In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

The men outside of the fence paused in the instant, as if a sudden petrifaction had fallen upon the group—one was arrested in the moment of tightening a saddle-girth; another was poised midway, one foot in the stirrup, the other just lifted from the ground; two or three, already mounted, sat like equestrian statues, their figures in high-relief against the broad fields of the western sky above the mountain-tops. Once a horse bent down his head and tossed it aloft and pawed the ground; and again the silence was unbroken, till there arose anew that strangely keyed, incoherent babbling. There was an abrupt rush in the direction whence the sound came, for it was distinct this time. The forlorn woman and girl were soon distanced, as they followed upon the strides of the stalwart sheriff. He ran fast and lightly, with an agility which his wonted pompous strut hardly promised. He was at the barn door and half-way up the ladder leading into the loft before his slower comrades could cross the yard. When they reached the barn the woman was standing in the space below the loft, her face set, her eyes restless and dilated; her self-control gave way at last to a sudden trivial irritation, incongruous with the despair and grief in her fixed lineaments.

"Quit taggin' arter me!" she cried out, huskily, to the tattered little girl, who, in tears and trembling with wild fright, hung upon her skirts.

The sheriff at the head of the ladder seemed, impossibly enough, to be tearing down the wall of the building. He had a hatchet in one hand; he used the handle of his pistol for a wedge, and presently the men, peering up into the dusky shadow, understood that he was plucking down the boards of a partition that, flimsy as it was, had seemed to them the outer wall when they had searched the place. Within was a space only two feet wide perhaps, but as long as the gable end. Upon a heap of straw lay a man, wounded, fevered, wild with delirium. He had no sense of danger; he could realize no calamity of capture; his hot, rolling, bloodshot eyes conveyed no correlative impression to his disordered brain of the figures he beheld before him. He talked on, unnoting the cluster of men as they pressed about him in the dust that rose from the riven boards, and gazed down wide-eyed at him. The only light came in through the crevices of roof and wall, but these were many. It served amply for his recognition, if more evidence had been needed than the fact of his home and the careful concealment, and it showed the attitudes of his captors as they looked around the thrice-searched place—at the hay that they had tossed about, the piles of corn they had rolled down, the odds and ends of plough gear and broken household utensils in one corner that they had ransacked. More than one commented, with a sort of extorted admiration, upon the craft that had so nearly foiled them. The triumphant figure of the sheriff was the focus of the shadowy group, easily differentiated by his air of arrogantly pluming himself; one might hardly have noticed the frowzy shock of hair and the pale face of the little girl protruding through the aperture in the floor, for she had climbed the ladder, and with a decapitated effect gazed around from the level of the puncheons.

It was a forlorn illustration of the universal affections of our common human nature that this apparition should be potent to annul the mists of a wavering mind, and to summon right reason in delirium. The thick-tongued, inarticulate muttering ceased for a moment; a dazed smile of recognition was on the unkempt, bearded face of the wounded man.

"Bet on Maggie!" he said, quite plainly. "She kin climb like a cat. She kin drive a nail like a man! Takes a heap ter git ahead o' Maggie!"

And then his head began to loll from shoulder to shoulder, and the look of recognition was gone from his face. He was now and again lifting his hands as if in argument or entreaty, and once more muttering with a thick, inarticulate tongue.

The sheriff glanced at a twisted nail in his hand, then down at the decapitated Maggie.

"Did you holp do this hyar job?" he asked.

The child hesitated; the law seemed on her track. "I druv the top nails," she piped out at last. Then, with a whimper, "Mam couldn't climb along the beam fur head-swimmin', so I clomb the beam an druv the top nails," she concluded, with a weak, quavering whine.

He looked down with a tolerant eye at the unprepossessing countenance. "Smart gal!" he exclaimed, unexpectedly; "a mighty smart gal! An' a good one too, I'll be bound! Ye jes' run down yander ter the house, sissy, an' fix the bed fur yer dad, fur we air goin' ter fetch him down right now."