In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

The sheriff's jaunty jubilance, in that the lawbreakers had been so smartly overtaken, attended him through the woods and down the road, as he cantered at the head of his posse, all armed and jingling with spurs—a cavalcade both imposing and awful to the few spectators which the sparsely populated country could muster, summoned out from the cabins by the sound of galloping horses and the loud-pitched talk. The elders stood and stared; tow-headed children, peeping through the lower rails of the fence, received a salutary impression, and beheld, as it were, the majesty of the law, materialized in this gallant style, riding forth to maintain its supremacy. Only the dogs were unreceptive to the subtler significance of the unwonted apparition, evidently accounting it merely a gang of men, and, according to the disposition of the individual animal, either accepting the fact quietly, with affably wagging tail, or plunging into the road in frenzied excitement, and with yelps and defiant barking pursuing the party out of sight of the house, then trotting home with a triumphant mien. The tragedy that the posse had found in Crazy Zeb's cell lingered still in the minds of two or three of the horsemen, their silence and gloomy, downcast faces betokening its influence; but the others instinctively sought to cast it off, and the effort was aided by the sunshine, the quick pace, the briskening wind, and the cheery companionship of the officer. He seemed to have no receptivity for the sorrowful aspects of the event, and his spirits showed no signs of flagging until he drew rein at the door-yard of one of the escaped robbers with whose names Guthrie had furnished him.

"'Ain't he got no sort'n men kin-folks?" he asked, his cheery, resonant voice hardly recognizable in the querulous whine with which he now spoke. "Lord have mercy on my soul! how am I a-goin' ter make out a-catechisin' the man's wife an' mother 'bout'n him! Git off'n yer horse thar, Jim. 'Light, I tell ye, an' kem along in the house with me ter holp bolster me up."

In several of these doomed households the forlorn women, in their grief and despair, turned fierce and wielded a biting tongue; and as the hapless officer showed an infinite capacity for anxious deprecation, their guarded sarcasms waxed to a vindictive temerity. Among them he was greatly harassed, and more than once he was violently threatened. Indeed, one old crone rose tremulously up in the chimney-corner as he sat before the fire, after searching the premises, keenly questioning the younger members of the family, and with her tremulous, aged palm she smote him twice in the face. He sat quite still, although the color mounted to the roots of his hair, while her children in frantic fear besought her to desist.

"Lord knows, Mis' Derridge," he said, looking meekly at her, "I'd be willin' fur ye ter take a hickory sprout an' gin me a reg'lar whalin' ef 'twould mend the matter enny, or make yer son Josiah a diff'ent man from what he hev turned out. I reckon ye oughter hev gin him a tap or two more'n ye done. But ef it eases yer feelin's ter pitch inter me, jes' pitch in, an' welcome! I don't wonder at ye, nuther."

She stared at him irresolutely from out her bleared eyes, then burst into that weeping so terrible to witness in the aged, bewailing that she had ever lived to see the day, and calling futilely on Heaven to turn the time back that she might be dead ten years ago, and upbraiding the earth that so long it had grudged her a grave.

The officer found it hard after this scene to lay hold on his own bold identity again, and he had naught to say when he got on his horse and rode away. It became possible to reassert himself and his office only when he chanced upon a household where there were men and boys. There he raged around in fine style, and frowned and swore and threatened, every creature trembling before the very sound of his voice. Thus he made restitution in some sort to the terrors of the law, defrauded by his former weakness of their wonted fierce effectiveness.

The afternoon was on the wane, and no captures had been made; the cavalcade was about turning from the door of a house—it was the last to be visited, the most distant of all—a poor place, perched high up on the rugged slope of the mountain, with a vast forest below it and on either hand, from the midst of which it looked upon a splendid affluent territory seeming infinite in extent. Peak and range, valley and river, were all in the sunset tints—purple and saffron and a suffusive blood-red flush, all softened and commingled by the haze; and above, the rich yellow lucency of the crystalline skies. A lateral spur was in the immediate foreground, high, steep, and heavily wooded, the monotony of the deep, restful green of its slopes broken here and there by vertical lines of gleaming white, betokening the trunks of the beech-trees amidst the dark preponderance of walnut and pine; more than one hung, all bleached and leafless, head downward, half uprooted, for thus the wind, past this long time, left trace of its fury. A stream—a native mountaineer, wild and free and strong—took its way down the gorge between the spur and the mountain from which it shot forth. From the door-yard might be had a view of a section of its course, the water flowing in smooth scroll-like swirls from the centre to the bank, and thence out again, the idea of a certain symmetry of the current thus suggested in linear grace—all crystal clear, now a jade-like green, and again the brownish yellow of a topaz, save where the rapids flung up a sudden commotion of white foam that seemed all alive, as if some submerged amphibian gambollings made the depths joyous. The crags stood out distinct on either hand, with here and there a flower sweetly smiling in a niche, like some unexpected tenderness in a savage heart. All was very fresh, very keenly and clearly colored; the weeds, rank and high, sent up a rich aromatic odor.

The officer, for years a farmer, and alive to all weather signs, hardly needed a second glance at the clear tint of the vigorous mould of the door-yard beneath his feet to know that it had rained here lately. "The drought in town ain't bruk yit," he said, half enviously—a mere habit, for he had now no crops to suffer from stress of weather. Here there had been copious storms, with thunder and lightning, gracious to the corn and the cotton, and not disdaining the humbler growths of the wayside, the spontaneous joyance of nature. The torrents had fallen in a decisive rhythm; the ground was beaten hard; the rails of the fence looked dark and clean; the wasp nests and the cobwebs were torn away—alack for the patient weavings!—the roof of the little cabin was still sleek, and shining. As he turned on his heel he marked how the new-built hay-stacks were already weathering, all streaked with brown.

He had searched the little barn whose roof showed behind the hay-stacks, but as he glanced toward it, in the mere relapse of bucolic sentiment, he became vaguely aware of an intent watchfulness in the lantern-jawed and haggard woman of the house, who had followed him and his party to the fence, in hospitality, it might seem, or to see them safely off the place. The reflection of her look—it was but a look, and he did not realize it then; he remembered it afterward—was in the eyes of a tallow-faced, shock-headed girl of ten. His own eyes paused in disparagement upon her; the hem of her cotton dress was tattered out and hung down about her bare ankles, all stained with red clay mud. There were straws clinging to her attire, and here and there in her tousled red hair. He was no precisian, to be sure, but her unkempt aspect grated upon him; these were truly shiftless folks, and had a full measure of his contempt, which he felt they richly merited; and so he turned once more to the fence, facing the great yellow sky, and the purple and amber and red flushed world stretching so far below. A little clatter at the bars where the posse prepared to mount and ride away was pronounced in the deep evening stillness; the cry of a homeward-bound hawk drifted down as with the sunset on his swift wings he swept above the abysses of the valley; and then the sheriff, stepping over the lower rail, the others lying on the ground, paused suddenly, his hand upon the fence, his face lifted. A strange new sound was on the air, a raucous voice muttering incoherently—muttering a few words, then sinking to silence.

Carew looked quickly at the woman. Her face had stiffened; it hardly seemed alive; it was as inanimate as a mask, some doleful caricature of humanity and sorrow, forlornly unmoving, with no trace of beauty or intelligence to hallow it; she might seem to have no endowment in common with others of her kind, save the capacity to suffer. The child's face reflected hers as in a mirror. The same feeble, pitiable affectation of surprise was on each when the sheriff exclaimed, suddenly, "What's that?"