Harshaw gave a short, satirical laugh, showing his strong white teeth.
“I wisht ter Gawd that thar Gwinnan wanted ter go ter Congress, or sech, ez would fling him ’fore the vote o’ Cher’kee County,—it be in the same congressional deestric’ whar he hails from,—I’d show him,” said Bylor, shaking his head with the savagery of supposititious revenge, and in the full delusion of unbridled power characteristic of the free and independent American unit. “I’d show him.”
“I reckon everybody don’t feel like we-uns do,” said Jerry Price, who, although he smarted under the unmerited disgrace he had experienced at the hands of Gwinnan, had submitted to it as a judicial necessity. Its rankling pangs were manifested only when, chancing to meet the foreman, Jerry would ask, in a manner charged with interest and an affectation of mystery, whether he had had his tongue measured yet, and how many joints it had been ascertained to have.
“They’re a little more disgruntled over in Kildeer than you are here,” Harshaw declared. “You’d allow the court-room was a distric’ school, if you could know the way he domineers over there. I always look to see the learned counsel put his finger in his mouth and whine when Gwinnan gets on the rampage.”
“Why, look-a-hyar, Mr. Harshaw,” demanded Bylor, “do you-uns call this a free country? Ain’t thar no way o’ stoppin’ him off? Goin’ ter hev five mo’ years o’ him on the bench?”
“He’ll be impeached some day, mark my words,” Harshaw declared; and then he fell to eying the smoking fire with slow, sullen, vengeful speculation, and for the rest of the day he was not such jovial company as his general repute for good-fellowship might promise.
In this interval of leisure which the recess afforded him, both as legislator and lawyer, Harshaw devoted himself to furthering his political prospects and strengthening his hold upon the predilections of the people. He was a man of many mental and moral phases: he sang loud and long at the revival at the cross-roads church; he attended rural merry-makings; he connived at having his own house “stormed” by a surprise party, the preparations being profuse and exhilarating, and the flavor of his hospitality was not impaired by his shaking hands with his guests, and violently promising to vote for them at the next election, each enlightened and independent citizen being himself not quite clear as to who was the prospective candidate: but the whole episode faded from recollection with the evening, mingling with the vain phantasmagoria of wild elation, and subsequent drowsiness, and retributive headache, and physical repentance. He went on a camp hunt with a party of roaring blades. The weather in the changeful Southern winter had turned singularly fine and dry; the air had all the crisp buoyancy of autumn and all the freshness of spring; fires drowsed on hearths; doors stood ajar; the sunshine was pervasive, warm, languorous, imbued with pensive vernal illusions. One might wonder to see the silent sere grass; were there indeed no whirring songs, no skittering points of light, hovering in mazy tangles, and telling the joy that existence might prove to the tiniest insect life? Birds? The trees were empty, but one must look to make sure: only the rising quail from the clumps of withered weeds; only the infrequent cry of the wild turkey down the bare, sunny vistas of the woods. The shadows of the deciduous trees were spare and linear, distinctly traced on the brown ground or upon the gray rock. In these fine curves and strokes of dendritic scripture a graceful sylvan idyl might perchance be deciphered by the curious. But the dense masses of laurel and the darkling company of pines cloaked themselves in their encompassing gloom, in these bright days as ever, and in their shade the dank smell and the depressing chill attested the winter. Vague shimmers hung about the mountains, blue in the distance, garnet and brown and black close at hand. The terrible heights and unexplored depths, the vast, sheer, precipitous descents, the titanic cliffs, the breadth, the muscle, the tremendous velocity of the torrents hurling down the gorges, gave august impressions of space unknown to the redundant richness of the summer woods. There were vistas of incomparable amplitude, as still, with the somnolent sunshine and the sparse shadow, as if they were some luminous effect on a canvas, painted in dark and light browns, graduated through the tints of the sere leaf in ascendant transition to the pale gold of the sunbeams; affording, despite the paucity of detail, an ecstasy to the sense of color.
It was a moment of preëminent consequence to Harshaw one day, when far up a stately avenue a deer appeared with the suddenness of an illusion, yet giving so complete a realization of its presence that the very fullness and splendor of its surprised eyes left their impression. Then, as in some jugglery of the senses, the animal with consummate grace and lightness, vanished, bounding through the laurel.
The wind was adverse and the hounds did not readily catch the scent. A few tentative, melancholy yelps of uncertainty arose; then a deep, musical, bell-like bay, another, and the pack opened with a great swelling, oscillating cry, that the mountains echoed as with a thousand voices, and in a vast compass of tone. The mounted men, hallooing to one another, dashed off in different directions, making through the woods towards various “stands” which the deer might be expected to pass. Now and then the horn sounded to recall the stragglers,—inexpressibly stirring tones, launched from crag to crag, from height to height; far-away ravines repeated the summons with a fine and delicate mystery of resonance, rendered elusive and idealized, till one might believe that never yet did such sound waves float from the prosaic cow-horn of the mountaineer.