VIII.
Leonard Rhodes arose from the bed to which his wounds had consigned him when he was at last permitted to dispense with the vigilant care and alert fears of the "yerb doctor." The methods of Phil Craig's practice consisted largely in frustrating disastrous possibilities. "Ye can't git up; ye mought fever," he replied to every appeal. "Ye mustn't think 'bout nuthin'; ye mought fever!" And after the extreme limits which had been assigned to Rhodes's durance were reached, the doctor revoked his promises of liberation, and required of him one day more, quiet and recumbent, for full measure. Rhodes might hardly have submitted had he not been willing that the community should think his hurt more serious than it really was. He himself appreciated that the wound was as trivial as it might be. But there was something disastrous to the pretensions of a candidate in the disproportionate importance that had been attached to it—the insult, for its paltry sake, that his friend had offered to Mr. Pettingill, his host, and a man who habitually voted with the opposite faction; and in a minor degree the slur cast upon the science of Phil Craig, who cared, however, not at all, looking upon Rhodes merely as an object of flesh and blood that might, under certain contingencies, perversely undertake to fever. Most of all, Rhodes deprecated the tragic conclusion of the midnight errand in his interest on which Steve Yates had been despatched. Although the community had generally accepted the conclusion that Yates had seized the opportunity for some unknown reason—a quarrel with his wife was frequently assigned as the cause—to flee the country, there were those who shook their heads darkly over the mystery, with misgivings and grim suggestions and hopes that "the body" would be found some day. And from these rumors Leonard Rhodes feared the defeat of all his cherished schemes. It was a personal popularity which he sought to conserve. Party feeling ran very high, and in point of strength the two opposing factions were closely matched. It was only by virtue of his own superior quality of comradeship, his geniality, the fact that he was untried and had the fascination of novelty, and was held to possess certain elements of character challenging admiration—being esteemed brave, gay, full of generous high spirits—that he had expected to overbear the balance, swinging at an impartial poise, and tip it ever so slightly in his favor. How far this prospect had been wrecked, how indissolubly his name was coupled with ridicule or reprobation, he had hardly dared to consider as he lay at length watching the light and shadow play in the full-leaved sycamore-tree close by the roof-room window, the flash of sunshine on the white wings of the nesting pigeons by the chimney, the wolf-skins swaying from the rafters, sometimes seeming, when the sun was low and the wind flickered, to reassume the symmetries of life, and to lurk there, with shining eyes and expectant motion, ready to spring. He could hear the river chant tirelessly its sweet low monody in its sylvan shadows; he knew the hour by the voice of the herds, and felt scant need of his watch ticking under his pillow; but most of all the flight of time was indicated by the sibilant wheeze of Mrs. Pettingill, often audibly conferring below stairs concerning the patient's dinner with the anxious, conscientious, cautious Craig, who seemed to consider all the disorders of the body to arise from the bad habit of eating to nourish it. His professional interdiction was upon almost every dish in Mrs. Pettingill's répertoire; but his back would be hardly turned before her heavy lumbering step was on the stair, and her countenance, red from bending over the coals, would appear above the door in the floor, and she would emerge carrying in her hand her appetizing blue bowl, or one of her large willow-pattern plates that knew more antiquated delicacies than often grace much finer ware. Corrugated consciousness of dereliction would be on her face, but a resolute determination to persevere in sinning.
"Ef Phil Craig hev got the heart ter starve ye, I ain't," she would wheeze. "An' ef ye air so contrairy-minded ez ter die o' this hyar leetle squab pie an' roastin' ears—roasted in thar husks—an' a small taste o' cheese and this transparent puddin', I'll jes' swear I didn't kill ye, an' ye hed nuthin' from my han' but cold spring-water."
And having thus adjusted her deceit to the possible pursuit of the laws of the land, she would administer her dainties, often descending heavily to her lair below-stairs for a fresh supply.
Thus it was that with all the hues of health, all his usual vigor of step and manner, Rhodes appeared once more before the gaze of the constituents whom he fain would capture.
"Hello! Ye've been 'possumin', Len," was the surprised cry that greeted him wherever he came. And although he might good-naturedly parry it, and respond to praise the "yerb doctor's" skill, still the fact that he had been scarcely hurt at all went the rounds of the gossips and caused much speculation.
"'Twar a powerful onlucky hit fur Steve Yates," one of the mountaineers observed at the blacksmith's shop one day, where a group stood about the door. "Ef' twarn't fur that, he'd hev been hyar yit, I reckon."
"Why did that thar Shattuck hev ter sen' Steve a-skedaddlin' off in the midnight fur another doctor-man when Phil Craig war thar, handy ter physic Rhodes with everything ez grows? That 'pears powerful cur'ous ter me," said the blacksmith, "every time I git ter studyin' 'bout'n it."
"Mark my words," said an elderly wight, the smith's father, who spent much time gossiping in his son's shop—he had a grizzled head of hair, on which his hat was tilted backward; a clean-shaven face, full of the script of years; and a manner not less weighty and impressive because his opinions were in some sort impeded by a toothless utterance, so did the evidences of age and experience lend value to his prelections—"whenst ye find out whar Steve Yates went, an' what he went thar fur, ye'll know why Shattuck sent him. They air tergether in that business. Mark my words!"
The suspicion exploded like a bomb-shell amongst the coterie, doing great execution. It was so patent a possibility that Shattuck should have used his friend's temporary unconsciousness and his own affected solicitude as a blind to despatch Steve Yates upon some mysterious errand of their own, from which he was never intended to return, that it amazed all the cronies that so obvious an idea had never occurred to them before. Far more natural than that Shattuck should experience so preposterous a fear for so slight a hurt. "Why," said the old man, "Rhodes looks ez survigrous ez that thar oak-tree!" pointing to a kingly and stalwart specimen, full-leaved and flush of sap, in all its ample verdure, as it stood overlooking the barn-like place. Far more natural than that Shattuck should distrust the science of Philip Craig, famous as a "yerb doctor," and prefer Dr. Ganey, the man of nauseous tinctures and extracts, and pills and powders, who was reputed, moreover, to have poisoned people by his "store drugs," and was known to have set a man's leg, fractured by a fall, so that although he walked he could not run nor leap, and had had the good use of it never since—to send for him, with Phil Craig at hand!
There were busy times after this at the blacksmith's shop, although not much forging was done, so completely did the mystery absorb both the frequenters of the place and its working force. They made a thousand guesses far from the truth, none of which seemed, even to the projectors, sufficiently plausible to adopt, until one day a conjecture, with all the coercive force of probability, came to their minds upon the receipt of strange news, which seemed to account at once for Steve Yates's absence and Shattuck's motive in employing him on this wild-goose chase.
On the previous day Shattuck had been singularly ill at ease. He was not a man vigilant for cause of offence, and when his friendship and trustfulness had been enlisted he was even obtuse to any change in the moral temperature of his associates. It had affected his nerves vaguely, before the fact was even elusively present to his perceptions, that Rhodes had begun to regard him differently, and that the new estimate colored his friend's manner. As this gradually grew upon his convictions, he received it with a sense of injury. He had in naught justified it. His presence here was not of his own motion. He remembered how Rhodes had besought his companionship upon this electioneering tour; how he had painted the beauties of the country, the quaint character of its inhabitants; how he had promised the opening of a mound on his own land to feed his friend's archæological fad, and a monopoly of all the curios that should be found therein, floridly offering them as lures, protesting himself, too, as under infinite prospective obligations, and urging his own interest. "I have to have a friend along, and Lord knows I don't want any of those Colbury galoots, with one word for me and ten for themselves."
And when Shattuck had acceded, and the peculiarity of his manner had proved attractive to the mountaineers, and encomiums from the simple people followed him here and there, Rhodes had been impressed with the idea that his friend was an immense acquisition and a positive help in the canvass, in which small matters of personal popularity would have to count against party principles. Few men in this world could be more engagingly genial and affectionate than was Leonard Rhodes at this stage of his onslaught upon the predilections of Kildeer County. Shattuck, who gave as slight attention as might be to these circumstances and their influence upon his friend's manner, had only felt that his heart warmed in turn. Although vaguely aware for some time that a change had supervened, he experienced a shock when a surly preoccupation, an intentional espousing of an opposite opinion, which evidently had no root in conviction, a dull monosyllable in reply, that was hardly reply at all, acquainted him definitely with Rhodes's state of mind and his indifference to its discovery—nay, that he rather courted a quarrel.
The culmination came shortly after the midday dinner; they still sat in the dining-room and smoked their pipes over a small smouldering fire, for, despite the brilliance of a July day, the air was chilly. They had gone back from Pettingill's cabin to Rhodes's own house, some seven miles distant down the valley, and were re-established there. It had been unoccupied for many a year; the transient tenant merely rented the lands of the farm; the house and the furniture remained much as his grandfather had left them. It was a double frame house, with curiously low ceilings; and although it had been for fifty years amazingly fine for the district, it was not quite equal to Colbury ideals, and its owner often pondered upon getting rid of it when he should have a sufficient offer for its purchase. He had lately utilized it as a point of departure for his hill-country canvass of the two counties, being more convenient than periodic returns to Colbury, and he had in the kitchen a scornful colored couple—strictly townsfolk—languishing in exile, amazed at the lack of culture of the mountaineers, and by the fact that there was so large an extent of waste country in the world.
"Ef Len Rhodes hatter be made gov'nor o' the State, he ain't gwine ter do it by foolin' dis chile agin up ter dis hyar mizzable, destitute wilderness ter cook fur him, sure!" Aunt Chancy had remarked to the equally disaffected and lugubrious Uncle Isham, who had come to cut wood and feed the horses.
Rhodes made no inquiry as to how they contrived to get through the lonely time during his absences, nor was he moved by their reproachful dark faces in the interludes of his returns. They were fond of society, and ornaments of select colored circles in their normal sphere, and their imaginings had never pictured aught so bereft of interest as this uninhabited space in the "flat woods" so near to the great ranges.
The house itself touched Shattuck's predilections. To him a peony, highly colored, on a black ground, in a mahogany frame, made a picture full of quaint character. The tall four-post bedsteads, with paper canopy emblazoned with a wreath of morning-glories, which suggested matutinal and industrial ideas rather than slothful lingerings beneath their fading blooms; the three or four carpeted steps at the foot of the bed, a sort of movable stair to enable one to mount into its comforts; the long serpentine sand-bag, which lay at the door to keep out the draughts; the stretch of mountains, blue far away, darkly bronze near at hand, that was visible from the tiny panes of every window—all combined to so suggest the past, to so disunite it from the present, that imagination needed little else to set these dim rooms astir again with former occupants, and to give him many an idle hour of pensive fantasies over his pipe.
He had glanced out of the door as he strolled about the dining-room, which opened on the porch at the side of the house; a mass of grape-vines twined over its dank and rotting roof; the heavy clusters of fruit had ripened here and there to a rich purple, with a silver bloom upon it, and again showed only translucent amber globules trenching upon a roseate hue. Amongst them all a tangle of white microphylla roses, their branches clambering high, was splendidly in blossom, and through the vista he saw the distant blue peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains, with the elusively glimmering mists upon them.
"Len," he said, suddenly, "you are a fool if you cut away that lot of grapes and roses. Let the porch rot. You can get a hundred such porches, but you won't come up with a tangle like that again in a lifetime."
Rhodes sat at ease, his chair tilted backward; his legs were extended at full length. His pipe was in his mouth, and his hat stuck on the back of his head; his richly brown hair was disordered on his forehead; his face was flushed, partly from the heat of the fire, partly from the smouldering irritation which Shattuck did not as yet divine; his nose, usually an inconspicuous feature, white and firm-fleshed, looked swollen and red, as if he had been drinking; his ungraceful posture drew his waistcoat into creases, and his old claret-colored coat, with a velvet collar, seemed high-shouldered and ungainly as he stayed his shoulder-blades against the back of the chair.
"Well, I'll undertake to do as I choose with my own," he broke forth, suddenly. "I'll put the axe to the root of the whole business if I want to."
Shattuck looked at him in amaze. "Why, of course, and welcome. What do you mean?" His tone was surprised and wounded, but pacific.
Rhodes, with a certain relief in liberating the pent-up tides of his vexation, went on with a visible increase of vehemence. "I mean that I have had about as much of your interference in my affairs as I have got a mind to put up with." He spoke between his set teeth, and with a toss of his hair, which was prone to fall upon his face.
Shattuck stood motionless, scarcely believing he had heard aright. A flush had mounted through his thin skin. He had a dismayed and hurt expression that was almost appealing. It was not that he found Rhodes's displeasure itself so overwhelming. That meant little to him. He was only aghast that Rhodes should make him feel it while a guest in the house. All the exigencies of hospitality hampered its recipient, and he hardly knew how to assert himself, how to lift his voice in defence.
"Will you tell me how I have interfered with you?" he asked, an almost imperceptible tremor in his tone. His eyes were fixed upon Rhodes, who did not meet them in turn, but kept his gaze upon the fire, still slowly smouldering.
"How? Well, I like that!" He cast his eyes up to the high mantel-piece, and laughed a little, showing his teeth—white and strong, but overcrowded and unevenly placed.
With all his odd bits of learning, Shattuck knew little of human nature. He had mastered more of the science of craniology than of those fine aerial transient guests that the skull may house—retroactive motives and full-winged schemes, and, strongest of all, that moral harlequin, coming and going, none knows whence or whither, the impulse. A mad bull is hardly in a state of mind or on a plane of culture to appreciate an accurately balanced syllogism, but Shattuck must needs offer logic to Rhodes:
"No stranger here could have influence enough with these people to interfere in your affairs. I am a stranger here. I could not interfere even if I would. How could I? Why should I?"
"That's what gets me!" cried his host, coarsely. "Why you should have undertaken to send seventeen miles for a doctor to physic a small scratch on the head, and how you could insinuate to an old man, whose guest I was—had forced myself on him, in fact, as well as you—that he might be strung up if I should die in his house for no fault of his—it all passes my comprehension."
Shattuck's flush grew deeper. His eyes, whose reproachful look the other never met, had a hot, hunted, harried look.
"I wouldn't have had it happen," cried Rhodes, clasping his hands behind his tousled head, the change in his attitude adding to the dislocation of his aspect and the precariousness of his posture, his chair still balanced on its hind-legs, his own legs still stretched out at full length—"I wouldn't have had Steve Yates sent on that lonely road at midnight on my errand, if I had known it, for a million—a quadrillion of dollars."
"Money seems really no object," Shattuck retorted, somewhat in his host's own vein. His eyes were alert now. The dull, hurt look had vanished. He was moved to defend himself against a reproach, unjust, indeed, but which his own troubled heart and tormented conscience and sensitive consciousness had often urged in their reasonless impunity. He was in naught to blame that any evil had befallen Yates—this he knew full well—and still he regretted, and still he reproached himself. And because of this he had become expert at his logical self-defence, and he sprang to its weapons as if for his life.
"A lonely road!" he sneered. "A late hour! As if I, a stranger in the country, did not travel it alone, and at midnight too, to escape the heat of a daytime journey, as everybody does who has occasion to come or go at this season. I took excellent care of myself upon it. I met nothing but a rabbit or two and a few stray cattle. It never occurred to me that Yates was not as safe on that road as in his own house. And I did not ask him to go. He volunteered. I did make too great a commotion over your being hurt, and I admit it. I was a fool for that; and I was mistaken—considerably—both in the nature of the wound and the man that got it. I gave myself too much solicitude altogether, far more than the subject warranted."
His eyes had succeeded in meeting Rhodes's at last, but they saw little of what was before them. The candidate had lowered his arms to a normal posture; the fore-legs of his chair had dropped to the floor; he sat erect, looking intently and deprecatingly at his angry friend, so hard to rouse, so thoroughly roused at last. Rhodes was of that temperament best controlled by the exhibition of a counterpart emotion. Shattuck's anger quelled his own. He was eager to interrupt, wincing under the low-toned words, husky with passion. He was of versatile capacities; he could be a balance-weight were there no one else to keep the poise. His anger was only indulged under the license of impunity. It had evaporated as if it had never fired his blood. He received the demonstration with a palpable surprise—as though he had done naught to provoke it—when his friend, turning toward the door, said, ceremoniously:
"And now, Mr. Rhodes, if you will add to your kind hospitality, for which I am indebted, the favor of ordering my horse, I will trouble you with my 'interference' no more."
Even Shattuck felt that he had gone too far, that he had needlessly quarrelled on a small provocation, when the other called out, naturally:
"Why, Shattuck, I am surprised! You ought to be ashamed to get mad so easy, when you know how I'm bothered and tormented out of my life. And with so much at stake! And you won't let me growl a little bit here with you at home, when I can afford to growl nowhere else, confound it! You ought to be ashamed!"
Shattuck hesitated. He cast a worried, agitated glance out of the window into the large freedom of the sunshine and the wind and the flying shadows of the fleecy summer clouds. There came a day when he remembered the moment, when he regretted that he had not ridden off into the buoyant midst of these lightsome elements. But at the time it seemed impracticable. There was something ludicrous, even more, unbecoming a gentleman, in leaving a friend's house in a pet, with the host's reproaches sounding in his ears, to be matched only by the bitterness of the guest's sneering retorts. There was, it is true, that implacable pride within him to which forgiveness is an unimagined possibility, and every fibre of it was poignantly astir. He did not conceive it possible that he could ever overlook Rhodes's lapse into the blunt speech of angry sincerity, unjustified by whatever his host might have come to feel. But he must have the semblance of comity and courtesy. In fact, he could hardly bestride his horse and ride away from the man's door without this friendliness, spurious though it might be, in his farewell. His face gave such token of his train of thought that Rhodes, although seeing him hearken to the suggestion of amity, did not swing back to the half-veiled surliness, too often the effect of an accepted effort at reconciliation.
"Lordy mercy! I'll let the weeds grow sky-high if you want to see the place go to rack and ruin," he said, as he bent forward to scoop up a coal in his pipe after the rural fashion he affected. "I didn't think you'd treat me so mean—the only friend I've got left; a broken reed, sure!" with a glance of reproach. "You might afford to let me maunder, and blame you or anybody else, I should think, for the confounded affair. As I'm likely to lose my election by it, I might have the poor privilege of a scape-goat."
"I won't play your scape-goat, I thank you very much," said Shattuck, his eyes eager with his wish to go, still hovering about the closed door.
"So I perceive," said Rhodes, shortly. Then, with a change of tone and an appealing glance of his dark-brown eyes: "But, for God's sake, Shattuck, don't run away and leave me the minute I flounder into a lot of bothers! For the Lord's mercy, try to put up with me a little, and let me grumble once in a while, for I do swear to you this whole thing has put me nearly beside myself. You know it is a canvass of personalities, and there's no telling the use this will be to Devens and his friends. If I can't carry these mountain districts I'm done, for the party issues will beat me like hell in Colbury and round about."
He took out of the breast pocket of the old claret-colored coat the envelope of a letter, which was scrawled over with figures pertaining to the relative population of the mountain districts, with an approximative calculation of the votes which he and his opponent might respectively receive. The smoke from his pipe curled between the paper and his eyes, but not even its sinuous vagaries served to alter the obdurate result, nor had his disaffected anxious gaze any effect, however slight, although he scanned these estimates forty times a day.
"I wish to God I knew where that confounded fellow Yates was!" he exclaimed. "They'll all have it that he died on account of my selfishness, being forced into Lord knows what dangers in my service." Then, with the politician's instinct for a popular pose—although at his own fireside, and with a man whom he did not care nor seek to deceive—he continued: "And for his sake, Shattuck, I'm more troubled than for my own. Why, I give you my word of honor, 1 hardly knew how to speak to his wife—I nearly said his widow—when I went to the house yesterday. And I couldn't look at that child of his. It's a calamity to them—a tremendous calamity—and I am concerned in it; and the Lord above knows I had no more to do with it than if I had been as dead as Hector!"
Shattuck had seated himself, his elbow over the back of the chair, his chin in his hand. He frowned heavily as he looked absently out of the tiny window-panes at the blue mountains, with so unseeing and troubled a gaze that Rhodes began to perceive that he had not only his own anxieties to restrain, but those of his friend as well. He sighed to assume the double load. He had a definite appreciation, however, that his position would hardly be bettered by his friend's desertion of him now, when he could not control the reasons therefore which Shattuck might give in his anger, and his opponent devise with so illimitable a license as speculation. He came to wish that he had let him go, but at that moment he exerted all his reserve force of geniality to heal the wound and frustrate his guest's departure.
"Oh, come on!" he cried out, suddenly, springing up actively, stretching both arms above his head, shaking out first one leg and then the other, that the trousers might slip down over his long boots, and seeking to rid himself of that stupor which waits on drowsing before a fire out of season—"come on! We are fairly baked before this fire. What ails that old nigger to build a big enough fire this weather to barbecue himself—and I wish he would! I'll order both the horses, and we will get out into the air, and get the cobwebs out of our brains. We'll ride up to Fee Guthrie's on the mountain, and I'll do a little electioneering, and show I bear no malice to him. And you'll see if he won't let you go digging around on his land in the cove for your pygmies. I declare I haven't treated you right, old fellow;" he clapped his hand jocularly on his guest's shoulder as they stood facing each other, and his manner of friendliness was not impaired, although he did not fail to see that Shattuck winced almost imperceptibly at his touch. "You haven't got a thing in the world but that old jug out of my mound"—and he glanced with a careless eye at a strangely decorated jar on the high mantel-piece—"and not a bone of a pygmy yet. Maybe Aunt Chancy could fool you with a beef bone or two—ha! ha! ha!—hearing you set such store on bones, hey?"
His discretion and his intuition were at fault. There is naught of which the man of science, albeit the veriest amateur, is so intolerant as ignorant ridicule. His fleering laugh jarred Shattuck's nerves, made sensitive by the ordeal of the morning, and his utter lack of appreciation of the meaning of that bit of pottery was as pitiable as if he lacked a sense—that of sight, for instance, and jeered at the idea of light. The human significance of it; the lost history of lands and peoples and civilization, of which it was a dim, vague intimation; the flight of time that it so fully expressed; the idea of death, of oblivion, of which it was so apt an exponent! Shattuck could not look at it without the thought of the hands that had carried it; the lips that had touched it; the strange, strange faces that had bent above it, reflected within its walls when full of water; the words, spoken in an unknown, forgotten language, of ambition or love or homely household usage, to which it had echoed—for a vibrant quality it had, porcelain-like. These immortal-seeming essences were all gone; yet here was the dumb insensate bit of clay left for him to turn in his foreign hands and ponder over with his foreign fancies—the idea wrung every fibre of feeling within him! And Rhodes's laugh was the vulgarity of the vandal.
The state of vacuity that does not feel and cannot know is made cognizable sometimes to the thinking and the feeling soul by a dreary sense of solitude, for which the consciousness of the finer susceptibility does not compensate. It was not that Shattuck resented the fact that his friend's limitations precluded his sharing these enthusiasms, as that that burden of isolation, that painful consciousness of a lack of congeniality, that yearning for fellowship, so poignant to the gregarious human animal, came upon him for the moment; a realization of being alone, out of the reach of his companion, beset him, and he found it bitter, albeit he recognized that his higher standpoint created the inaccessibility.
Rhodes, once more in the saddle, was infinitely conversable. He had on the face which he took about with him on his canvass—his best expression, gay, gentle, kind; his conversation was full of country jokes, which he delivered with a rural drawl, and he was about as rustic a specimen as an educated man can well personate. He never dropped the character for a moment, although he hardly cared to impress his friend with its value. Its lapses from his usual habit of speech revolted Shattuck in some sort, albeit the contorted language of the ignorant mountaineers never grated upon his somewhat nice philological prejudices. One was the voice of affectation—an aping of boorishness and rusticity and yeoman simplicity, which Shattuck called by the not inapt name of "poor-mindedness;" the other was the natural speech and manners of those deprived of opportunities of culture, and was entitled to respect as being the best they could do.
"Bless your soul, Rhodes," he said at last, with a touch of satire, "you needn't put so many negatives in a sentence with the kind object of pleasing me; I'm not a registered voter in either of your counties. And I love you so that I'd vote for you, if I could, just as willingly for three or four negatives in a single negation as for eight. Save 'em up, my dear boy. I remember the fate of the man who couldn't say 'No,' but I must say I don't think it impends for you at present."
"Hello! I didn't know you were such a school-master. I'll have to mind my p's and q's, hey?" said Rhodes, with a good-natured intonation, although he had flushed darkly at the taunt.
So instilled into his blood was the instinct of policy, however, that he abated naught of his determination to conciliate his friend if possible beyond this merely outward truce. And now was illustrated how subservient is the science of propitiation to the object upon which it is exerted, for Leonard Rhodes had been held to possess the subtle art to an extreme degree, and so proficient had he become therein that he was wont to find its unctuous exercise a pleasure. He could but himself admire the dexterity with which he brought the conversation to prehistoric America, especially prehistoric Tennessee. He had paused when they had reached one of the high ridges about the base of the great mountains far above, and he called to Shattuck to observe that, looking back toward his place, they could distinctly see the mound, and that, looking forward down the multitudinous defiles amongst the ranges, the pygmy burying-ground might be located by the proximity of the cataract, a mere cascade in the distance, an emerald gleam and a glittering, white, plume-like waving. Thence the transition was easy to the many antiquities found within the state. To his surprise, Shattuck seemed incomprehensibly to hold back and to grow reticent. Rhodes had material to work upon far different from the simple unsuspecting country folk. He had not thought that divination could so keep pace with most secret and supple intention, and that his object was perfectly plain and unglossed to the man whom it sought to mislead. Shattuck was almost openly impatient of the topic on which he was wont to love to talk, and which he often could not be prevailed upon to relinquish. He would not seriously discuss it now. When Rhodes demanded of him a theory concerning the ancient aboriginal races, based upon evidences of their advanced civilization, he replied with uncharacteristic flippancy that he was never acquainted with any of them, and that he could make a pretty pot of money if he had been. And when Rhodes, with that heavy assuming ignorance which is so ready to trench upon unknown, untried ground of laborious research, deeming all things slight and of small difficulty that are strange to its meagre acquisitions, attempted to argue certain hypotheses upon which he had heard him descant, Shattuck left the disquisition to his host, not even affecting to set him right when Rhodes himself could feel that he was floundering. The candidate was wanting in any fine capacity to read character or conduct in its more delicate script, and Shattuck's state of mind was as undecipherable hieroglyphics. Thus at cross-purposes they at last reached Guthrie's home, high up on the mountain.