"'WAR—WAR HE 'QUAINTED WITH ENNY OF 'EM?'"
"Great Gosh! Adelaide!" Yates exclaimed, irritably, contemptuous all at once of the limitations of her standpoint. "Ye stay cooped up hyar sociatin' with nobody but leetle Mose till ye hev furgot every durned thing ye ever knowed. The Leetle People hev been dead so long ago nobody 'members 'em—not even old man Peake, an' he air a hunderd an' ten year old—ef he ain't lyin'," he added, cautiously.
Her face flushed. There was fire in her serene eyes, like a flare of sunset in the placid depths of a lake. "I'm willin' ter 'bide along o' leetle Mose," she retorted. "I never expect ter see no better company 'n leetle Mose ter the las' day I live, an' I never did see none!"
Yates shifted his weight uncertainly upon his other foot, and surveyed with a casual glance the wide landscape. The sense of supersedure was sharp at the moment. He had been in his day a great man in her estimation, and now "leetle Mose," with his surly dejection, with only a tooth or two—and with these he would have gladly dispensed—with his uncertain gait and his pigeon-toes and his nearly bald head, was a greater man still. He and his mother were a close corporation, but, for the sake of his own fealty to the domestic Dagon, Steve Yates forgave them both. He went on presently:
"The valley man hed jes' hearn tell ez them Leetle People war buried hyarabout. I never seen a man so streck of a heap ez he war, an' he axed me fool questions till I felt plumb cur'ous a-talkin' 'bout them Leetle Stranger People buried thar on the rise." Once more he turned toward the slope that embarrassed, half-laughing glance—in which, however, there was no mirth—betokening a spirit ill at ease, and secretly shrinking from some uncanny, irksome fear.
Her eyes mechanically followed his to the purple slope so still under the crimson sky. Higher up, the mountain, shielded by the shadow of its own crags from this reflection of the west, showed a dark-green shade of an indescribable depth and richness of tone, never merging into dusky indefiniteness. Through a gap in the range to the east were visible the infinite blue distances of the Great Smoky peaks, their color here and there idealized by the far-away glamours of sunset to an exquisite roseate hue, or a crystalline and perfect amethyst against the amber horizon. Down the clifty gorge—its walls of solid sandstone, cloven to the bare heart of the range by the fierce momentum of the waters—the bounding river came. One mad leap presented the glittering splendors of a glassy-green cataract, and in its elastic spray an elusive rainbow lurked. Its voice was like that of one crying in the wilderness, so far might its eloquent iteration be heard. The Little People, in their day, might have given ear to its message and pondered on the untranslated tidings, but now they did not heed.
Only the dwellers in the mountaineer's cabin hard by listened at times to the pulsing rhythm, as alive as the metre of a great poem; and, again, in duller mood, its sound was but as silence to those who cared not to hear. The dark little house seemed small and solitary and transitory here among the massive, enduring mountains, beside the majestic flow of the waters, and the rail-fence enclosed the minimum of space from the great unpeopled wilds.
"I 'lowed ter him they never walked," Yates said, presently. "Ez fur ez I know, they hain't been seen, nor none o' 'em set out ter walk, sence they war put thar fust. Nobody ez I know purfesses ter hev seen enny o' the Stranger People's harnts."