, but it be our say-so ez ter when ye go out.”
The surprise of it overpowered him for a moment; he stood blankly staring at them. The next, he realized that his pistols were in the holster with his saddle, and his gun that he had placed beside the door had been removed. He was not, however, deficient in physical courage.
“Take care how you attempt to detain me!” he blustered.
She laughed in return, shrilly, mirthlessly; as he looked at her he was sure that she would not hesitate to draw the trigger that her long, lean fingers, bedaubed with the corn-meal batter, already touched.
The idiot put his hands before his eyes, with a hoarse, wheezing moan of horror and remonstrance. The girl looked on with the tranquillity of sanity.
Harshaw could rely only on the superiority of his own intellectual endowments.
“Why, look here, madam,” he said bluffly, rallying his wits, “what do you want of me,—to stay here? I have got no notion of going, I assure you; not till daybreak, anyhow.”
He flung himself into his chair, and looked up at her with an exasperating composure, as if relegating to her all the jeopardy of the initiative and the prerogatives of action.
She quailed before this unexpected submission. She could have had no doubts as to her course had he shown fight; the tall and subsidiary young man also wore an air of sheepish defeat. Harshaw stifled his questions; he gave no sign of the anger that seethed within him, the haunting fear that would not down. He stretched out his booted legs to the warm fire, feeling in the very capacity of motion, in the endowment of sensation, a relief, an appreciated value in sheer life which is the common sequence of escape, and remembering that by this time, but for his quick expedient, he might be in case to never move again. He thrust his broad hat far back on his yellow head, put his hands into his pockets, and looked in his confident fashion about his surroundings, while the woman lowered her weapon, and presently went mechanically about her preparations for supper, evidently attended by some lurking regret for her precipitancy. She looked askance at him now and then, and after a time ventured upon a question.
“Ye say yer name be Harshaw?” she asked.
“I said so,” Harshaw replied. So alert were her suspicions that she fancied significance in the simple phrase. She exchanged a quick glance with the young man, who appeared at once lowering and beset with doubt.
Even Tad apprehended the meaning in the look.
“Ye know my name, ’pears like, better ’n yourn,” he grinned, with a guttural, foolish laugh.
As the boy spoke Harshaw was impressed anew with the change in his fate; the creature of cuffs and curses, who had been the very derision of perverse circumstances, was a marvelous contrast to the well-fed, fat, kindly-tended lad who leered good-humoredly from where he lounged against the great chimney. Yet despite this attestation of benignant impulses harbored here, there was the rifle, which had had such importunate concern for his attention, standing ready at the woman’s right hand.
“Well, madam,” said the politician, “I have been about right smart in the mountains, and I have partaken of the cheer around many a hearth-stone, but this is the first time I have ever been invited to look down the muzzle of a rifle.”
She winced visibly at this reflection upon her hospitality, as she knelt on the hearth, slipping the knife under the baking pones on the hoe, and turning them with a dexterous flip.
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” continued Harshaw. “I have never heard of anybody but law-breakers giving themselves to such practices,—moonshiners and the like.”
The woman suddenly lifted her face, her dismayed jaw falling at the significant word. Harshaw could have laughed aloud. The simple little riddle was guessed. And yet the situation was all the graver for him. There was a step outside; the door opened for only a narrow space; darkness had fallen; the room was illumined by the flaring flames darting up the chimney; he knew that he was scrutinized sharply from without, and now and then he heard the sound of voices in low conference.
It was well, doubtless, that the secret petitions he preferred to the powers of the earth and the air for the utter confusion and the eternal destruction of the mountain hunters who had made so slight and ineffective a search for him—or perhaps none at all—could not be realized, or his misfortune might have engendered far-reaching and divergent calamity, disproportionate in all eyes save his own.
He knew now that he had stumbled upon a gang of moonshiners, and had been taken for a revenue spy, or a straggler from a raiding party. How to escape with this impression paramount, or indeed how to escape at all, was a question that bristled with portentous dubitation. He was content to pretermit it in the guarded watchfulness that absorbed his every faculty, as one by one the men strode in to the number of four or five, each casting upon him a keen look, supplementing the survey through the door.
One of them he suddenly recognized. “I have seen you before,” he said, with a jolly intonation. “This is Sam Marvin, ain’t it?”
The owner of the name was discomfited when confronted with it, and seeing this, Harshaw was sorry that he had, with the politician’s instinct, made a point of remembering it.
He could with difficulty eat, despite the fatigues of the day, but he sat down among them with a hearty show of appetite and with his wonted bluff manner. His sharpened attention took cognizance of many details which under ordinary circumstances he would not have noticed. He could have sworn to every one of the rough faces—and right welcome would have been the opportunity—grouped about the table. The men ate in a business-like, capacious fashion, especially one lean, lank fellow, with unkempt black hair and a thin face, the chin decorated with what is known as a goatee. Notwithstanding their roughness they were not altogether unkind. Philetus could not complain of disregarded pleas as he begged from chair to chair, under the firm impression that there was something choice in the menu not included in the contents of the pan placed for him on a bench, which should serve as table, while he was to be seated on an inverted noggin. And the dogs spent the time of the family meal alternately in a petrified expectancy and sudden elastic bounds to catch the bits flung liberally over the shoulders.
When the repast, conducted chiefly in silence, was concluded, the group reassembled about the hearth-stone, the pipes were lighted, and conversation again became practicable. It required some strong control of his faculties to bear himself as an honored guest instead of a suspected informer, trapped, but Harshaw managed to support much of his wonted manner as he lighted a pipe that he had in his pocket and pulled it into a strong glow. Nevertheless, he was beset with a realization of how easy it would be for them to rid themselves of him without a possibility that his fate would excite suspicion. As he looked into the flaming coals of the fire, his quickened imagination could picture a man lying lifeless at the foot of a great wall of rocks,—lying motionless where he had fallen, but with an averted face,—and another vista in which his horse, with an empty saddle, with pistols in the holster, cropped the grass on a slope. He thought of it often afterward,—the man lying lifeless beneath the crags, with a face he did not see! This was the doom that persistently forced itself upon him as most obviously, most insistently, his; naught else could so readily release these desperadoes from the peril that threatened them. He began to remember various stories of Marvin’s old encounters with the “revenuers:” on one occasion shots had been exchanged; one or more of the posse had been killed; he could not remember accurately, but he thought this was accredited to Jeb Peake,—“hongry Jeb,” who could, according to the popular account of him, “chaw up five men of his weight at a mouthful an’ beg for more.” They had much at stake; perhaps, as they looked into the fire with that slow, ruminative gaze, they also saw a picture,—a halter wavering in the wind. The room alternately flared and faded as the flames rose and fell. It bore traces of renovation: the door was new, the floor patched. He made a rough guess that Marvin had taken possession of one of the long-deserted huts seen at intervals in the mountains. Raindrops presently pattered on the roof; then ceased, as if waiting breathlessly for some mandate; and again a fusillade; and anon torrents. The melancholy elements in the wild wastes without seemed not uncheerful companions in lieu of the saturnine group about the fire. Alack, for liberty, the familiar thing! Harshaw sought to reassure himself, noting their kindness to the idiot and to the little child. Philetus climbed over their feet, and made demands, of a frequency appalling to a mind less repetitious than the one encased in the downy yellow head, to be ridden on their great miry boots.
Suddenly Marvin spoke: “My wife ’lows ez how ye defended Mink Lorey when he war tried.”
“I did,” said Harshaw jauntily.
“Waal, did this hyar gal,—this Lethe Sayles, ez lives yander at the t’other eend o’ the county,—did she up an’ tell in court ennything ’bout me?”
Harshaw was not a truthful man for conscience’ sake; but in the course of his practice he had had occasion to remark the inherent capacity of the truth for prevailing. He was far too acute to prevaricate.
“Yes,” he said, sticking two fingers into his vest-pocket and swinging the leg he had crossed over the other, “she swore that you were moonshining and told her so; she had told me as much before. We wanted to prove that Mink was drunk, and had somewhere to get whiskey besides the bonded still. We couldn’t get in all the evidence, though.”
The fire snapped and sparkled and flared. The pendent sponge-like masses of soot clinging to the chimney continually wavered in the strong current of air; now and then fire was communicated to it, and a dull emblazonment of sparks would trace some mysterious characters, dying out when half realized.
Harshaw could but see that his frankness had produced its impression: there was a troublous cast in all the stolid countenances around the hearth; but he was glad to be regarded as a problem as well as a danger.
“In the name o’ Gawd,” exclaimed Marvin irritably, “why did ye kem hyar ter this hyar place fur? Ain’t Shaftesville big enough ter hold ye?”
Harshaw repeated the account of himself which he had already given to Mrs. Marvin. “I ain’t ready to go yet,” he remarked. “But when your wife thought I wanted to, by George, she got down the gun and said I shouldn’t.”
“Ye know too much,” suddenly put in “hongry Jeb,” who looked as cadaverous and as melancholy as his name might imply.
“I know enough to shut my mouth,” said Harshaw bluffly, “and keep it shut.”
He looked eagerly at “hongry Jeb,” as he threw this out tentatively.
The mountaineer’s face was distinct in the firelight, and he gazed at the leaping flames instead of at the speaker.
“I ain’t able ter afford ter resk it,” said “hongry Jeb.” He made a sudden pass across his jugular toward his left ear, exclaiming “Tchisk!”—the whites of his eyes and the double row of his shining teeth showing as he smiled horribly on Harshaw.
The lawyer turned sick. How could he hope that these moonshiners would jeopardize aught for his sake? He could trust only to himself.
There was some drinking as the evening wore on; the monotony of this proceeding was beguiled by the fact that one of the dogs took a drop occasionally, at the instance of the youngest of the moonshiners—a mere boy of twenty—and Marvin’s son Mose. It was desired that he should extend his fitness as a boon companion by the use of a pipe, but he revolted at fire and distrusted smoke, and displayed much power of shrillness when snatched by the ears and cuffed. He was finally kicked out, to crawl wheezingly under the house, debarred from the hearth-stone which unaccomplished dogs who were not even bibulous, much less smokers, were privileged to enjoy.
But the evening was not convivial. The moonshiners brooded silently as they drank and smoked. Among them, unmolested, Tad sat. He had never been so happy as now, poor fellow. He goggled about and laughed to himself till he fell asleep, his grotesque head dropping to one side, his mouth open, snoring prosperously.
Marvin glanced at him presently. Then he looked at Harshaw, showing his long tobacco-stained teeth as he laughed. “I hearn ye hev all been in a mighty tucker ter know what hed kem o’ Tad, down yander in the flatwoods,” he said. He sat in a slouching posture as he smoked, his legs crossed, his shoulders bent, his head thrust forward. “Lethe Sayles tole me ’bout’n it.”
“Old Griff has nearly lost his mind about Tad,” said Harshaw.
“What?” demanded Marvin, with an affectation of deep surprise. “Can’t he find nuthin’ else ter cuss an’ beat?”
“Pore—old—man!” exclaimed “hongry Jeb,” wagging his black head, and showing the gleaming whites of his eyes in his characteristic sidelong glance.
“Well, I expect Tad has been a good deal better off along of you,” Harshaw admitted. “But that don’t make it right for you to have kidnapped him.”
“Lord knows, we-uns didn’t want him,” said Marvin. “We-uns ain’t gifted in goadin’ sech a critter ez him, like old man Griff. We can’t git work enough out’n him ter wuth the stealin’. He jes’ kem up ter whar we-uns lived, one night. I reckon ’twar several nights arter he war flung in the water. He looked mighty peaked.”
“An’ I never see a critter so hongry,” put in the pullet boldly from her seat in the chimney corner, her long yellow feet dangling beneath her short homespun skirt, her hair, which was luxuriant, gathered in a sort of top-knot on her head, “’thout ’twar Jeb thar.” She gave a cackling laugh of elation at this thrust, as she knitted off her needle in a manner that might make one wonder to see a pullet so deft.
Jeb good-naturedly grinned, and Marvin went on:—
“We reckoned he war a spy for the revenuers, ’kase they ’lowed we wouldn’t suspect sech ez him, sent ter find out edzac’ly whar the place be, an’ we war ’feared ter let him go back.”
Harshaw winced.
“So we jes’ kerried him off along o’ we-uns. Mebbe ’twarn’t right, but folkses sech ez we-uns air can’t be choosers.”
“Naw, sir; else we can’t be folkses,” said “hongry Jeb.”
How could he grin, with that lean, ghastly countenance, whenever he contemplated his terrible jeopardy!
“Ef Tad hed been well keered fur at home I’d hev felt wuss, but ’twouldn’t hev made no differ,” said Marvin; “but I know’d I could do better by him ’n old Griff.”
“Mink’s in jail now to be tried again for drowning him,” said Harshaw, surprised at his own boldness.
“Waal, stranger,” said Marvin satirically, evidently going to make the best of it, “the court air gin over ter makin’ mistakes, an’ we pay taxes ter support a S’preme Court ter make some mo’. Man’s human, arter all; he can’t be trested ter turn from everything else, an’ take arter the right an’ jestice. He ain’t like my gran’dad’s dog, ez would always leave the scent of deer or b’ar an’ trail Injun. That dog knowed what war expected of him, an’ he done it. But man’s human. Man’s nuthin’ but human.”
“Ho! ho! ho!” laughed “hongry Jeb,” in appreciative elation.
A pause ensued.
The sound of the rain on the roof was intermitted at intervals, and the wind lifted a desolate voice in the solitudes. The sense of the vast wilderness without, measureless, trackless, infinitely melancholy, preyed upon the consciousness. Perhaps Harshaw, in the quick transition from the artificial life of the world, was more susceptible to these influences, more easily abashed, confronted with the grave, austere, and august presence of Nature. He had a fleeting remembrance of life in the city: the gush of soft light; the mingled sound of music and the babbling of the fountain in the rotunda of the hotel; the Capitol building, seen sometimes through morning fogs and contending sunshine, isolated in the air above the roofs of the surrounding town, like a fine mirage, some turreted illusion; and again its white limestone walls ponderously imposed, every line definite, upon the deep blue midday sky.
That other sphere of his existence seemed for the moment more real to him; he had a reluctance as of awakening from a trance, as he gazed at the unkempt circle of mountaineers about the dying fire.
They were beginning to yawn heavily now. Marvin was laying the chunks together and covering them with ashes, to keep the coals till morning. Harshaw looked on meditatively. Once, as he lifted his eyes, he became aware that they were all covertly watching him with curiosity and speculation.