In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

The house itself touched Shattuck's predilections. To him a peony, highly colored, on a black ground, in a mahogany frame, made a picture full of quaint character. The tall four-post bedsteads, with paper canopy emblazoned with a wreath of morning-glories, which suggested matutinal and industrial ideas rather than slothful lingerings beneath their fading blooms; the three or four carpeted steps at the foot of the bed, a sort of movable stair to enable one to mount into its comforts; the long serpentine sand-bag, which lay at the door to keep out the draughts; the stretch of mountains, blue far away, darkly bronze near at hand, that was visible from the tiny panes of every window—all combined to so suggest the past, to so disunite it from the present, that imagination needed little else to set these dim rooms astir again with former occupants, and to give him many an idle hour of pensive fantasies over his pipe.

He had glanced out of the door as he strolled about the dining-room, which opened on the porch at the side of the house; a mass of grape-vines twined over its dank and rotting roof; the heavy clusters of fruit had ripened here and there to a rich purple, with a silver bloom upon it, and again showed only translucent amber globules trenching upon a roseate hue. Amongst them all a tangle of white microphylla roses, their branches clambering high, was splendidly in blossom, and through the vista he saw the distant blue peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains, with the elusively glimmering mists upon them.

"Len," he said, suddenly, "you are a fool if you cut away that lot of grapes and roses. Let the porch rot. You can get a hundred such porches, but you won't come up with a tangle like that again in a lifetime."

Rhodes sat at ease, his chair tilted backward; his legs were extended at full length. His pipe was in his mouth, and his hat stuck on the back of his head; his richly brown hair was disordered on his forehead; his face was flushed, partly from the heat of the fire, partly from the smouldering irritation which Shattuck did not as yet divine; his nose, usually an inconspicuous feature, white and firm-fleshed, looked swollen and red, as if he had been drinking; his ungraceful posture drew his waistcoat into creases, and his old claret-colored coat, with a velvet collar, seemed high-shouldered and ungainly as he stayed his shoulder-blades against the back of the chair.

"Well, I'll undertake to do as I choose with my own," he broke forth, suddenly. "I'll put the axe to the root of the whole business if I want to."

Shattuck looked at him in amaze. "Why, of course, and welcome. What do you mean?" His tone was surprised and wounded, but pacific.

Rhodes, with a certain relief in liberating the pent-up tides of his vexation, went on with a visible increase of vehemence. "I mean that I have had about as much of your interference in my affairs as I have got a mind to put up with." He spoke between his set teeth, and with a toss of his hair, which was prone to fall upon his face.

Shattuck stood motionless, scarcely believing he had heard aright. A flush had mounted through his thin skin. He had a dismayed and hurt expression that was almost appealing. It was not that he found Rhodes's displeasure itself so overwhelming. That meant little to him. He was only aghast that Rhodes should make him feel it while a guest in the house. All the exigencies of hospitality hampered its recipient, and he hardly knew how to assert himself, how to lift his voice in defence.

"Will you tell me how I have interfered with you?" he asked, an almost imperceptible tremor in his tone. His eyes were fixed upon Rhodes, who did not meet them in turn, but kept his gaze upon the fire, still slowly smouldering.

"How? Well, I like that!" He cast his eyes up to the high mantel-piece, and laughed a little, showing his teeth—white and strong, but overcrowded and unevenly placed.