In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

The officer in his turn stared. "That's all right. I didn't know whether he hed gone," he said at last, with an airy wave of the hand. He turned within, smiling. "Fee air like the man in the Bible ez say, 'I go not,' an' goes," he muttered to himself, in triumphant satisfaction.

The sheriff found it a long night. The voices gradually dwindled until only a fragmentary, low-toned colloquy could be heard beside the fire outside, so had the number of renegades to the loft of the barn increased; and when at last the drowsy converse was hushed, the impetuous flare had died away; no fluctuating glimpses of the landscape embellished the darkness; the fire had sunk to a mere mass of vermilion embers amidst the utter gloom which it did not illumine. A wind after a time arose, and hearing it astir in the valley, the sheriff, in his frequent stridings to and fro in the little cabin, bethought himself of the menace of scattered coals to the hay and straw, and now and again looked out of the window to see how the gray ash was overlapping this smouldering mass, that had spent its energies in those wild, upspringing, tumultuous flames, and had burned out to the ground. More than once he mended the fire on the hearth-stone within, merely that he might have the company of the flicker on the wall; but it, too, was drowsy, and often sent up sluggish columns of smoke in lieu of blaze, and he seemed to himself the only creature alive and awake in all the spread of mountain and valley. He had contrived to keep his vigil alone. He had given a special promise that he would call the prisoner's wife at twelve o'clock to watch the latter half of the night. By no means reluctant, exhausted with the excitements of the evening superimposed upon the work and cares of the day, she and Maggie had climbed the ladder to the roof-room, and had left the officer in undisturbed possession below.

After a while he lighted a tallow dip, and surveyed the haggard face of the patient, as he still chose euphemistically to call the prisoner. The feeble glimmer illumined the room in pallid and melancholy guise, instead of with the hilarity and glow and bright good-will which the sulking fire had shown earlier in the evening. A great, distorted silhouette of his own head appeared upon the wall, leaning ogreishly over the pillow. He noted these things in the midnight. His hand on the round knob of the bedstead seemed to stealthily grasp a club. The forlorn face of the recumbent man added its significance to the shadow. A more sinister and threatening picture it was hardly possible to imagine, and after gazing at it with gruff disfavor, Carew shifted his position, and once more looked anxiously at the haggard face on the pillow. It bore certain tokens which in his ignorance he fancied were characteristic of the facies hippocratica; from time to time, as he lighted the candle anew, he noted them again, and his own face seemed to reflect them in a sort of dismay and terror. Once, as he struck the candle sharply downward to extinguish the flame, he apostrophized the patient out of the sudden darkness:

"Ef ye don't git sensible enough ter talk sorter straight afore ye take off from hyar fur good an' all, I dun'no' how in kingdom come I be a-goin' ter find out whar it war ez ye hid that plunder—ef ever ye did hide it."

He walked back to the hearth, where the gray smoke, itself barely visible, rose in a strong, steady column, now and then darting out a tiny scintillating tongue of white flame; he threw himself again into the rickety chair, his anxious eyes on the fire. A black cat, crouched upon the hearth, commented hospitably upon his proximity by a loud purring as she alternately opened and shut her witch-like yellow eyes. She recalled to his mind many a homely fireside fable of witchcraft that held in permanent solution the terrors of his childhood which the wisdom of later years might vainly strive to precipitate and repudiate. He looked at her askance while she peacefully slept, and the wind went heavily by the window as with the tread of a thousand men. He himself was never so consciously vigilant. It seemed as if he had never slept. He could hardly realize the fatigue, the drowsiness, with which he had struggled in the earlier portion of the night. Not a stir escaped his attention from the bed where the wounded man lay, whether in the soft recuperation of slumber, or the heavy stupors that so nearly simulate death itself, his ignorance could not determine. Once, as the flame flared white from out the gray smoke, he looked to see if the hands were plucking at the coverlet, a sign familiar to him of the approaching doom. And then, as the dull, dense, unillumined column of vapor streaming up the chimney benighted the room, he heard, with his keen senses all tense, the howl of a wolf on a far-away summit.

"So durned onlucky!" a thick voice said, suddenly, as it were in his ear.

Carew gave a galvanic start that jarred his whole frame, and he had a momentary impression that he had been dreaming. As he turned his head he heard the wind surging in the infinite leafage of the vast mountain wilderness. But within all was still save the slowly ascending column of gray smoke, and all was silent—not the chirping of a cricket, not the gnawing of a mouse—till abruptly, from out the semi-obscurity of the room, the thick, unnatural voice came again, came from the pillow where the restless head was rolling once more.

The sheriff drew a long breath of relief, raucously cleared his throat, and stretched out his stalwart, booted legs comfortably upon the hearth. Then he once more turned his face toward the bed, for, whether because of the pervasive quiet or the absence of other distractions, the utterances of delirium that had hitherto seemed incoherent and mere mouthings were now comprehensible—the words, although but half formed and thickly spoken, having become articulate.

"Durned onlucky," the voice said, over and over again, with falling inflections infinitely disconsolate.

A smile was on the officer's face. In the absence of other entertainment, these queer unauthorized gyrations of the powers of speech, all astir without the concurrence of the brain, promised to relieve somewhat the tedium.