In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Their dull solemnity grated upon her mood, so far afield was it from any standpoint yet revealed in his words. She resented his motionless, intent, pondering survey.

She sought to shake off the responsive gravity his mien induced. "Goin'!" she cried, her eyes growing brighter and deeper and darker as they dilated. "Waal, we'll hev ter try ter spare ye. Waal! waal!" with an affected sigh.

The familiar note of irony seemed to rouse him to more immediate intention. He thrust his pistol in his belt, and with a nod turned away down the path.

Moses, who could never be prevailed upon to greet a visitor, always took welcome heed of departure. To his mind the dearest behest of hospitality was speeding the parting guest. Without prompting, he sent a jubilant cry of "Bye! bye!" after Guthrie's retreating form, and beamed upon him with a damp and gummy sputtering smile, graced by all his glittering teeth.

Letitia, too, gazed after the guest, whose manner had suddenly presented an enigma. "Looked all of a suddint ez ef he hed fund suthin' he didn't want, like a rattlesnake; or hed furgot suthin' he couldn't do without, like his breakfast, or a thimble, or his brains."

He went slowly and thoughtfully along the dank path, over which the heavy long-tasselled grasses leaned. Pinks bordered it here, and anon the jimson weed; again it was enlivened by the glow of a great red rose, with the essence of summer in its fresh breath, as it swayed on a long, full-leaved, thorny wand. This clutched at his coat, and as he paused to disengage the cloth, he looked back at the house—the mountain looming behind it, with a horizontal band of mist athwart the slope; the little roof still dank and shining with dew; the tiny porch all wreathed with vines that stretched a surplusage of their blooming lengths across to the window; the little glassless square where the batten shutter swung. Here it was, he thought, that Shattuck had stood, knee-deep in the lush thick grass, when the shutter was closed, and colors were null, and the black night gloomed, and she sang within while he waited, and the moon rose all too soon! He turned and looked at the gorge, as if he expected to see there the pearly disk amidst the dark obscurements of the night-shadowed mountains. It was instead a vista of many gleaming lights: the sunshine on the river, and the differing lustre of the water in the shadow; the fine crystalline green of the cataract, and the dazzling white of the foam and the spray; the luminous azure of the far-away peaks, and the enamelled glister of the blue sky—all showing between the gloomy, sombre ranges close at hand. And while he still looked, he mounted the horse at the gate and rode away.

XIV.

It was a fine sensation for the group of gossips that always seemed an essential appurtenance to the blacksmith shop at the cross-roads when, this bright morning, the sheriff of the county, an infrequent and unfamiliar apparition, rode up to the open doors, and drew rein under the branches of the overhanging oak-tree. So broadly spreading were these branches that not even the diminishing shadow, ever waning as the day waxed on to noon, had bereft the space beneath of its gray-green gloom and its sense of dew. A wagon, one wheel lying tire-less on the ground, and a stout stave lashed crutch-like in its place, stood near by in the full yellow glare, with a reduced cartoon of itself, sadly out of drawing, on the sand beneath it, supplemented by a caricature of two men who sat upon its pole. The interior of the shop looked dark and cool, and the blacksmith's father, bareheaded and in his shirt-sleeves in a rickety chair by the door, caught the softening effect of its twilight in his aged and minutely wrinkled face. Two or three dim figures were indistinct within; upon a bench outside a couple of loafers smoked, while still another utilized as a seat the roots of the tree. The shadow of its foliage played on the clapboards of the roof, long ago broken here and there, and still unmended, for the rain and the snow were welcome to wreak their worst, drizzling through upon the republican simplicity of the "dirt floor" within. Hardly a curl of smoke ascended from the chimney, and as the officer cast his eye along the two red clay winding roads, both of a most irresponsible and vagrant-like aspect, as if they had no goal in expectation, there was no other sign of habitation in sight; the woods closed in, limiting the prospect; here and there mountains rose, seeming, as always, nearer than reality warrants; and it was a most sequestered, slumberous spot to which the sheriff had betaken his brisk individuality and the energetic potentiality of his official presence.

So welcome a break in the monotony had not occurred for many a day. A sentiment of gratitude merely for his company pervaded the by-standers. They looked for no developments more striking than the detail of the ordinary news from the town, some good-natured raillery back and forth, and the intimation of his errand, which perchance might touch the summoning of jurors or witnesses in some of the more remote districts of his bailiwick; and each idler was devoutly glad that the allurements of plough and harrow and hoe had not availed to keep him at work and at home on this momentous occasion, which might not be duplicated for months. But when the officer's hard face and unsmiling eyes betokened the more serious import of his visit, there ran through the assembly a keen thrill of curiosity and expectancy.

The sheriff, not perhaps all indifferent to the flutter his advent roused, flung the reins over his horse's head and dismounted.