In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

"How still it is! Hear Wild-Duck Creek on the rocks!" Shattuck said as he buckled his saddle-girth and put his foot in the stirrup. The eastern windows were all aflare with a white, opaque radiance in broadened, vitreous, distorted reduplications of the moon. The deep, elongated shadows of the house lay among the orchard boughs. He looked around at the old building when once in the saddle, to see its gables and its chimneys rise anew against the clear sky and the vague outlines of the mountains, only because it pleased him—its solid decency, even dignity, in its honest, unornamented validity, touched his receptive æsthetic sense—not because he divined that he was looking his last upon it. How finite a creature is man; how little he knows his way along these earthly paths—adown which soon or late he goes to meet his fate, never aware how near its approach—one might realize, thinking on a time like this, when these two, all unprescient, rode together to the burial-ground of the "Leetle People." The wind was in their faces—how fresh, how free! The dew glittered in the air; the moon, although yellow and waning, with a melancholy presage in her lessening splendors, made the night like some pensive, softly illuminated day of dreamtides. Their escort of mounted shadows galloped beside them; the turf stretched out into long miles behind their horses' hoofs. They met naught save a fox scudding over a stretch of sward with stealthy speed, and a bundle of feathers between his jaws. The Yates cabin, that Guthrie was first to see, a dimly glimmering gray, was as silent and still as if it housed no life within its walls—as silent and as still as that long slope, with the shadows of the great trees and the intervenient sheen of the moon all adown it, where the Little People had slept this many a day, knowing no waking.

Shattuck led the way. He had turned once more to the tall isolated laurel-bush, almost of tree-like proportions, where he had begun his labors before. He did not at once throw himself from his horse; he was taking note of a strange thing, something that he had not marked heretofore. That mass of bloom and foliage rose between the grave whose stone coffin his pickaxe had struck and any possible surveillance from the Yates cabin. A doubt for the first time stirred in his mind whether it were indeed Adelaide who had fired that murderous rifle ball. The next moment the absorptions of his intentions, his opportunity, usurped all else. He flung himself to the ground, breathless, elated, with an electrical energy in his muscles, as he seized the pickaxe on which Guthrie leaned irresolute, and struck the first blow.

The mountaineer turned his softened moonlit face upon him with a slow smile in his eyes. "I be glad ye hed the grit ter begin; I hain't." The dew had bereft his long curls of their wonted crispness; they hung in lengthened tendrils and dishevelled on his broad shoulders. He pushed his hat far back on his head. His heavy spurred boots were deeply sunken in the long grass. He slowly placed one upon the spade as he drove it down into the mould. "I can't holp bein' sorry fur the Stranger People, ez they air leetle, an' air dead, an' hev been waitin' so long in the dark fur the las' day an' thar summons ter rise."

That sharp smiting of metal upon stone jarred the moonlit quietude, and Guthrie looked up with dilated eyes, his hand quivering on the spade. "This ain't no common grave," he cried; "the ground is loose!"

He was not given to logical deductions; he did not speculate; he only stood staring with wonder; while Shattuck, all unaccustomed to the practical phenomena of digging, apprehended only cause of gratulation that the investigation was to be the less hindered. He made no reply, briskly shovelling out the earth. Presently, with a silent sign to Guthrie, he reached the topmost slab of the strange small sarcophagus. How long since it had seen the light that now fell upon the clay-incrusted stone! When it was first laid here, in what quarter was the moon? How often had it waxed and waned afterward, unmindful? The vibrations of the cataract filled the air with the full pulsings of nature's heart. The wind—wanderer!—came and went, as it did in the days of the pygmies. A flower from the laurel—a mere tissue of a bloom, so fine, so fragile of texture—was wafted down, and fell upon the slab, as transitory, as futile, as unheeded, as ye, O forgotten Little People!

Then the slab was lightly lifted, albeit with trembling hands. With averted eyes Guthrie shrank back, and, as his shadow withdrew, the moon shone straight into the tiny crypt, and Shattuck leaned forward to look. An exclamation, not of triumph, of horror, smote the air sharply. The mountaineer, with all his pulses aquiver, looked down into his coadjutor's white, startled face. Shattuck was kneeling beside the open grave, holding the coveted jug in his hand, full of silver currency. The slow mountaineer, hardly mastering the idea, turned to the coffin. If it still held bones, they lay beneath a pair of folded saddle-bags that filled the narrow space.

In the confusion that beset his senses, he did not discriminate the thunderous sound that rose upon the air: the flimsy bridge was vibrating under the reckless gallop of a score of horsemen. He only knew, as in a dream, that the moonlight was presently full of swift mounted shadows bearing down upon them, Shattuck still with the jar in his hand, although starting to his feet, and he himself leaning upon the spade. The air reverberated with a savage cheer of triumph. The sheriff had thrown himself to the ground, and with a smile of scornful elation held his pistol at Guthrie's head.

"Ye air no spy, air ye, Fee?" he cried out, with ringing sarcasm. "Got a mighty good reason not ter be. An' I reckon, my pretty Mister Town-man," turning to Shattuck, "ye air no spy nuther. But I'll gin in, Fee, I never war so fooled ez I hev been in you-uns. I never thunk ter set a thief ter ketch a thief this-a-way."

Upon the word, Guthrie, into whose stunned consciousness the truth had gradually sifted, turned, with a flaring color and a fiery eye, and dealt the officer a terrible blow in the face with his whole force. The next moment the two men, their arms interlocked, were swaying to and fro on the brink of the open grave, so nearly matched in strength that it was hard to say which might have prevailed, had not a swift flash of red light sprung out in the pallid moonlight, and a sharp report rung upon the air. They fell apart, the officer staggering backward, but Guthrie sinking down upon the ground, whence he would rise no more.

A mingled clamor, terrible, full of fierce meaning, was suddenly loud upon the night. The shifting temper of the populace was never more aptly illustrated. In an instant the officer was a prisoner in the hands of his posse, and his posse was an infuriated mob. The hoarse cry, "String him up! string him up!" arose more than once. And those who spoke calmly, and with reason and argument, were equally formidable as they called upon the officer to justify his deed.