In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

XI.

He was not sorry that farther conversation was precluded by the necessity of riding in single file, for the road, rocky and narrow, hardly more than a bridle-path, indeed, was beset by precipices, now on one side, now on the other, and again sheer down on both, their way lying along the crest of a high comb-like ridge, above abysses veiled by the heavy growth of pines, the plumy tops waving far below. Rhodes and Shattuck found it needful to give careful heed to their steps, for their horses, bred in the "flat woods," trod this narrow ridge with a gingerly gait as if the ground were hot, with pricked-up ears, and with now and again a convulsive snort of surprise and disparagement. But the sure-footed mountain mare, well inured to the craggy heights, went deftly and carelessly along at a sharp trot, occasionally snatching a casual mouthful from the bushes that precariously clung to the wayside, while the colt, with the nimblest disregard of lurking dangers, caracoled and curveted, now in advance and now behind the party, showing its flying, unshod heels in almost impossible attitudes against the sky, inconsistent with the laws of gravity and of standing upon the earth at all. Here could be seen the great contours of the range, invisible from the cove, or but dimly suggested by variant shades. The massive slopes rose on every hand; from deep intervenient ravines came now and then silver gleams of mountain torrents among the crags and the pines. Often and often the tremors and tinklings of hidden streams struck clearly on the ear, mingled with the sigh of the rustling foliage, and their breath gave to the fragrant air freshness. A great peak near at hand loomed up high against the sky; as the horsemen made a sudden turn the massive shoulder of the mountain intervened and the dome disappeared. The cove seemed nearer and nearer whenever a glimpse of it was vouchsafed from amidst the dark-green forest that presently towered about them, for the road now ran through the woods upon a broad slope, with ever and anon a cliff beetling over their way. The dense foliage of the laurel jungles was bronzed by the sunlight, growing ever more tawny as the afternoon waned. Purple shadows were lurking in the midst of the valley. Farthest mountains, blue once, were violet now and faintly flushed. And when at last the horsemen emerged from the densities of the woods into the clifty gorge, and rode still in single file upon the swaying, hollow-sounding bridge, they found a deep red cloud reflected in the river, and all the harbingers of twilight abroad in the cove. The smoke from the Yates cabin, seeming nearer than the fact might warrant, since the undulations of the land, which plodding feet must measure, were not a part of the line of sight, curled up with a brisk convolution and a volume that heralded the evening meal. All adown the lane the cows were coming home, and the mellow clanking of their bells accented the quietude. Some night-blooming flower was awake in the woods with a sweet, wild, indefinite odor. Here and there on the purple slope, reputed to be the pygmy burying-ground, a fire-fly flickered, swift, elusive, evanescent. And on a great blooming laurel-bush the mocking-bird sang, heedless of the darkness to come, heedless of the day gone by, possessed by its fervor of music that made gloom light and all life a joyance, like some enthusiast soul in the ecstasy of a gift, unmindful of the world and of all the paltry outward aspects.

"This hyar big laurel-bush air a good landmark," Ephraim said, turning in his saddle, his hand on his mare's back, that he might better reverse his posture as he spoke to the two men that followed. "About the only one thar be, too. We had better begin thar, I reckon. Fur ef ye find nuthin,' ye'd know whar ye started ef ever ye kem ter dig ag'in. The t'other trees air all too much alike." And he turned his face again toward the mare's head, and surveyed anew the space before him.

Singularly clear it was and free from underbrush; the steepness of the slope and the great draught of the gorge made it a fair field for the fierce autumn fires that annually swept over it. Only the gigantic oak and poplar and chestnut-trees were spared, standing full-leaved and in a heavy phalanx upon the declivity. Beneath their boughs mystery lurked unsolved. A sentiment of awe, of doubt, of reluctance took possession even of Rhodes's prosaic mind as he reined up in the deep shadow. He drew out his watch, albeit he had resolved that he would not remonstrate.

"Will you have time, Shattuck?" he said. "Hadn't you better wait until to-morrow?"

"I war a-thinkin' ez much myself," said Ephraim, turning a hopeful face toward Shattuck, who had drawn rein, and sat motionless upon his horse, looking about him with a quick dilated eye, as if he hardly heard.

The strange place! The thronging shadows! How many times had they mustered here! With what pathetic sense was the silence replete! What tears had been shed for those who lay here hushed, and themselves would weep no more, as once they had wept in that universal heritage of sorrow! What hearts had bled that these hearts, dust now, should cease to beat! Time—there is no time, when man through all the vain centuries can feel so close to man, can think his thoughts and measure the throb in pulses long ago stilled. Ah! the confusion of tongues wrought no divergence here! The conclusiveness of the grave, however named; the yearning sense of loss; the insistent expectation, nay, the imperative demand of the soul that this terrible pause, this nullity, should not be the final period of that fair promise called life—all hung about the forgotten pygmy burying-ground with infinite mystery, with unassuaged pathos. Only science, of all the developments of the human mind, might fitly take account of the mere functional disabilities which it represented—might speculate and exert its fine rational inferential imagination, and construct a status from assumed facts, and promulgate dicta so founded, to be received and accepted for a time, and then demolished by a still more fine-spun theory in what is called the march of progress. These forces were astir in Shattuck as he flung himself from the saddle. His brow was slightly corrugated, his eyes were alight, his pulses beat at fever-heat; not that he entertained so far-fetched a theory as that these poor mortal relics were aught but the infant remains of the American Indian, or, perhaps, of earlier aboriginal people, but the talk of strange myths, and that inexplicable Tennessee tradition of pygmy dwellers, colored even his mind, which he sedulously sought to hold blank for the correct impression, and made his hand tremble as he laid hold of the pickaxe, extended down to him by Ephraim Guthrie, as if he were indeed on the verge of some superlatively strange discovery discounting all human experience, and befitting the realm of a fairy tale.

"Hyar they air, pick an' spade, ef ye be a-goin' ter dig yerse'f," remarked Ephraim. He did not realize any difference in social status that might have relegated the manual labor to him, nor even the fact that it was better suited to his massive and burly frame. He had intended to perform it, in his character of host, to shield his guest from the discomfort of the slight exertion. He relinquished the implements with reluctance, remembering this resolution; but superstition, now that he was upon the spot, prevailed, and overbore even the instinct of hospitality native in the mountaineer's heart. The two implements clashed together, the sound loud and metallic in the stillness; he looked a little wistfully after his guest as Shattuck bore them away out into the more open spot where the laurel bush grew almost to the proportions of a tree, unimpeded by others of its kindred. He had no wish, this simple Ephraim, to peer in at the strange sepulchre—the six-slab stone coffin he had often heard of in the terrible fireside stories; he cared naught for curiously woven shrouds, and feathered mantles, and carcanets of pearl beads, and jars of quaint pottery; nor for questions of race and time and civilization these may betoken and solve. Rhodes still sat in the saddle, as motionless as an equestrian statue, sharply outlined against the crimson sky, and beneath an oak bough as dark, as heavy, and as massive as if it were wrought of bronze. The light was clearer in the open space where the branches could not fling their gloom, and as Shattuck ran swiftly down through the long grass he could still see a flower here and there smile up at him—the tawny red of the jewel-weed, and the close-tufted ball of the "mountain snow." The range loomed far above. A star was on its crest, faintly scintillating. The door and window of the Yates cabin, farther down the cove, were illumined from the fire-lit hearth, a dimly fluctuating radiance, sidereal too in the midst of the gathering shadows. The falls still showed their gleaming green and white, and the mists, exhaled from the depressions between the purple slopes, wore a gentle dove-like gray. A tender hour of reveries, and blurring tints, and restful recollections of the day done, but still far from the morrow. The two men under the tree did not speak; the horses did not stir; only the vague rustling of the saddle betokened the regular rise and fall of respiration; even the frisky colt stood motionless, and gazed at the flashing river with a full and meditative eye. Shattuck had paused before the laurel on the side toward the water; neither of the other men, albeit country-bred, might have noticed that here the grass and weeds were a trifle bent—under the recent rain, perchance; a trifle withered—by the sun, it might have been. Nor did he; he chose the spot, remembering Yates's words that here the ground sounded hollow.

But no man who had ever wielded a pickaxe could have failed to discern, as he lifted it high, and the sharp point sank into the ground, that it was merely a replaced turf that yielded so readily to the blow—replaced with its mat of roots severed—and not the tough earth bound by a thousand veinous fibres to the full-pulsed herbage. He was unaccustomed to the earth save geologically or geographically considered, and to herbage except in its botanical aspects. He only lifted the pickaxe high above his head once more, and once more the point struck down into the loosened mould—struck down with a sharp metallic clangor, as of steel upon stone. It rang far through the quiet cove. A low, hollow, vibratory, vault-like resonance followed—mute, indeed, to all ears save his own, but what significance that murmur held for him! He lifted his head to look at the two men who had turned toward him upon the sudden smiting of the rock, and were gazing at him. The next moment—a moment confused forever after in his recollection—something invisible passed him in the air, singing shrilly, a high-keyed tone; a sharp report, and all the echoes of mountain and crag were clamoring. He hardly realized its meaning. He turned dully in the direction whence the sound seemed to come, and so trivial a thing as the movement saved his life. Close by his head again a rifle ball whizzed; it kept the line unswervingly, entered the skull of the staring, amazed colt upon the slope, pierced his brain, and the creature dropped dead without a struggle on the long grass. The sight served to convince the stupefied, reluctant faculties of Shattuck that some enemy in the dusk was firing at him. He could not, in the bewilderment of the moment, distinguish the words that Rhodes shouted to him. It was rather in obedience to his gesture, as he rode a little way out from the gloom, leading by the bridle his friend's plunging and frightened horse, that Shattuck dropped pickaxe and spade, and ran toward him across the dusky, tangled grasses. He caught the reins as they were flung to him; but it was no easy matter to mount the rearing and snorting animal. The other two men were fairly in retreat before Shattuck, running by the horse's side, and hanging with all his weight upon the bridle, contrived to get his foot into the stirrup. Rhodes, riding down the smooth slopes of the pygmy burying-ground, across unnumbered graves, the heavy shadow of the forest trees shielding the party, and making further attack futile, heard at last the hoof-beats of his friend's horse at a regular gallop pressing hard behind him, and turned to see Shattuck once more safe in the saddle. He put spurs to his own steed without more ado. The dank evening air fanned his face; he could hear its silken rustle as it was stirred into seeming activity by his own quick rush through it. This vague simulation of a sound, the horses' muffled hoof-beats barely distinguishable in the thick grass, the drowsy chant of the cicada, the dull monotone of the river—all hardly impinged upon the sense of primordial stillness that pervaded the eventide; it might have seemed that that keen, menacing note of the rifle, the sharp shibboleth of doom, was but some jarring incongruity of a morbid fancy.

The trees began to give way; the more open, level spaces of the cove were at hand; the darkness gradually diminished. Rhodes again clapped spurs to his horse, since here they were to leave the protecting shade. Foremost of the three, he was already in the lane when he became aware that he was not followed; his companions had fallen away. His first impulse, as he glanced over his shoulder into the vacant gloom, was to pursue his own way, and make good his escape. Then he reined up so suddenly that the horse, still trembling and wild and frightened, fell back upon his haunches. Rhodes sat motionless for a moment, gazing over his shoulder.

Night possessed the pygmy burying-ground, and the great phalanx of oak and chestnut-trees was lost in an indistinguishable gloom; but here, where no shadow hindered, he could see the contours of the wide landscape, from which color had faded, and, above its dusky, blurring expanse, the dark sky embossed with a myriad of stars. The fences on either hand of the grass-grown way were dimly visible to his alert senses. Along their parallel lines naught was to be seen, save once a flash betokening the striking of a spark betwixt flint and iron; and in that moment he thought he heard the thud of hoofs. He ground a curse between his teeth as he wheeled his horse. Shattuck, it seemed, had seen fit not to follow his host's lead, and doubtless the dull Ephraim was not yet aware, as he cantered along in the rear, that Rhodes did not still guide the little party. The candidate was a brave man, and in any sufficient quarrel could have stood his ground with equanimity. To be the target, however, for a mysterious enmity that lurked in ambush and in the nightfall promised heavy draughts upon the resources of his courage. The prosaic and utilitarian phase of his mind took account of his candidacy in this connection. No man is so heavily handicapped in a race as he who bears the imputation of unpopularity. The public expectation of success is as a loadstone to the event. He sustained a positive loss in the mere fact that he or his friend had been fired upon. And whither was Shattuck bound now, and what to do? With a determination to hold him in check and to thwart his purpose, Rhodes galloped in the direction whence the faint hoof-beats sounded, albeit the darkness held unknown terrors, the thought of which shook his nerves, and although silence as profound as this had but now been rent by that tense report of the rifle. It was only for a few moments that the successive cross-stakes of the zigzag rail-fences, seeming disconnected from the rest, and high as the horse's head, flew by him on either side in relief against the lighter tones of the fields they enclosed. The river suddenly shows between its banks, gleaming darkly with the night sky, all the splendors of the stars shattered in the ripples, and is gone as he dashes on. He hears the booming of the cataract; and from the pygmy burying-ground, where late the mocking-bird sang, the sudden ill-omened shrilling of an owl. He sees above the western mountains a dull red after-glow of the sunset, and below its darkling pine-grown slopes the little Yates cabin, its windows shining squares of yellow light. The radiance issued forth so far as to reveal Shattuck alighting from his horse at the bars, and the clumsier figure of Ephraim Guthrie still mounted, and looking over his shoulder, as he perceived for the first time that Rhodes was not in the lead.

An aptitude in emergency is a natural trait, not cultivated, and Rhodes possessed it to a useful degree. He flung himself from his horse, and followed on his friend's heels with such despatch that albeit he did not hear the words with which Shattuck greeted the party within, he was on the threshold before a rejoinder was elicited. No friendly greeting had it been, to judge from the dismayed, deprecatory faces grouped about the fire. Adelaide had risen with a slow look of doubt, a sort of stunned surprise. Letitia, who had been out milking the cows, stood in the back doorway, the brimming piggin on her head, one hand lifted to stay it, the wind rustling the straight skirt of her dress, the twilight and the fire-light mingled on her face. Her blue eyes were alight with a sort of wonder, that held nevertheless an intimation of comprehension, which was at variance with the stolid amazement in Baker Anderson's countenance, as, just arrived and still breathless, he sat squarely in his chair, one hand on either knee, his jaw fallen, gaping thunder-struck at the intruder. The centre of the family group, Moses, was seated upon the floor in the fire-light, and turned himself dexterously about to survey over his small shoulder the new-comers; he was silent in seeming recognition of the fact that their gaze overlooked him, and had no reference to his existence; his soft face only expressed a sort of infantile apprehensiveness and suspension of opinion. A tallow dip sputtered on the high mantel-piece; there was pine amongst the fuel, and the resin flared white in the flames. Very distinct the scene was, although, as the lights fluctuated, the fire flickered in the breeze, which swayed it like a canvas: the brown walls; the purplish black squares where the night looked in through the windows, with here a feathery bough, and here a star, and here the dim contours of a dark summit against the sky; the red-bedecked warping bars; the table not yet set forth with the supper crockery, save only a great brown pitcher and a yellow bowl; the sheen of tin-ware on a shelf; even Shattuck's shadow, as sarcastically nonchalant as the substance which it mimicked, as it waved its hand in mockery of courtesy, while he reiterated his bitterly merry congratulations. The white light showed the very flare of fury in his eyes that oddly dallied with the smile on his face.

"You are a courageous rifleman, Mrs. Yates," he was saying, glancing up at the rifle on the wall, glittering upon the rack of deer antlers. "You have set three men off at full run this evening. Few ladies could say as much, I am sure. If you would only mend your aim a little!"

With a blunt accusation she could doubtless have coped; but she could only stare at him in silent amazement as he made these elusive feints. The other two men, lumbering and massive shadows in the background, stared too in surprise at him, and silently waited developments.

He had his hat in his hand as he leaned on the tall back of a chair, and he looked steadily at her with an air of graceful and good-natured raillery, all at variance with the fire in his eyes.

"Mend your aim, only a trifle, Mrs. Yates, and next time perhaps your target won't be so unmannerly as to run off from so accomplished a marksman," and once more he laughed with a genial inflection, then caught his breath with a sort of gasp as his face grew scarlet.

Rhodes laid a hand upon his shoulder. "Why, Shattuck," he exclaimed, with a resonant amazement that made the roof of the little cabin ring like a sounding-board, "what are you thinking of? Mrs. Yates to fire a rifle at us?"

"At me, if you please!" cried Shattuck. Then addressing Adelaide: "Didn't you say you would—or perhaps my treacherous memory misleads me—in case I ventured to open the pygmy graves? Your husband told me this."

"Yes; but I never—" she faltered; then she paused.

Letitia had placed the piggin on the shelf, and crossed the room with a quick, light, definite step. The clumsy rifle was off the rack and in her slight, incongruous grasp in another moment. She held it up before the men; there was the powder stain of a recent discharge about its lock. And then her eyes, like blue flames, burned upon the shrinking, overwhelmed mistress of the house, thus seemingly convicted on her own hearth-stone.

Adelaide never knew how she found the breath to gasp forth the words; the instinct of self-defence alone framed them. "I fired the rifle off at a hawk ez war arter the chickens, early, early this arternoon whilst ye war away," she replied to the woman who had said nothing, instead of to the man who had spoken so plainly.

Rhodes's eye was suddenly steady. His face had grown graver, indeed, but it had cleared. It wore a look now adjusted to inspection, and thoroughly in character—the pallid hue, the relaxing ligaments, and flabby flesh it showed only a moment ago were all resolved into the firm, controlled countenance of a man who has his nerves, his fears, his prospects, well in hand.

"Mrs. Yates," he said, with sober circumspection, "this is a very serious matter, to threaten to shoot Mr. Shattuck. I hope your husband told you so."

Poor Adelaide! With that sense of responsibility for woe which is in some sort assuaged by a completeness of confession, she broke out, with all the abasement of self-blame: "Oh, he did! he did! That's why we quar'led; that's why he lef' me. I know 'twar wrong, now. I reckon I never meant it then. But I wanted the Leetle People lef' be in thar graves, like they hev always been."

Rhodes's comprehension was at best but ill adapted to the reception of any subtle meanings. To his mind those words expressed a recantation of her former denial. His face hardened, but at the same time there was a look of genuine relief upon it, which Shattuck—still leaning upon the back of the chair, and airily flirting his hat in his hand as he glanced from one to the other—could not altogether interpret.

"It was indeed very wrong," Rhodes said, severely. "And might have been far worse. If your aim had been better, you might have killed Mr. Shattuck instead of Guthrie's colt."

She turned her eyes, full of a sort of confused terror, and her pallid face toward Ephraim, who stood near the doorway, a massive, stolid presentation of the rustic. He met her look with a glance of deep reproach.

"Fee hev been in mighty hard luck ter-day," he remarked. "Somebody hev been a-shootin' of his cattle—the leetle red steer, an' that thar small crumply cow named Beauty Bess." His tone was as if he recalled acquaintances to Mrs. Yates's mind, and had something of an elegiac cadence. "An' now hyar's that leetle colt ez he sot sech store by—spry leetle critter, with a powerful springy gait. Fee looked ter him ter show speed one o' these days."

Her wild eyes dilated. "Why, Eph," she cried, in a convincing, coercive voice, "I—I never shot the pore leetle critter!"

"He warn't pore! He war fat, fur true," asseverated Ephraim, with a farmer's pride in the state of his stock.

Rhodes burst into a sudden rollicking laugh, and Shattuck wondered at the evident change in his moral atmosphere. The candidate had found the explanation of his friend's unpopularity far more easily to be endured than the idea that he himself sustained a secret enmity. The circumstance of the rifle-shot would be felicitously accounted for by this woman's threats against Shattuck's projected investigation, her husband's quarrel with her for this reason and his subsequent desertion of her. The political status of the canvass might remain intact, suffering naught from her inimical feeling against Shattuck, who had made her husband his partisan.

"But I wouldn't shoot a colt. I wouldn't be so mean," she declared, her eyes full of tears.

"You had rather shoot merely a man," Shattuck suggested, lightly.

"We ought to have you bound over to keep the peace, Mrs. Yates." Rhodes resumed his note of severity.

"For I have the permission of the owner of the land to open the graves and to search for curiosities and relics, and I shall do so, relying on the protection of the law," Shattuck added.

"You'd better do like ye done the t'other night," Letitia put in, unexpectedly; "kem whenst all be asleep."

Shattuck turned a look of questioning amazement upon her.

"Oh, I hearn ye!" she said, impatient of the denial in his face—"I hearn yer pickaxe a-striking inter the ground agin the rock coffins o' the Leetle People."

Once more Rhodes looked ill at ease. A strange ghoulish guest this seemed even to his standpoint of superior education—to haunt the vicinage of those pygmy graves in the light of the midnight moon.

But Shattuck's face had a distinct touch of anxiety upon it. "Why, who could that have been?" he exclaimed, with so genuine a note of surprise that Rhodes's suspicion was disarmed.

"Never mind, never mind," he said, with his coarse jocularity; "there'll be a few pygmies left for you, I'll be bound! Come along, we must be getting home."

Shattuck shook off the hand which his friend placed upon his shoulder; but Rhodes turned with unimpaired cheerfulness to the others.

"Now look-a-here, Mrs. Yates, this must stop, short off, right here. I'd like to think I'd leave as good a friend behind me as the pygmies have in you; but you can't befriend with impunity people who have been dead so long that they are too funny to keep their coffins to themselves. You look out! You don't want an action for assault with intent to kill brought against you, I reckon. I think I may promise that Mr. Shattuck will do nothing about this offence—if it is not repeated. At least, I would go that far myself," he concluded, with an air of prompting his friend's generosity.

But Shattuck said nothing. His whole interest in the present moment had given way to that suggestion of a strange sound in the midnight and what it might signify. He still hung on the back of the chair, his hat in his listless hands, but his face was turned toward the purplish black square of the window, and his meditative eyes dwelt upon the inscrutable darkness that encompassed the pygmy burying-ground.

Adelaide had seen, in a sort of numb despair, her denial of the deed swallowed up in her admission of the threat. In her confused sense of the fact, and her loss of courage before the inexorability of the conviction, as it were, out of her own mouth, she could only reiterate: "I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" And her stunned immobility of aspect seemed sullen, and her tone was interpreted as dogged.

"Oh, well, all right," said Rhodes, lightly. He could be casual enough now, since it could be made plain to all the country-side that it was no affair of his, but a quarrel between Shattuck and the fugitive Yates and the deserted wife. "Come, come, Shattuck," again clapping his heavy hand on his friend's shoulder, "we must be a-jogging."

Ephraim, too, had the voice of accusation in his farewell. "I ain't s'prised none," he said, looking over his shoulder, with a lowering melancholy gleam in his eyes under the broad brim of his hat, as he turned toward the door—"I ain't s'prised none ef Fee makes ye pay fur that thar leetle colt, an' takes it 'fore the court." He paused upon the threshold after a heavy lumbering step or two. "I reckon he won't make ye pay much, though; an' Fee ain't one nohow ter set store on courts," he added, relenting.

She stood there, arraigned on her own hearth-stone, silent, pale, her face seeming as rigid as if it were some changeless symmetry of marble, in the interval while they mounted their horses and rode way. The sound of the hoofs came, then ceased as a marshy dip intervened, and rose on the air once more from the farther side, and dulled in the distance to silence. The throbbing of the cataract asserted itself anew. From every weed growing rank about the fence corners, from amongst the vines over the porch, vibrated the voice of the myriad nocturnal insects, chiming and chiming interminably. Only the irresponsive darkness without met her eye as she still mechanically gazed through the doorway where the visitors had disappeared.

Letitia had sunk down in the great spacious high-backed chair on which Shattuck had leaned. It was a half-reclining posture, to whose languors her slenderness and drooping grace lent a sort of individuality, and she looked like a child half recumbent in the corner, both hands clasping one of its arms. Her curling hair, a tress or two falling on her forehead, the rest drawn back and tied at the nape of the neck, whence the ends all escaped, seemed longer as her head drooped. Her eyes for the moment were upon the fire. When she suddenly lifted them, they shone like sapphires, with crystalline splendor, and Adelaide, in amazement, saw that they were full of tears—saw them thus that night for the first and last time in all her life.

"How could ye have done it?" she exclaimed. "Ye wicked heart! Ye cruel, evil soul!"

"Litt," cried Adelaide, aghast, "ye ain't believin' what them men said ter me? Ye 'ain't turned agin me too?"

She looked down piteously at the girl; then as she stooped to lift the baby, her hands trembled, and she fumbled so that Moses made some shift to raise his own indolent bulk and snuggle into her arms.

"B'lieve them men?" echoed Letitia, her eyes ablaze. "I'd b'lieve his word agin the Bible. I ain't keerin' 'bout t'others." She seemed, with a toss of her head, as if she annihilated them.

Adelaide could not account for her own words afterward. It was so strange a transition from her own absorbing; tumultuous, insistent troubles to intrude into the subtle, incipient, unrealized thoughts and feelings of another.

"Litt," she said, as calmly as if nothing of moment had happened—she had seated herself, with the child's face close to her cheek—"ye oughtn't ter talk that-a-way. That man don't keer nuthin' 'bout you-uns."

Letitia slowly turned her face. There was in its expression many a phase of bitter introspection, wonder underlying them all, and a sort of helpless despair as a finality, dumb and infinitely pathetic. Somehow, ignorant as the other was, little as she could have described or differentiated it, she became sharply aware of the wound she had dealt, the poignant rankling of the heart that received it. She sought, in a panic of regret and self-reproach, to nullify it.

"Ye don't keer, though," she clumsily tried to laugh it off. "Ye be always a-tellin' ez how ye be no favorite 'mongst the men folks, an' 'pear ter think it's a sorter feather in yer cap ter be too ch'ice an' smart fur the gineral run."

To her surprise, the girl showed no resentment. It seemed that that calamitous possibility had dwarfed every other consideration.

"I ain't keerin' fur sech ez them," she said, slowly, with a tremor in her low voice, as if she made the distinction clear to her own mind.

The sudden, heavy footfalls of Baker Anderson sounded upon the puncheons. He had repaired to the wood-pile for pine knots, and he seemed, in heaping them upon the fire, to seek to make amends for a dereliction of duty, plain to his own sense if not to others.

"I didn't know what in thunder I oughter hev said or done, Mis' Yates," he remarked, as he knelt on one knee on the hearth, his square, boyish face showing its grave sympathy as the white light streamed up the chimney. "I didn't know but what whilst them men war a-sassin' round so 'twould be the right way ter pertect the fambly ter take down my rifle ter 'em."

Letitia's face was aflame. "Thar's been too much o' takin' down rifles a'ready. Leave that ter Adelaide."

Baker, still in his humble posture, turned his eyes toward her, a clumsy sneer upon his blunt features. "Ef ye 'low Mis' Yates done sech ez that, I wonder ye air willin' ter bide with her. Whyn't ye go home?"

Once more her eyes, with their jewelled effect, so crystalline a blue they were, shone upon him, fiery and fierce. "I'll bide with that thar rifle. I'll watch it by day, an' I'll guard it by night. 'Twon't send a ball agin soon ter scorch his head. I saw his hair all whar 'twar singed. An'"—she turned suddenly upon Adelaide, who was quaking beneath the storm her ill-considered words had raised—"ef ye tell me he don't think nuthin' of me, I tell you-uns I could think o' him a thousand years without a 'thanky.'"

She sat erect in her chair, flushed and defiant. She suddenly drooped back into her former, half-recumbent posture, and again burst into tears.

Adelaide, her nerves all strained and jarring, feeling at fault to have elicited this outburst in the presence of Baker Anderson, who was something of a gossip, and with the false accusations and reproaches, the danger and the trouble of her own position still pressing heavily on her, could but fall a-weeping too.

"I 'ain't got but one friend in the worl'," she said, clasping her child. "An' hyar he is."

"Yes, an' he'll be yer frien' ez long ez he needs ye, an' no longer," said the tactless Baker, who had no talent for woe, and who hardly entered into the emotions of either woman, except to grasp the division of their friendship.

He thought them dreary company that evening, and that they were much given to silent tears, which were troublesome, cowardly things for which Baker Anderson had never found any use.