IX.
The house was the usual small log-cabin, so overshadowed, however, by trees, dense and dark, that not the whole structure, but only the tiny porch and door were visible up the dusky green vista. When the sun fell through the leaves it was in fleckings of abnormal lustre, so deep was the shade. Fowls pecked about in the long dank grass. From high up on the mountain-side came the clear metallic clink of a cow-bell. A spring gurgled close at hand in the yard, and a vessel, with butter or milk in it, covered with a white cloth, was visible among the gravelly banks that bounded the spring branch. An old woman, tall and stalwart, sitting upon the porch, furtively looking at the two visitors as they came through the bars and up the path, had so forbidding an aspect that Shattuck was reminded of the superstition of "an evil eye." She gave them no greeting, but listened silently as Rhodes, having pulled himself together again into his genial, rustic, canvassing identity, asked for Felix Guthrie. He broke off short.
"Now, I wonder if you ain't Mrs. Guthrie!" he exclaimed.
"Ye air a good guesser," she said, with a sneer. "Who else would I be, hyar in Fee Guthrie's house?"
She wore no cap. Her hair, luxuriant and gray, was combed plainly down over her ears and caught in a heavy coil, that betokened its great length, at the back of her head. Her face in contrast was sallow and parchment-like. The features were singularly straight; her eyes were dark, her spectacles were mounted upon her head, and her expression was unsmiling. It was hardly wonderful that Rhodes should have lost his balance, and he had a discomfited sense that Shattuck might relish the fact. Shattuck, however, was looking about with his usual keen susceptibility to the interest of new places and people.
"I mean," said Rhodes, confused, "the second Mrs. Guthrie."
"I ain't the fust one, now, sure," she said, her eyes fixed upon him with a sort of pertinacious attention. "An' what's that to you?"
Rhodes made a mighty endeavor to cast off the influences that paralyzed his advances. "You'd never guess, and so I'll tell you. I have heard my grandfather talk about you enough—how he danced with you at a bran dance down on Tomahawk Creek. Remember old Len Rhodes? Young Len, he used to be; but I am young Len now, myself."
Her face changed suddenly, so unexpectedly that one might wonder that it did not creak, so stiff and immobile had the features seemed. There was a new expression in her eye—a sort of glitter of expectancy.
"What did he say, this hyar old young Len Rhodes o' yourn? What did he say 'bout'n me?" She had a cautious air, as if she reserved her opinions.
Rhodes had taken off his hat and was leaning against the post of the porch, although he still stood upon the ground. He burst into sudden laughter that seemed to startle the somnolent dark stillness of the shadows.
"Oh, no, Mrs. Guthrie," he cried, archly. "You don't catch me that way. You'll be saying next thing that because I'm running for the Legislature I'm going round the country trying to get votes by flattering the ladies. I don't know what the t'other Len Rhodes said to you that day at the bran dance on Tomahawk Creek years and years ago, but this Len Rhodes ain't a-goin' to repeat any of his second-hand compliments, not if he knows himself, and he think he do!"
A faint color was in her parchment-like cheek, a yellow gleam in her black eyes; the woman seemed to have grown suddenly young! A moment ago the idea might have been ridiculous, but now it was easy to see that she must have been beautiful—most beautiful. And she was determined to hear the words in which old Len Rhodes—in her day young Len Rhodes, the judge's son, and the richest and most notable man in all the county—had celebrated the fact. Her vanity still burned, albeit embers. How long, how long since fuel had been brought to feed this fire, that nevertheless would die only when her breath might leave her!
"Oh, ye air jes' a-funnin'! Ye can't remember nuthin' yer gran'dad tole 'bout the gals he danced with forty-five year ago. He couldn't tell 'em one from t'other hisself arter twenty year had passed. Gals is mos'ly alike," she added, with a consciousness that Rhodes had knowledge, as far as she herself was concerned, which contradicted this humble assertion. She smiled upon him. "Ye mus' git in the habit o' tellin' a heap o' lies electioneerin'. An' ye feel like ye mought ez well bamboozle one or two old wimmin ez not 'mongst the men. A few lies mo' or less won't make much diff'ence in the long count again ye at the jedgmint-day."
"I'll tell you something that's got the ear-marks of truth—something that Len Rhodes told me about you," declared Rhodes, apparently led on and over-persuaded into loquacity—"something that I couldn't know of myself. Ain't that fair, Shattuck? This is my friend Mr. Shattuck, Mrs. Guthrie. I carry him around to keep the girls from running off with me. The other Len Rhodes had no such trouble when you knew him. I'll be bound the main thing was to keep him from running off with the girls. Ha! ha! ha!"
Mrs. Guthrie bent her softened and unrecognizable face upon Shattuck, and said that he was "right welcome" and she was glad to see him. Then she turned to the candidate, with an anxiety which was almost pathetic, to hear that younger self praised in the repeated words of a man she had known forty-five years ago.
"Waal, I'll know the ear-marks of the truth whenst I hear it," she prompted his lagging resolve.
"Your name was Madeline Crayshaw," he began. He was gayly fanning himself with his hat.
"Ye could hev fund that out ennywhar," she said, expectantly.
"And your eyes were black," he went on, with an air of gallantry.
"They air yit," she interposed, flashing them at him.
"And for all your eyes were black, your hair was as yellow as gold, a yard long. Could I find that out now by looking at you?"
She shook her head.
"And Len Rhodes said you looked when you danced for all the world 'like a lettuce-bird a-flying.'"
"Who would hev thunk o' hearin' that old foolishness agin?" she cried, her eyes dim with pleasure. "I don't look like a lettuce-bird now; some similar ter a ole Dominicky hen, I reckon, stiddier a lettuce-bird. But that war the word on the tip o' Len Rhodes's tongue, for he never got tired o' talkin' o' yaller hair an' black eyes. I wonder the 'oman he married at las' warn't no better favored," she added, with a sudden hardening of the lines of her features. "Sech a admirer o' beauty ez he war! But he war a admirer o' lan's an' cattle an' bank-stock ez well; an' yer granmam war mighty well off, ef she war little an' lean an' hed no head o' hair at all, ter speak of."
Rhodes did not change color. There may have been those in his grandmother's days ready to break a lance in support of the supremacy of her charms, but her grandson had no mind to enter such antiquated lists. He only said, with electioneering subtlety—the development of which Shattuck watched with the admiring curiosity and wonder that he might feel concerning some acrobatic feat which he should, nevertheless, never desire to imitate or emulate—"Yes, pretty girls had mighty little need of bank-stock and lands then, as now. Beauty always will be chosen. If you had a daughter now, you might make it up to me for having given my grandad the go-by."
She looked at him with narrowing lids, wondering if he truly thought it possible that his grandfather had been her rejected suitor—a gay gallant, who had danced with all the country-side beauties, among whom he was a toast with his soft words and his flatteries sown broadcast, but who, when about to settle down, had chosen a staid, pious, educated wife, whose social status was such as to make his marriage a decided looking-up, even for him. Leonard Rhodes's claim to rank with "the quality" was largely dependent upon her side of the house. The assumptions of vanity, however, have an elastic limit. Mrs. Guthrie stretched it, convinced that he believed that the rich, dashing, flirting son of the judge was in the old days the disappointed swain of a simple mountain girl. Thenceforward, when she set herself to boast of her youth, she claimed the trophy of his heart, dust and ashes long ago in the grave of the simple-minded old gentleman, who had grown sober under life's discipline before he was forty, and had forgotten his merry youth save for a casual reminiscence.
"Yes," continued Rhodes, "I ought to be coming up here to see some lettuce-bird of a girl, instead of those hulking step-sons of yours, Fee and Ephraim, to humbug 'em into voting for me. Make 'em vote for me, Mrs. Guthrie. You owe me one now—you owe me one for the old time's sake."
"They needn't kem home ter me ef they don't vote fur ye," she said, fascinated with this fictitious conquest. She bore herself more proudly for it to the day of her death, although she knew in her secret soul the falsity of what he seemed to believe. On such slight fare as this can the vanity of a woman subsist.
And when he turned casually and asked, "Where are the boys, anyhow?" she directed him to a barley field, where they were cradling barley, and told him to come back that way with his friend, and she would have a "snack" for them. Shattuck marked, as they started, the alacrity with which she was rolling up the stocking that she had been knitting, and sticking the needles into the ball of yarn, her fine head, with its wealth of gray hair, distinct against the heavy vines that draped the porch. Their way took them around the side of the house in the deep lush grass, past the beehives all ranged by the fence, which was ascended and descended by a flight of steps, and surmounted by a small platform, and thence down through the orchard. Here the birds congregated in the thickly matted foliage. Only now and then at long intervals its dark-green shadow was penetrated by the sun. The warm fragrance of the so-called June apples was on the July air; the clover bloomed underfoot, and the bees boomed; the call of the jay, the sweet pensive cooing of a dove, sounded; then all was silence, save for a mere whisper of the sibilant wind.
Rhodes took off his hat as he walked, with the air of a need to refresh himself, his richly brown hair slightly stirring in the breeze. He cast his absorbed glance at his friend.
"Ain't she tur'ble 'oman?" he said, his electioneering ellipses sticking to his speech.
"Not so very 'tur'ble,' that I can see," said his friend, with unnoticed mimicry.
"Oh, Lord! yes, she is!" And Rhodes wagged his head with an unequivocal sincerity. "I know folks say she was an awful termagant with her first husband, who was a consumptive; and they did have a story"—he lowered his voice, and glanced cautiously around him—"that she hastened his end to be rid of the bother of nursing him. And then she married this fellow Guthrie's father. And she made a perfect jubilee up here a-beatin' the childern. I know the tales about it useter skeer me! I was a little shaver then, and I wouldn't go in the dark for fear of meeting her, though I had never seen her. At last one day Felix got his chance, and bit her arm nearly through, and ever afterward he clawed and bit and fought till she let him and Ephraim alone. Yes, my grandfather said she turned out exactly like he always knew she would."
"Why, I thought you said he was in love with her," exclaimed Shattuck, for Rhodes's representation had borne such verisimilitude as might deceive a casual on-looker as well as one eager to be convinced. Rhodes cast upon him an amazed glance.
"What!" he said, in his genuine "quality" voice, as if this had touched the climax of the improbabilities.
Shattuck marked the vibrations of pride and surprise ring out smartly.
Then Rhodes, hesitating for a moment, added, "My grandmother was a lady. As to beauty"—the sneer about beauty had evidently rankled—"why, such things as prettiness and coquetry were never thought of in connection with her. She was a lady, and when you've said that you've said it all. And she was such a superior woman! My grandfather outmarried himself more than any man you ever saw."
Shattuck was silent for a moment. "I thought," he remarked at length, "that it was the American eagle that fluttered most through the rhetoric of electioneering eloquence. I didn't know that the lettuce-bird had superseded the big national fowl."
"Oh," exclaimed Rhodes, who had waited on his friend's words with a knitted brow, and he drew a long breath of comprehension, "grandpa did use to say the prettiest girl he ever saw was this Madeline Crayshaw. He never saw her but once. It was at a bran dance on Tomahawk Creek—some sort of a political commotion, speechifying in favor of Henry Clay or some other old cock. He said her hair was the color of nothing in this world but a lettuce-bird, and she had the disposition of a panther. He said she reminded him of a wild woman—some sort of savage—and he wondered if she could look pleased, and if she were subject to the same sort of compliments that other girls like. So when she was glowering round at the other girls as if she could rend 'em with jealousy, he tried the lettuce-bird dodge. And, bless your soul, she was as pleased and sweet as pie."
"And has remembered it for forty-five years, poor thing!" said Shattuck.
"Ha! ha! ha! 'Poor thing!' She never made you learn to kick and bite and fight to keep a whole skin and a whole set of bones. Fee Guthrie don't say 'poor thing!' I won't go back to the first husband, for I hadn't the pleasure of his acquaintance, and he may have died simply because it was too much trouble to live."
"And you made her believe that you thought your grandfather was in love with her—had been rejected by her. You deceived her!"
"Man alive! how could I? She knew she never saw him but once in her life. And how can I make tenders of his affections at this late day? Tenders of affection are not retroactive. A man can't flirt as proxy for his dead grandfather. It was merely a little electioneering compliment."
"Oh, Rhodes, how do you manage to look yourself in the face in the mirror?" exclaimed Shattuck, with a laugh.
"I look at myself in the mirror with a good deal more pleasure than is proper, I expect," said Rhodes, smoothing his handsome and lustrous red-brown beard. He tipped his straw hat over his smiling, full-lashed dark eyes, for they were out of the shadows at last, and in the sun amongst a stretch of the barley. The wind bent it; long glintings of pale light pervaded it. The whole field was of a delicate, fluctuating green, with these fine undulations like quicksilver running over it. Sometimes the shadow of a cloud came, a thing swiftly scudding and noiseless too, and the green, hitherto held in indefinite solution, was precipitated into a pure emerald tint, for this was a later sowing than the spaces further down the slope, which had grown tawny with ripeness, and showed on the hither side the long swaths from the cradling, drying upon the ground. The cradles lay there too, and beneath the dark shadow of a great spreading buckeye-tree in a corner of the fence—the only one in the field that bore its pristine richness of foliage, for the rest, gaunt and bare, girdled long ago, towered into the air, dead, white, and unsightly—lounged the two brothers, loitering away the heated hour.
From the depths of the cove below, this field on the mountain slope was visible a long way. Shattuck remembered having observed it as a dull, light-tinted, tiny square in the midst of the dense primeval woods that encompassed it. Now he looked with interest to identify in turn the landmarks of the cove. So purple it was in the distance, save where the slopes rose on either hand, and the summits of the forest grew gradually into a bronze hue, and thence to the deep, restful green of the full summertide. Far away all the horizon was bounded by many a range and peak, painted in all the gradations of blue, from a dull, blurred tint to the finest turquoise delicacy, and rising tier upon tier, till at last the enamelled sky limited the climbing heights. Here and there in the depths below, vague lines marked where the fences ran. A tiny curl of smoke first betokened the Yates cabin; he saw the sun strike full on its shining roof. But most salient of all, the river gleamed a steely gray beneath the craggy walls of the gorge, and the cataract danced all white and green, like a jewel endowed with a flashing life. This only, in the sweet serenity and peace of the scene, seemed to move. The wind came and went, it is true, but with scant token of its presence; only now and again a suggestion of the pallid reverse side of the leaves bestreaked the mountain slopes and marked its path. A flock of sheep feeding in a brambly, rocky space were as motionless as a pastoral scene on canvas. Once a glow of an intense blood-bay color struck his keen eye, and made him aware that a horse was tethered a little way down from the house; the sun struck upon the glossy flank; then the animal slipped into the deep shadow, and was seen no more.
None of this had Rhodes observed. His eyes were fixed upon the two brothers as they lounged amongst the grass and weeds in the fence corner, culpably overgrown in the eyes of a farmer, but cool and sweet in the dense shade of the buckeye-tree, and with sundry long tangled vines of the purple and white passion-flowers, clear-eyed in the grass, and the scarlet trumpet-blossom flaring over the staked and ridered rail-fence. There could hardly be two men less alike, the difference accented since they were both bareheaded—the one with his grave, forceful features, at once sullen and sad, his long curling hair hanging on the shoulders of his blue cotton shirt; the other bullet-headed, close-cropped, with a twinkling, merry eye, a propitiatory expression, a broad face that would look young even when it should be withered and wrinkled like a shrivelled apple, and the coarse brown tufty hair should be as white as snow. The latter looked up with a ready-made, adjustable smile as Rhodes's hearty "Howdy, boys?" rang upon the perfumed air. The candidate did not wait for them to rise, but flung himself at length into the sweet grass, taking his hat off his head and leaning his shoulders against the big buckeye-tree.
"Waal, how do you-uns do, Mr. Rhodes?" said Ephraim, with smooth cordiality. "How be you-uns a-kemin' on these days? A month o' Sundays sence we hev seen ye."
He then looked quickly at his brother, with an anxious submission of his conduct for the fraternal approval. For Ephraim Guthrie labored heavily between the quick geniality of a mercurial temperament, a lack of confidence in his own judgment, and a childlike reliance on his brother's opinion: without its coincidence with his own he could not be at ease for a moment. He always spoke precipitately on the impulse of the first, was checked by the second, and waited with pathetic anxiety for the third. He was all things to all men, and this vacillating lack of consistency rendered his amiability of little value in the estimation of the candidate. Rhodes saw with disappointment the other brother, the valid object of conciliation, rise, after a mutter of salutation, to join Shattuck, who, with a nod to the two, had turned away, and stood, with one hand in his pocket, silently surveying the scene below him. He only lifted his eyes slightly in recognition of Guthrie's approach as the burly young mountaineer drew near him, and it was his uncommunicative host who spoke first.
"Glad ter see ye, Mr. Shattuck—glad ter see ye on the mounting."
Shattuck divined that he enjoyed unusual cordiality in being deemed by his host preferable for conversation to Rhodes. The injury which Guthrie had inflicted upon the candidate, and which he had been thought to so magnify, recurred to his mind, with the further fact that it was no accident. Guthrie evidently still cherished the motive that prompted it, and bore malice. It was intention that had led him to leave the candidate to talk to the plastic younger brother while he himself held aloof under the guise of joining the other guest. Nevertheless, his ear was keen for the conversation between the two, which the crafty Rhodes may have in part designed for him, and Shattuck was aware that it was only a divided attention with which he was favored. He responded, however, with equal courtesy.
"A fine view you have here, Mr. Guthrie—a very fine view. I don't know its equal anywhere."
Guthrie glanced quickly at him, then ran his eye over the scene, with the effect of seeing it for the first time. He knew no other aspect of the world. It had never occurred to him that the lives of many other people were not bounded by these fine and massive symmetries of mountain ranges in every tender phase of purest color; by infinite distances, challenging the capacities of farthest vision; by softest pastoral suggestions of cove and slope; by primeval wildernesses and stern and rugged solemnities of crags; by phantasmal chutes of flying mountain torrents. His sense of its beauty was blunted by the daily habit of its presence; paradoxically, it could be brought home to him only if it were swept away.
"Yes," he said, uncertainly, "an' we'd hev a good lookout fur corn ef we could hev mo' rain." And he cast a weatherwise eye angrily at the sky, where all the clouds seemed gadding abroad a-pleasuring only, and with no idea of utility as they dallied with the wind. "Not," he added, with an after-thought and a certain precipitation, as if he were afraid that the remark might be overheard, and forthwith acted upon—"not ez I want ter hev enny fallin' weather nuther till we-uns git in this hyar barley."
The differing interests of his crops evidently divided his affections, and he was in the normal condition of the farmer disappointed in either rain or shine.
They stood silent for a moment by the fence, and as Shattuck turned one of the great trumpet-flowers in his hand and looked down into its scarlet horn, then let the tendril spring back elastically into its place, Rhodes's words came to them as he wrestled with Eph Guthrie's presumable political persuasions against him. These were altogether assumed by the candidate for the purposes of argument, for which the plastic Eph furnished but a straw man, as it were, easily knocked down, requiring to be cleverly and surreptitiously picked up again by his insistent opponent, in order to plant still more well-delivered and coercive blows.
"Fee 'ain't got no grudge against me, I know," Rhodes was saying. "I don't bear no malice for a little tussle like that, and I know Fee don't."
"How ye know he don't?"
Shattuck was startled by hearing this sotto voce comment upon the dialogue by Fee in person close to his elbow. He turned and looked at the man, seeking to convey in the glance an intimation that he had spoken his thought aloud and that it had been overheard. Felix Guthrie evidently cared as little as might be. His eyes met Shattuck's unabashed.
"Fee ain't in no wise malicious," Eph piped up.
"I know it—I know that—no man better," Rhodes interrupted him promptly, for he knew that Eph could talk by the yard measure on the subject of his brother's perfections, so close was the fraternal bond. "I know Fee can't bear malice. I like Fee, and Fee likes me, and won't do a thing against me—not a thing!"
"Waal, ye better not be too sure o' that," the voice at Shattuck's elbow said, in that suppressed, significant soliloquy.
Shattuck, embarrassed by these confidences in prejudice to his friend's loudly expressed conclusions, was about to turn away, when Guthrie's hand was laid upon his arm.
"Stranger," he said, his head with his big broad hat and its clinging curls bent forward, "don't it 'pear a sorter cur'ous dispensation to you-uns that that man yander b'lieves so what he say whenst it air in my heart ter kill him—yes, sir, ter kill him!—if he war ter interfere with me?"
"'YES, SIR, TER KILL HIM EF HE WAR TER INTERFERE WITH ME!'"
"What!" said Shattuck, uneasily feigning. "Do you want to go to the Legislature too?"
"Legislatur' be damned!" said the other, in a deep husky tone, and with a meeting of the straight heavy eyebrows above his intent eyes. "I ain't keerin' a minit's breath 'bout'n the kentry an' sech. But ef he interferes with me 'bout—'bout Letishy Pettingill, his life ain't wuth much purchase—not," he shook his head with a formidable look in his eye, "much purchase."
Shattuck was roused to a sense of danger. He had already interfered too much, and with disastrous results, in his friend's interests; but here was a peril so patent, so immediate, that it was a most obvious duty to seek to diminish the menace. "You mus'n't be disposed to lay too much blame on Rhodes," he said. "She mightn't like either one of you, but somebody else."
"Who's he?" demanded Guthrie, breathlessly, with an evident instantaneous transference of the intention of vengeance and the pangs of anxiety to this myth.
"I don't know. Do you suppose she told me? Women don't tell these things; that's one of their little ways."
Guthrie drew a long sigh. "An' a mighty mean way too," he commented.
"And men are not often more communicative," Shattuck dexterously equalized the balance. "Mr. Rhodes hasn't talked to me on the subject, but I think I might undertake to say for him that he doesn't want to interfere with you in that quarter."
"He did the night o' the infair at Pettingill's," the slow mountaineer argued, with a swift application of logic.
"Oh, pshaw! he didn't want to 'dance Tucker,' that's all," said Shattuck, with a laugh, and once more seeking to turn away.
Guthrie's hand closed upon his arm; his eyes were on the stretch of barley, bending and swaying as the wind swept through its pliant blades, and shoaling from an argentine glister to green, and from green again to elusive silver glintings—what time the cove below was dark and purple and blurred, as a great white cloud hung, dazzling and opaque, high, high in the sky, and, as it passed, the valley grew graduually into distinctness again, with the privilege of the sunshine and the freedom of the wind, and all its landmarks asserted anew.
"Stranger," Felix said, lowering his tone, "she made ch'ice o' him stiddier me. I hed the right ter dance with her, an' she made ch'ice o' him."
"What of it? That happens every day; a woman prefers one man to another. 'Tisn't worth a quarrel."
"'Pears ter me it's better wuth killin' a man fur than all the other quar'ls that men die in daily."
Shattuck, looking into those vehement eyes, felt an uncomfortable chill stealing along his spinal column, hearing all the time Rhodes's hearty voice as he lay all unconscious on the grass, and held forth to the acquiescent, utterly unimportant Ephraim.
"Would that make her like you any better if she liked him?"
Guthrie's eyes turned ponderingly away to the roof gleaming in the cove that sheltered her at the moment.
Shattuck took confidence. "That isn't the way to make her like you, and that's what you want."
"Hain't Rhodes been thar lately?" demanded Guthrie. "I axed her, but she hev got sech a tormentin' way she wouldn't tell me."
"Only to talk to Mrs. Yates, and see if he could do anything to help her to hear from her husband. Oh, Rhodes would like Letitia a deal better if she could vote for him. He would go to see her every day then, you might be sure."
Guthrie cast a glance of frowning contempt over his shoulder at Rhodes; then, with a sudden change of tone, he said: "I hev been mightily troubled in my mind lately 'bout'n him. I war fitten ter hope in my heart ez he wouldn't git well, though I hev been layin' off ter repent some, fur I know that ain't well pleasin' ter the Sperit. I wouldn't hold Rhodes no gredge ef 'twarn't fur her. An' though she showed she hed ruther dance with him than with me, she don't 'pear ter like him noways special. An' sometimes I feel like I ought ter make myse'f easy."
The pitiable vacillations of a lover's hopes and fears appealed to Shattuck. The strength of the man's will, the sternness, almost savagery, of his character, added a force to all that he said, not lessened by Shattuck's knowledge of the object of his affections, or, rather, that upon that aerial and whimsical identity little knowledge was predicable. His disposition was to reassure, to soothe.
"Oh, you may indeed make yourself easy as far as Rhodes is concerned," he insisted. "Rhodes is thinking about nothing in this world but his election, and you ought to show a generous, friendly spirit, and vote for him, and let by-gones be by-gones."
"Oh, Lord! I'd jes' ez soon vote him inter a seat 'mongst the choir o' archangels ez not—though he'd look mighty comical thar, I'm a-thinkin'—ef I war sure ez he warn't gittin' ahead o' me 'bout Litt Pettingill."
He sighed deeply, and cast an absorbed, unseeing glance over the landscape. His strong brawny hand, still on Shattuck's arm, trembled slightly.
"I ain't like other men, stranger. I never loved nobody but her in all my life. Hate hev been my portion. Hard licks hev been my policy, an' the more ye air ready ter give, the less ye hev ter take. That's the way the world goes."
And Shattuck could not gainsay this dictum of the mountain philosopher, albeit the world from which he deduced this cogent truth was but the breadth of the cove.
"Ephraim I hed ter stan' up fur, bein' ez he war so all-fired helpless whenst small, but it air sorter of a habit o' takin' keer o' him an' speakin' him fair, account o' other folks treatin' him mean; I never sure enough keered fur him—though I don't want him ter hear me say that, nuther. I never knowed what love meant till I tuk ter dreamin' 'bout Litt all night an' studyin' 'bout her all day. An' I do swear it's in my heart ter kill enny man ez kems atwixt us."
"Well, 'tisn't Rhodes," Shattuck declared, easily. "And to that I'd be willing to take my oath."
"Ye see, stranger, I be mightily afflicted," said Fee Guthrie, and his strong voice trembled.
"You don't look like it, my friend," returned Shattuck, with a smile.
"Oh, I am!" cried the other, with a poignant intonation. "Even ef Rhodes warn't ahead of me, an' ef she liked me, she moughtn't be willin' ter marry me. Some wimmen wouldn't. I hev got that step-mam o' mine ter take keer of; many a gal wouldn't 'gree ter 'bide with her. An' I can't leave her!"
Shattuck, tiring but a moment ago, felt a freshening of interest. "Why," he said, "I have heard that she was unkind to you and your brother when you were children."
"Onkind! Lord! that warn't the word fur it till I got the strength ter be more onkind ter her. But she don't own nuthin'. She 'ain't got nuthin' ter live on. I promised my dad ter support her."
There was a pause.
"Stranger, folks tell a heap o' tales on her. They 'low she killed her fust husband, an' hev 'witched folks, and casts the evil eye. She wouldn't be safe. Ef 'twarn't fur my dad fust, an' then fur me, she'd hev been made ter answer ter the folks in the cove fur her deeds. But the Guthries hev the name o' shootin' mighty straight. So she hev been lef' ter be."
There was another pause while he took off his hat and fanned himself with its broad brim. With it still in his hand he resumed: "She 'witched my dad, I reckon, ter git him ter marry her, though folks said she war good-lookin' in them days. An' dad ez good ez 'witched me; it's an evil spell he flung around me, sure. I knowed what he war goin' ter ax me on his death-bed; I jes' knowed it in all my veins, in every drap o' blood. The doctor said he couldn't live fur twelve hours more. An' I got on my horse an' I rid away. I rid fur an' I rid constant, an' when the horse couldn't git along no furder I rested under a tree. I rid fur forty-eight hours—mind ye, the doctor said twelve—an' at last I 'lowed 'twar safe ter kem home. I kem. An' thar, propped up in the bed, war the skeleton o' a man with Death's hand on his throat, waitin' fur me an' fur my promise—an' Death waitin' too. I reckon Death tuk right smart pleasure in that minit—he knowed he got us both through that promise, fur life couldn't mean nuthin' fur me arterward. An' somehow, though I hed fled that promise, I couldn't holp makin' it. How kin ye look in a dyin' man's eyes an' deny him? I promised I'd bide with her an' take keer of her ez long ez she should live. He war dead in a minit. He jes' waited till the words passed my lips. An' he looked at me. An' then he fell back dead."
Shattuck was silent. Even his facile optimism was at fault for the nonce. And after another long-drawn sigh Felix went on:
"'Tain't made my life easy. I knowed that minit I went into chains, fur a promise ter the dead ain't like one ter the livin'. An' though I owe her nuthin' but gredges, both fur me an' Ephraim, 'tain't in gredges I be 'lowed ter pay the debt. I never knowed the weight of it, though, till I met that thar leetle snip o' a gal. 'Pears ter me Litt ain't like nobody that ever lived afore; the very way she turns her head air diff'ent, an' the hair grows on it not similar ter none. Folks round about the mountings say she ain't good-lookin', but her face shines ter me in the darkest night."
"She is—she is beautiful, and the rarest type of beauty," cried Shattuck, warmly; "she is unique. She would be considered most beautiful anywhere else."
Guthrie turned upon him a face aglow with gratification. "That's what makes me like you-uns, stranger," he said, cordially. "Ye 'pear ter sense things so. But I war set agin ye some, at fust, knowin' ye ter be Rhodes's friend," he added, frankly. "She likes ye too, Litt do. The t'other night whenst I war visitin' thar she talked ter Mis' Yates an' me an' Baker Anderson 'bout nuthin' in this worl' but you-uns, an' how smart an' perlite ye be, an' book-l'arned, an' diff'ent from them in the cove."
Shattuck received this with a vague, indeterminate thrill, which he did not then discriminate as premonition, but which he remembered afterward.
Guthrie was beset by no suspicion. "Lord!" he exclaimed, his face fervent and flushed, "ef I could take that thar leetle gal's hand in mine ter walk through this life, I could make the journey well pleasin' ter the Lord, though I don't reckon I'd keer whether 'twar heaven or hell arterwards. 'Twould make up ter me fur all the troubles I hev hed in this life. An' they ain't a few—they ain't a few. But I be powerful hampered, powerful hampered, stranger, even ef I warn't so all-fired 'feared o' Rhodes. She never would abide ter live along o' my step-mam, an' I can't leave her. I hev swore a oath ter the dead." Then he seemed to shake off his fears. "It's done me good ter talk so free. I couldn't hev done it—ter a stranger too—'ceptin' I knowed what store Litt set by ye, an' how smart she 'lows ye air."
Once again that vague prophetic disquiet thrilled along Shattuck's nerves. Felix had put his hat again upon his head; his face was softened with a reminiscent smile, as his eyes dwelt upon the furthest blue peaks, most illusory semblances of mountains, faint sublimations of azure, refined almost to nullity, upon the horizon.
"T'other night, what time she could spare from tormentin' Baker Anderson—an' she do make him funny enough ter set a horse a-laffin'—she spent in tellin' them cur'ous tales ye hev set a-goin' 'bout the folks ez war in this kentry 'fore the Injuns. An' Baker axed ef them Phœnicians warn't jes' the Fed'ral army. He 'peared ter think ez ye hedn't got the news o' the War yit. It liked ter hev killed Litt. She couldn't quit laffin'. But she tuck Mis' Yates up mighty short 'bout the Leetle People, an' 'lowed ye didn't want ter examinate thar graves fur gain, but fur knowledge fur the hist'ry o' the kentry."
And suddenly Shattuck's eyes were alight. He took instant advantage of this unexpected recruit to the ranks of scientific investigation. "She was exactly right, and shows her common-sense. And I wish, Fee"—he adopted a cordial familiarity of tone in his anxiety—"you would take that view yourself, and let me examine one or two of those graves."
Guthrie evidently experienced an inward struggle. He was divided between a sincere attraction which he felt toward the stranger, a wish to please, and a repugnant reluctance into which conscience—his queer, distorted, backwoods conscience—entered largely.
"I couldn't let ye tote the bones off, even ef they air prehistoric." He thought the word signified some sect different from Baptist or Methodist, and heterodox enough to forfeit the sanctity of sepulchre, since he had heard it so often urged by Shattuck, in extenuation of his wish to examine the graves. "I couldn't do that. He mought not like it whenst he wakes on the jedgmint-day ter find his bones in a strange place; he mought never hev been out'n Tennessee in his life, an' not be 'quainted with nobody risin' at the same time 'round him. But ye may open one grave, an'"—he relented still further, looking into Shattuck's eyes, eagerly fixed upon him—"an' ef he hev got a jug like the one I seen, I'll let ye hev it, an'," his brows grew anxious with the devising of the expedient, "I'll loan him a pitcher from the house, so he'll hev one, though the Lord only knows what he wants with it, an' mebbe at the las' day he will hev forgot, an' won't know the diff'ence."
"I won't take the jug," said Shattuck, suddenly infected with the reluctance to rifle the sarcophagus, so strong amongst the mountaineers, so alien to the man of science. The forgotten relics lying there in that long rest became all at once, through Guthrie's homely speech, individualized, invested with the rights of property, the sense of a past and the certainty of a future, humanized as a man and a brother, rather than a system of bones that might, ethnologically considered, establish or disprove a theory, its manner of burial less significant of the universal doom of death and the hope of resurrection than of the civilization of the race and the fashion of the day. "I won't take the jug. I only want to see what this widespread story of prehistoric pygmy dwellers in Tennessee rests upon. That is all. I think they must be children—these Little People. I won't take the jug."
Guthrie's face cleared instantly. "Waal"—he drew a long breath—"I'm glad o' that. Fur ef they air chil'n, he mought set mo' store on his jug an' his beads 'n on his soul's salvation. I don't see ez it could hurt ter jes' lift up the top stone an' set it back agin. Bein' ez it's you-uns, I'll resk it enny-hows." The opportunity of investigating this most unique myth, originating how and where no man can tell, of which so much has been so diversely written and said, caused every sentiment of the archæologist to glow within him. In this secluded region it was hardly probable that the tread of science had ever before pressed the turf of the pygmy burying-ground. He should be able to speak from actual experience. There was no doubt concerning the spot. And all the country-side confirmed the tradition with singular unanimity, with one voice. Every detail was full of interest; the very method of coffining—the six slabs of stone in the shallow graves, the strange weavings and material of the shrouding rugs and mats, the ornaments, the weapons, the jugs with the sea-shells within—what rich intimations of the industrial status, the civilization of these people of the pygmy myth! Ah, here indeed was history in its most unimpugnable form! These tokens should balk oblivion, and truth prevail even in the grave.