In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

She laughed in a languid way, once more stretching up her tired arms, the brown gourd in one of her lifted hands, and then she relapsed into silence, her eyes fixed upon the swift flow of the stream. He too was silent, gazing upon the gliding waters. Naught so unobtrusively, so sufficiently fills an interval of quiet as this watching the continual movement of a current. They neither knew nor cared how the time went by. Ceaselessly the swift swirling lines made out to the centre of the stream, and further down swept once more close in to the banks as the conformation of the unseen channel directed the volume and the force. The spring gurgled; its sunlit branch, wherein might be seen now and again a darting minnow, with its svelte shadow beneath it, flowed timorously down to join the river till a sudden widening and a quicker motion showed that its pulses felt the impetus of the stronger current. A kill-deer, flying so low as to dip its wings, ever and anon alighted on the margin, its stilt-like legs half submerged as it ran hither and thither, now and then bending to dig in the sand with its long slender bill. Suddenly there was a darker shadow in the water. A young woman had abruptly emerged from the undergrowth on the opposite bank, and was crossing the stream on the rickety little foot-bridge, consisting of but one log, the upper side hewn; her balance was a trifle difficult to maintain, as she carried a child in her arms. She looked eagerly toward the two as they sat by the spring, thus essentially differing from "leetle Mose," who, upon perceiving them, turned the back of his pink sun-bonnet upon them with an air of sullen rejection, unaware how the dignity of his demonstration was impaired by the diminutiveness of his head-gear, and, sooth to say, of the head within it. If he had expected to thus formidably crush the two spectators, he was mistaken; but he could not observe how it affected them, for he buried his face upon his mother's shoulder. She seemed fatigued and travel-worn as she came near, and her face bore traces of recent weeping in the pathetic drooping lips, the heavily lidded eyes, and her pallor. She strove gallantly for a smile and to speak in a casual tone, as she said, "Howdy, Litt?" Then, although nodding to Shattuck, for introductions are not in vogue in this region, she went on, eagerly: "Did Steve kem ter the infair? He 'lowed he would." She paused, biting her lips hard to keep back the tears. Letitia looked uncertainly at Shattuck, as if expecting him to reply. The benedict, drearily superfluous to the festivities, had hardly been noticed by her as he lurked about the walls and sought what entertainment was possible to one under the social disabilities of matrimony.

"Who? Stephen Yates? Oh, yes," said Shattuck. "He talked to me a long time. You were uneasy because he didn't come home?" he asked, with facile sympathy. At the kind tones her self-control melted, and the tears began to flow afresh. "The infair broke up with a row, and Mr. Rhodes was hurt," he explained, holding out his cigar with a delicate gesture, and touching off the long ash against a verge of the rock. "Steve Yates went for the doctor on one of Mr. Pettingill's horses. It seems to me that it is time for him to be back, too," he added, his mind recurring to his own interest in the matter, and once more he looked across the river and up the section of the road which became visible for a little way along the side of a corn-field, expecting to see the dust rise beneath the hoof-beats of the messenger's horse or the doctor's buggy wheels. But all was still and silent; only the air shimmered in the heat, and from amidst the blue-green expanse of the corn he saw a mocking-bird rise in the ecstasy of its redundant song, its wing-feathers a dazzling white in the sun, and drop back quivering and still singing upon the unstable perch of a waving tassel.

Adelaide's tears continued to flow, although she sought to stanch them now and again with the curtain of her sun-bonnet, which she pressed to her eyes. She had seated herself upon one of the rocks on the opposite side of the spring, and the "leetle Moses," whom she held upon her knee, one arm passed about his sufficiently burly waist, seeing that he was not noticed, indulged his own curiosity, and from the interior of his pink sun-bonnet bent a stare of frowning severity first upon Letitia, and then transferred his callow speculation to Shattuck. Perhaps it was far less Adelaide's natural embarrassment at thus meeting in tears a stranger than her divination of the young girl's mental attitude toward her that roused her pride and the resources of her fortitude. She sought to put away the recollection, hardly less poignant than the reality, of the long sad hours of the wakeful night—spent in reviewing the quarrel, repenting her hasty words to her husband, and anon inconsistently angered anew because of the memory of his own bitter sayings—the keen expectancy of the lagging morning, and the terrible morbid fear that had grown upon her jarred and shaken nerves that he would come back no more. Far, far was all her feeling from the girl's comprehension, and she deprecated that, with that half-scoffing face, Letitia should look in upon her sorrows—disproportionate and fantastic though they might be, but none the less piercing—and seek to gauge them by the narrow measure of her own experience and her own untried, undeveloped gamut of emotions.

"I ain't a-goin' ter git married," remarked the fancy-free scoffer from her perch, "till I kin find a man ez I kin trust wunst in a while ter take keer o' hisself, a-goin' an' a-comin' from a neighbor's house. Mus' be powerful sorrowful ter set at home an' shed tears lest he mought hev stumped his toe on the road. Mighty oncommon kind o' man I want, I know, but"—with resolution—"I be a-goin' ter s'arch the mountings, far an' nigh, till I find him. I'd like ter marry a man ez could be trusted ter take keer o' hisself, an' mought even, on a pinch, take keer o' me."

Shattuck, with a smile, glanced across at the weeping wife, who laughed a trifle hysterically amidst her tears, and said:

"Oh, don't, Litt!" Then, regaining her composure, she once more pressed the curtain of her calico sun-bonnet to her eyes. It seemed that her dignity required some explanation. "I wouldn't hev minded it so," she said, "ef me an' Steve hedn't hed words. He wanted me ter kem with him ter the infair, but I war 'feared ter bring leetle Mose, fur he mought hev cotched the measles or the whoopin'-cough."

"He's safe now," remarked Letitia. "I be the youngest o' the fambly. I hed the measles thirteen year ago, an' I never did demean myself so fur ez ter hev the whoopin'-cough."

Somehow the tone of raillery, the sense of the freedom and the irresponsibility of the young girl, roused a vague sort of protest in the other, only a few years older, but upon whose heart were so many clamorous demands, all the dearer for their exactions. She felt bound to set herself right. Who had ever a happier married life than she and Stephen, a more contented home? And then the supreme unanimity of their worship of the domestic god Dagon—the extraordinary "leetle Mose!"

"I 'low I wouldn't hev been sech a fool ef 'twarn't so uncommon fur me an' Steve ter fall out," she said, her face resuming its serene curves, her full, luminous dark eyes fixed with a sort of recognition on Shattuck, which his quick senses apprehended as identification from description. "I oughtn't ter hev set up my 'pinion 'gin his, I reckon. He war mightily tuk up with a man—I reckon 'twar you-uns—ez hed been a-diggin' in the Injun mounds."

Shattuck nodded in response to this unique introduction.