He repeated this with simplicity, evidently desirous of giving the pygmy dwellers their bounden due.
"I 'lowed ter him," he continued, "ez folks hed let them be, an' they hed let the mounting folks be. Nobody wanted sech cur'ous harnts ez folks o' thar size ter git ter walkin' at this late day."
There was a vague chill in the air—or was it in the moral atmosphere?
"What be he a-vagrantin' round fur, inquirin' 'bout them as be dead an' done with the livin' long ago?" she demanded, a touch of acerbity in her tone and a restless look in her eyes.
"He 'lows ez he's jes' kem hyar along o' Leonard Rhodes ez be a-'lectioneerin' fur floater fur the Legislatur'. An' him an' Rhodes air frien's, an' Rhodes hev got some lan' in this county ez hev got one o' them Injun mounds on it, an' he hev let this frien' o' his hev men ter dig an' open it ter see what they could find. I seen 'em arter it ter-day; this hyar man 'peared mighty nigh ez excited ez a Juny-bug; I noticed he never dug none, though, hisse'f."
He paused for a moment, chewing hard on his quid of tobacco; then he slowly laughed. "The folks he hed hired ter dig 'lowed he war teched in the head, but he 'peared sorter sensible ter me—never teched a spade, an' 'twar a hot day."
"What did they find?" asked his wife, breathlessly.
"Dirt," Yates said, with an iconoclastic laugh, "a plenty of it. He 'peared toler'ble disapp'inted till he hearn 'bout the Stranger People's buryin'-groun'. Adelaide"—he raised his voice suddenly—"that thar idjit o' a man, he 'lows ez them Leetle People warn't grown folks at all—jes' chil'n; I tried ter tell the fool better—jes' leetle chil'n!"
He glanced quickly at her, as if prepared for the shock of surprise which must be elicited by this onslaught upon the faith of a whole community. Somehow, as she again fastened her eyes on the sombre declivity, her face wore the look of one whose secret thought is revealed in words. In the few years that she had lived here, a stranger herself, in some sort—not accustomed, as was her husband, to a lifelong vicinage to the pygmy burial-ground—she had developed no receptivity to that uncanny idea of a race of dwarfs. Always as children she had thought of the Little People; she had made no effort to reconcile this theory with the strange fact that no similar sarcophagi, enclosing larger frames, were known of far or near; she found no incongruity in the idea that infants should have been thus segregated in death from all their kindred; it seemed a meet resting-place for youth and innocence, thus apart from all others. They were children—only children; all asleep; asleep and resting! With the strange fascination that the spot and its unique tradition exerted upon her, she would glance thither from time to time throughout the day, pausing at her task to follow the shadow of the clouds sweeping over the purple slope, and to listen to the whir of bees in the still noon amongst the sweet fern and to the call of the glad birds. When she sang in fitful fragments a crooning lullaby to her own child, who had made all childhood doubly dear and doubly sacred to her heart, she was wont to watch pensively the tender glow of evening reddening there, so soft, so brilliant, so promissory of the splendid days to come that it needs must suggest that supernal dawn when the Little People should all rise to greet the rising sun that they had seen set for the last time so long ago. In bright, slanting rows, as swift, as ethereal, as dazzling as the morning mist transfigured by the sun's rays—with her prophetic eyes she could behold them, rank after rank, coming down the slope in this radiant guise; meanwhile they slept as securely as her child slept in her arms, their waking as certain.
The picture recurred to her thoughts at the moment. "They will all rise before we-uns at the jedgmint-day," she said, her far-seeing gray eyes clear and crystalline upon the unmarked place.