In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Shattuck, going up-stairs, glanced down, upon hearing the words, at the cosy nook and the fiddler, and was reminded anew of his friend's danger, his sense of achievement in carrying his point having served for a time to dull his anxiety. The room had taken on that strange, discordant, forlorn effect which is characteristic of a scene of gayety overpast, and is never compassed by mere bareness, or disarray, or disuse. There was a pervasive sense of expended forces, as if all the elation and effervescent spirit exhaling here had left a veritable vacuum. The candles on shelf and niche and table were sputtering in their sockets or burning dimly. Here and there mountaineers slouched about, awaiting their womankind, who presently flustered out of the shed-room wrapped in shawls, and with big bundles of the "supper" so unhappily transformed into a "snack." There were chairs tilted back against the walls as the spectators of the festivities had left them. A saddle or two and a trace-chain and some bits of harness were lying about the floor, where they had been temporarily disposed by the owners, engaged in "gearing up" the teams without. Now and again voices could be heard calling refractory beasts to order, but dulled by the distance, and partaking of the languor of the hour. The baby, who had danced as assiduously as the best, albeit its walking days were not yet well ushered in, had succumbed at last, and lay, a slumbering heap of pink flesh and blue calico, upon the floor. Its attitude demonstrated the elasticity of its youthful limbs, and its hands clutched one of the pink feet that had done such yeoman service earlier in the evening. An old hound, bound to the spot by the talismanic phrase, "Guard him!"—a duty from which only death itself could lure him—sat bolt-upright by the prostrate figure, and looked now with sleepy eyes and cavernous yawns at the departing guests, and now became preternaturally vigilant, and uttered wistful wheezes of despair and envy as the hopeful gambols of the young dogs about the munching fiddler caught his attention. The whole picture grew dim and hazy with its flickering lights, and fluctuated suddenly into darkness, as if it had slipped from actuality into a mere memory, as Shattuck went farther up the stair and the roof-room gathered shape and consistency before him. The window at one end still held the glamour of the moonlight, the silver green of the swaying foliage, the freshness and the sparkle of the dew. He heard the pigeons cooing drowsily. The wolf-skins swinging from the rafters caught the gleam of the candle, and borrowed a sleek and rich lustre. The focus of the tallow dip itself glowed yellow in the midst of its divergent rays, that grew dim as they stretched ever farther among the duskily brown shadows of the place. Now and again it was eclipsed as figures, ministering to the wounded man, passed before it. Suddenly they drew back. Rhodes's face, distinct upon the pillow, caught the light full upon it. Shattuck started forward, a great throb of relief astir at his heart, and a loud exclamation, incoherent, upon his lips. For his friend had opened his eyes, alight with his own old identity; his face, pallid, and with smears of blood faintly discernible, although much of it had been washed away, wore a languid smile. It seemed that the element of his being which was strongest in him, his sense of postulance, of candidacy before the people, was reasserted first of all his faculties.

"Did I—did I—hurt anybody?" he faltered; "I didn't mean to hurt anybody." Then, as he seemed to realize his surroundings, his memory revived.

"Where's Fee? Fee didn't get hurt, did he? Where am I?" He lifted himself upon his elbow and looked waveringly about. "Lord!" he exclaimed, impressed by the silence, "you didn't stop the dancing on my account, Mr. Pettingill? I've spoiled the party! Well! well! I'll never be able to look Mrs. Pettingill in the face again." And he sank back on the pillow.

The surly countenance beneath the host's grizzled shock of hair took on a milder expression. The stiff grooves and lines of the lips relaxed, and might be said to have released a smile. "We kin spare the party, Mr. Rhodes—spare it a sight easier'n we kin spare you-uns." Then, as Shattuck unwisely pressed up to the side of the bed, the old man's eyes suddenly assumed a hard glitter of triumph with the hot anger that made him breathe quickly and stertorously, and curved the lines of his stiff old mouth.

"Thar be some," he remarked, "ez will 'low I be jes' glad ter git shet o' bein' prosecuted. Me prosecuted, 'kase ye an' Fee tuk ter tusslin' in the middle o' the dancin', an' Fee war the bes' man. Prosecuted!" He snorted out the word with a repulsion that made the very tone odious.

Rhodes, visibly agitated, pulled himself into a sitting posture. "Who—who—said that—such a thing?" Still dazed and confused though he was, his eyes, sweeping the by-standers, rested with the certainty of reproach upon Shattuck. There was a momentary silence. "Understand one thing, Mr. Pettingill," he said at length, with a quick flush upon his pale face that had seemed to grow lean in the last hour—"understand this: alive or dead, no man speaks for me."

He sank back once more upon his pillow, which the herb doctor had readjusted with a hand that was as soft and listless as any fine lady's; he lifted the injured man's head into another position.

"It air mo' level," he observed, learnedly. "This slit in his head air a-goin' ter cure up right off," he continued, looking with mild blue eyes at Shattuck, who stood flushed and indignant among them all, feeling repudiated in the odd turn that affairs had taken. "'Tain't goin' ter inflame none, hevin' bled so much. He warn't shot nowhar; jes' cut on the head. His hair is singed some, whar the powder burnt it, I reckon. He mustn't git up, though, ter-day nor ter-morrow, else he'll fever."

If Shattuck, with the cowardice that is the essential sequence of a well-intentioned mistake, hoped that no more might be said by Mr. Pettingill, he understood little of the pertinacity and endurance that can animate him who presses his breast against the thorn. The host had been unspeakably afflicted by the bare suggestion of foul play. It had served as a goad when naught else might have moved him. Even although its efficacy was nullified, he could not pass it by, but again and again in review he evoked all its capacities of poignancy. "Ye shet up, Phil Craig," he said, his manner of rebuke palpably affected. "Ye ain't fitten ter doctor the 'quality.' I hev hed ter send Steve Yates a-cavortin' seventeen mile in the midnight ter fetch a doctor ter physic Mr. Rhodes fur a leetle gash side o' the head! May keep we-uns from bein' prosecuted, though; leastwise we'll hope so."

Rhodes, appalled, could only stare with amazement at Shattuck. How his friend could have brought himself to consider bodily health before political advantage, and yet call himself a friend, was a thing which he could not comprehend. It was all too fresh for even the sophistical comfort of believing that he had tried to do all for the best. He could only look at Shattuck with eyes full of wonder and reproach, doubly effective from his reduced and prone estate; and Shattuck, indignant and resentful, could only turn short about and walk away. He repented that he had done aught. And then he wondered how any man of sense could have done aught else. His dignity was affronted by the position in which he found himself. He despised his friend for the pusillanimous time-serving of his hearty endorsement of all that the mountaineers had done and said. And yet he could but acknowledge that this was ample. He despised himself for his vicarious fright, his over-serious treatment of the incident. And yet, as he recalled the scene—the two struggling, swaying figures, the savage blow with the butt end of the pistol, the sudden discharge of the weapon, the heavy fall, the long insensibility—it seemed as if the issue were phenomenally fortunate, rather than such as might have been expected. Amidst all the nettling subjects of contemplation, one recurred with continually harassing suggestions—how he should meet the physician whom he had caused to be summoned in the midnight from the distance of seventeen miles, when the learning or the ignorance of the simple herb doctor had so amply sufficed for the emergency. Caused to be summoned! He thought of Steve Yates riding the horse's back sore, believing that a dying man lay in the house. As he heard Rhodes's rollicking laughter—a trifle quavering, to be sure—he quailed before the idea that there was nothing to offer the physician when he should arrive. He felt that he would have been glad of a diseased liver or an injured brain to justify his proceedings. He began in a nervous state of expectancy to pause whenever he reached the shadowy window, and to look through the silvered branches of the sycamore-tree, fearing to descry perchance a mounted figure approaching along the winding road. All vacant it was as it curved, now in the clear sheen, now lost in the black shadow, reappearing at an unexpected angle, as if in the darkness the continuity were severed, and it existed only in sinuous sections. Once adown the dewy way a youthful cavalier spurred with a maiden mounted behind him, swiftly passing out of sight, recalling to the imagination some romance of eld, when the damosel fled with her lover. An ox-cart lumbering slowly along, with its burly, nodding team, through the illumined spaces, and disappearing in intervals of obscurity, the motion of the oxen's horns somehow vaguely discerned before they emerged again from the shadow, illustrated the leisurely ideal of mountain travel. After it had quite vanished, and even the sharp, grating creak of its unoiled running-gear had been lost in the distance, a swift canine figure, distorted by speed to a mere caricature of its species, with tail drooping, with ears laid back close to its head, darted along the serpentine curves—one of the visitors' dogs, just made aware of his master's departure, and in his haste to overtake the jogging vehicle adding farcical suggestions of comparison to its slow progress.