In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Her eyes, their fine color still asserted in the glow of the red embers, had in them a certain wonder, a sentiment of pain, a touch of fear. The boy's words had given direction to her thoughts. Felix Guthrie would not have lingered to see her sing—he knew but vaguely that her face charmed him. He had no adequate sense of its beauty. She herself had learned it only in another man's eyes—so loath they were to leave it, so fired with some subtle enthusiasm for it. He could look at her silently for hours; but surely, she thought, she could not have fancied in that sinister apparition at the window any resemblance to him. And why should he linger without and peer in at the fireside group when the door would have opened willingly? It was not he; but who was it? And this mystery bore her company into the dull, dead hours. She could not sleep; her eyes were open, and staring into the darkness long, long after slumber had enwrapped all others of the household. She was not restless, only wakeful, as if she should never sleep again. She marked all the successive changes of the night. A long time a cricket shrilled and shrilled in some cranny of the room, and at last was weary, and so grew mute. An owl screamed once without, and was heard no more. Occasionally the dogs, who slept under the house, stirred and wheezed and changed their posture, bumping their heads against the floor as they moved, and were still again. The wind roved for a while listlessly about the garden bushes, and at last was lulled amongst them. And then ensued a hush so intense, so prolonged, that it weighed upon her senses, alert to catch and distinguish some sound that might break it. Naught. Not even the ashes crumbled in the wide chimney-place, where they covered the embers. So deep was the slumber of Adelaide beside her, of Moses in his crib, that they hardly seemed to breathe. Darkness unbroken and silence absolute. Thus might she feel, she thought, without sound or light, if perchance she should wake some time in her grave, after she had lain five centuries, say, quite dead; as the Little People might feel, stirred to some merely mechanical sensation of falling to dust, in those quaint coffins that had become a curiosity, bereft of human significance, of fraternal sanctity, so old, so queer they were. Thus they felt, no doubt, in the long pauses of the centuries while they waited for the judgment.

And with a sudden fear of a dull numbness stealing over her, she roused herself to a sitting posture, and slipped from the high piles of the thick feather-bed to the floor. Her bare feet were noiseless as she crossed the room and sat down in a rocking-chair. The stones of the hearth were warm yet, and pleasant to the touch. She heard the dogs stir once again, and a young horse that was at liberty without trot slowly around the cabin.

What sort of lives did those Little People lead here? she began to wonder anew. Was the grass so fine and soft and green in their day as now? Did the flowers bloom, and the sun shine, and the earth grow so fair of face in the long summer-time that the thought of death became inexpressibly repugnant, and one might wish it afar off, long, long to wait on this sweet existence? O Little People, that it should have come at last! O Little People, to lie so long and wait in gloom!

Somehow the thought of the eventless passing of centuries to them gave her a more adequate idea of the quietus of death—its insoluble change. She felt stifling. She rose to her feet, opened the batten shutter near at hand, and looked out upon the night. The moon had risen; she had hardly expected to see it there, hanging in the gorge of the mountains above the falls. Melancholy and waning it was. She had never heard that it was a dead, burnt-out world of spent fires; she thought it of this life, and she welcomed the sight. Stars were out, and the clouds all gone. The dank breath of herbage, sodden with rain, came to her; the mists were barely visible, hovering above the dark ravines. The shadows were long. She saw the horse whose hoof-beats she had heard, not drowsing, but standing beside a clump of bushes, his ears alert, his motionless head turned intently toward the mountains. The sound of the cataract was only a dull monotone, as if it slept in the dead midnight. And suddenly, as she stood there, with the moonlight on her white gown and her disordered hair and in her lustrous eyes, another sound smote her ear—the sound of a pickaxe striking suddenly upon stone. It came from the pygmy burying-ground. She heard it only once, for it came no more.

VIII.

Leonard Rhodes arose from the bed to which his wounds had consigned him when he was at last permitted to dispense with the vigilant care and alert fears of the "yerb doctor." The methods of Phil Craig's practice consisted largely in frustrating disastrous possibilities. "Ye can't git up; ye mought fever," he replied to every appeal. "Ye mustn't think 'bout nuthin'; ye mought fever!" And after the extreme limits which had been assigned to Rhodes's durance were reached, the doctor revoked his promises of liberation, and required of him one day more, quiet and recumbent, for full measure. Rhodes might hardly have submitted had he not been willing that the community should think his hurt more serious than it really was. He himself appreciated that the wound was as trivial as it might be. But there was something disastrous to the pretensions of a candidate in the disproportionate importance that had been attached to it—the insult, for its paltry sake, that his friend had offered to Mr. Pettingill, his host, and a man who habitually voted with the opposite faction; and in a minor degree the slur cast upon the science of Phil Craig, who cared, however, not at all, looking upon Rhodes merely as an object of flesh and blood that might, under certain contingencies, perversely undertake to fever. Most of all, Rhodes deprecated the tragic conclusion of the midnight errand in his interest on which Steve Yates had been despatched. Although the community had generally accepted the conclusion that Yates had seized the opportunity for some unknown reason—a quarrel with his wife was frequently assigned as the cause—to flee the country, there were those who shook their heads darkly over the mystery, with misgivings and grim suggestions and hopes that "the body" would be found some day. And from these rumors Leonard Rhodes feared the defeat of all his cherished schemes. It was a personal popularity which he sought to conserve. Party feeling ran very high, and in point of strength the two opposing factions were closely matched. It was only by virtue of his own superior quality of comradeship, his geniality, the fact that he was untried and had the fascination of novelty, and was held to possess certain elements of character challenging admiration—being esteemed brave, gay, full of generous high spirits—that he had expected to overbear the balance, swinging at an impartial poise, and tip it ever so slightly in his favor. How far this prospect had been wrecked, how indissolubly his name was coupled with ridicule or reprobation, he had hardly dared to consider as he lay at length watching the light and shadow play in the full-leaved sycamore-tree close by the roof-room window, the flash of sunshine on the white wings of the nesting pigeons by the chimney, the wolf-skins swaying from the rafters, sometimes seeming, when the sun was low and the wind flickered, to reassume the symmetries of life, and to lurk there, with shining eyes and expectant motion, ready to spring. He could hear the river chant tirelessly its sweet low monody in its sylvan shadows; he knew the hour by the voice of the herds, and felt scant need of his watch ticking under his pillow; but most of all the flight of time was indicated by the sibilant wheeze of Mrs. Pettingill, often audibly conferring below stairs concerning the patient's dinner with the anxious, conscientious, cautious Craig, who seemed to consider all the disorders of the body to arise from the bad habit of eating to nourish it. His professional interdiction was upon almost every dish in Mrs. Pettingill's répertoire; but his back would be hardly turned before her heavy lumbering step was on the stair, and her countenance, red from bending over the coals, would appear above the door in the floor, and she would emerge carrying in her hand her appetizing blue bowl, or one of her large willow-pattern plates that knew more antiquated delicacies than often grace much finer ware. Corrugated consciousness of dereliction would be on her face, but a resolute determination to persevere in sinning.

"Ef Phil Craig hev got the heart ter starve ye, I ain't," she would wheeze. "An' ef ye air so contrairy-minded ez ter die o' this hyar leetle squab pie an' roastin' ears—roasted in thar husks—an' a small taste o' cheese and this transparent puddin', I'll jes' swear I didn't kill ye, an' ye hed nuthin' from my han' but cold spring-water."

And having thus adjusted her deceit to the possible pursuit of the laws of the land, she would administer her dainties, often descending heavily to her lair below-stairs for a fresh supply.

Thus it was that with all the hues of health, all his usual vigor of step and manner, Rhodes appeared once more before the gaze of the constituents whom he fain would capture.

"Hello! Ye've been 'possumin', Len," was the surprised cry that greeted him wherever he came. And although he might good-naturedly parry it, and respond to praise the "yerb doctor's" skill, still the fact that he had been scarcely hurt at all went the rounds of the gossips and caused much speculation.