In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

With all his odd bits of learning, Shattuck knew little of human nature. He had mastered more of the science of craniology than of those fine aerial transient guests that the skull may house—retroactive motives and full-winged schemes, and, strongest of all, that moral harlequin, coming and going, none knows whence or whither, the impulse. A mad bull is hardly in a state of mind or on a plane of culture to appreciate an accurately balanced syllogism, but Shattuck must needs offer logic to Rhodes:

"No stranger here could have influence enough with these people to interfere in your affairs. I am a stranger here. I could not interfere even if I would. How could I? Why should I?"

"That's what gets me!" cried his host, coarsely. "Why you should have undertaken to send seventeen miles for a doctor to physic a small scratch on the head, and how you could insinuate to an old man, whose guest I was—had forced myself on him, in fact, as well as you—that he might be strung up if I should die in his house for no fault of his—it all passes my comprehension."

Shattuck's flush grew deeper. His eyes, whose reproachful look the other never met, had a hot, hunted, harried look.

"I wouldn't have had it happen," cried Rhodes, clasping his hands behind his tousled head, the change in his attitude adding to the dislocation of his aspect and the precariousness of his posture, his chair still balanced on its hind-legs, his own legs still stretched out at full length—"I wouldn't have had Steve Yates sent on that lonely road at midnight on my errand, if I had known it, for a million—a quadrillion of dollars."

"Money seems really no object," Shattuck retorted, somewhat in his host's own vein. His eyes were alert now. The dull, hurt look had vanished. He was moved to defend himself against a reproach, unjust, indeed, but which his own troubled heart and tormented conscience and sensitive consciousness had often urged in their reasonless impunity. He was in naught to blame that any evil had befallen Yates—this he knew full well—and still he regretted, and still he reproached himself. And because of this he had become expert at his logical self-defence, and he sprang to its weapons as if for his life.

"A lonely road!" he sneered. "A late hour! As if I, a stranger in the country, did not travel it alone, and at midnight too, to escape the heat of a daytime journey, as everybody does who has occasion to come or go at this season. I took excellent care of myself upon it. I met nothing but a rabbit or two and a few stray cattle. It never occurred to me that Yates was not as safe on that road as in his own house. And I did not ask him to go. He volunteered. I did make too great a commotion over your being hurt, and I admit it. I was a fool for that; and I was mistaken—considerably—both in the nature of the wound and the man that got it. I gave myself too much solicitude altogether, far more than the subject warranted."

His eyes had succeeded in meeting Rhodes's at last, but they saw little of what was before them. The candidate had lowered his arms to a normal posture; the fore-legs of his chair had dropped to the floor; he sat erect, looking intently and deprecatingly at his angry friend, so hard to rouse, so thoroughly roused at last. Rhodes was of that temperament best controlled by the exhibition of a counterpart emotion. Shattuck's anger quelled his own. He was eager to interrupt, wincing under the low-toned words, husky with passion. He was of versatile capacities; he could be a balance-weight were there no one else to keep the poise. His anger was only indulged under the license of impunity. It had evaporated as if it had never fired his blood. He received the demonstration with a palpable surprise—as though he had done naught to provoke it—when his friend, turning toward the door, said, ceremoniously:

"And now, Mr. Rhodes, if you will add to your kind hospitality, for which I am indebted, the favor of ordering my horse, I will trouble you with my 'interference' no more."

Even Shattuck felt that he had gone too far, that he had needlessly quarrelled on a small provocation, when the other called out, naturally: