In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

"They tell me, Yates," remarked one of the by-standers, with the pious intention of making himself disagreeable, "ez you-uns hev got the meanes' baby in the kentry. Plumb harries ye out'n house an' home with the temper of him."

"I have hearn that, too," affirmed another, the gleaming teeth of his half-illumined face attesting his relish of the abashed attitude of the forlorn Benedict. "I hev hearn 'way down ter Hang-Over Mountain big tales 'bout'n the survigrous temper o' that thar brat o' yourn. They 'low they kin hear him holler plumb ter the Leetle Tennessee."

The others exchanged glances of derision. The goaded father plucked up a trifle of spirit.

"He may have a survigrous temper, an' he do holler; he hev got the lungs ter do it; fur I tell ye now he's a whale! He air goin' ter be the Big Man o' these mountings—a reg'lar Samson!"

"Sure enough?" demanded the host, who, in his double character of entertainer and father, showed more interest in "leetle Mose" than the bachelors felt, except as he subdued his paternal relative and rendered him ridiculous.

"Yes, sir! Git him to stand on his feet, sir, an' I tell ye his head will reach that high." Yates measured off a length of the post at least twice the height of Moses. "He's a whale!" And, with a gravely triumphant nod, he pushed boldly into the room, although he knew that the rows of elderly women against the wall were commenting upon his "insurance" in appearing without his wife, thence proceeding, doubtless, to tear the character of the "leetle Moses" in such manner as that flimsy and much rent and riddled fabric was capable of being further shred.

The floor trembled and elastically vibrated to the tread of the dancers. The fiddler was seated in a rickety chair, precariously perched upon a table that evidently felt also the recurrent thrills of the measured pace. An intimation of the reverence in which his genius was held was given in the generous glass at the feet of the musician, never allowed to grow empty, however often, with a dexterous downward lurch, he caught it up and applied it to his lips in the intervals of the "figures," which he cried aloud in a stentorian voice. The big boots on his long crossed legs swayed above the heads of the company; his own head was not far from the festoons of red peppers swinging from the brown beams, his face was rapt, his cheek rested on the violin; his eyes were half-closed, and yet his vision was clear enough to detect any effort on the part of a passer-by to perpetrate the threadbare joke of appropriating the glass at his feet devoted to his refreshment. Then the fiddle-bow demonstrated a versatile utility in the sharp rap which it could deal, and its swiftness in resuming its more ostensible uses. There was little laughter amongst the young hunters and their partners. They danced with glistening eyes and flushed cheeks and a solemn agility, each mandate of the fiddler watched for with expectant interest, and obeyed with silent alacrity. They were all familiar to Steve Yates, looking on from the vantage-ground of his twenty-two years at the scenes of his youth, as it were; for in this primitive society the fact that he was a married man rendered him as ineligible for a dancing partner as the palsy could have done. Only Leonard Rhodes seemed something of a novelty. He hailed from the county town, and was a candidate for the Legislature. In the nimble pursuance of the road to success and fame he mingled in the dance, and he would have esteemed it fortunate could his devoirs have always been as congenial. He affected a pronounced rural air, although even his best manners were further from the cosmopolitan standard at which he habitually aimed than he himself realized. He was a tall, well-built, brown-haired young man, with a deeply sunburned face, a small, laughing brown eye, a reddish-brown, waving beard of a fine tint and lustre, which he usually had dyed a darker tone to evade the red shade considered so great a defect in that region. Owing to the length of his absence from his home in the interests of his canvass, and the lack of the village barber and his arts, its color had quite regained its pristine value. He wore sedulously his old clothes, which, upon his handsome figure, hardly looked so old or so plain or so democratic as he would fain have had his constituents see them, or, indeed, as the garments would have seemed on another man. He danced impartially and successively with every girl in the room; and it was well for his political prospects, doubtless, that he had such elastic and tough resources for this amusement at his command, since the neglect of any one of the fair might have resulted in the loss of an indefinite number of votes among her relatives of the sterner sex. His opponent, a family man forty-five years of age, was in disastrous eclipse. The elder candidate could only stand in a corner with some old codgers, who were painfully unresponsive to his remarks and his jolly stories, and whose attention was prone to wander from his long, cadaverous, bearded face as he talked, and to follow the mazes of the dance.

Yates bethought himself of Rhodes's friend, the archæologist, and catching sight of him lounging in a window opposite, his face lighted with the first suggestion of pleasure that the evening had offered. He made the tour of the room gradually, pausing now to keep out of the way of the dancers; now darting mouse-like along the wall in the rear of a couple advancing to the centre; now respectfully edging past a row of the mountain dowagers seated in splint-bottomed chairs, and talking with loud, shrill glee, bestowing but scant recognition on the man who had left his wife at home. At last, after many hair-breadth escapes, he reached Mr. Shattuck, still lolling upon the window-seat.

"How hev ye been a-comin' on?" Yates demanded, looking down at him with a pleased smile.

For Mr. Shattuck, without the affectation of rustic proclivities, made his way so fairly into the predilections of the mountaineers that his friend Rhodes, who held himself a famous tactician and full of all the finer enterprises to capture public favor, had asked more than once how he managed it.