In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

"Why, Shattuck, I am surprised! You ought to be ashamed to get mad so easy, when you know how I'm bothered and tormented out of my life. And with so much at stake! And you won't let me growl a little bit here with you at home, when I can afford to growl nowhere else, confound it! You ought to be ashamed!"

Shattuck hesitated. He cast a worried, agitated glance out of the window into the large freedom of the sunshine and the wind and the flying shadows of the fleecy summer clouds. There came a day when he remembered the moment, when he regretted that he had not ridden off into the buoyant midst of these lightsome elements. But at the time it seemed impracticable. There was something ludicrous, even more, unbecoming a gentleman, in leaving a friend's house in a pet, with the host's reproaches sounding in his ears, to be matched only by the bitterness of the guest's sneering retorts. There was, it is true, that implacable pride within him to which forgiveness is an unimagined possibility, and every fibre of it was poignantly astir. He did not conceive it possible that he could ever overlook Rhodes's lapse into the blunt speech of angry sincerity, unjustified by whatever his host might have come to feel. But he must have the semblance of comity and courtesy. In fact, he could hardly bestride his horse and ride away from the man's door without this friendliness, spurious though it might be, in his farewell. His face gave such token of his train of thought that Rhodes, although seeing him hearken to the suggestion of amity, did not swing back to the half-veiled surliness, too often the effect of an accepted effort at reconciliation.

"Lordy mercy! I'll let the weeds grow sky-high if you want to see the place go to rack and ruin," he said, as he bent forward to scoop up a coal in his pipe after the rural fashion he affected. "I didn't think you'd treat me so mean—the only friend I've got left; a broken reed, sure!" with a glance of reproach. "You might afford to let me maunder, and blame you or anybody else, I should think, for the confounded affair. As I'm likely to lose my election by it, I might have the poor privilege of a scape-goat."

"I won't play your scape-goat, I thank you very much," said Shattuck, his eyes eager with his wish to go, still hovering about the closed door.

"So I perceive," said Rhodes, shortly. Then, with a change of tone and an appealing glance of his dark-brown eyes: "But, for God's sake, Shattuck, don't run away and leave me the minute I flounder into a lot of bothers! For the Lord's mercy, try to put up with me a little, and let me grumble once in a while, for I do swear to you this whole thing has put me nearly beside myself. You know it is a canvass of personalities, and there's no telling the use this will be to Devens and his friends. If I can't carry these mountain districts I'm done, for the party issues will beat me like hell in Colbury and round about."

He took out of the breast pocket of the old claret-colored coat the envelope of a letter, which was scrawled over with figures pertaining to the relative population of the mountain districts, with an approximative calculation of the votes which he and his opponent might respectively receive. The smoke from his pipe curled between the paper and his eyes, but not even its sinuous vagaries served to alter the obdurate result, nor had his disaffected anxious gaze any effect, however slight, although he scanned these estimates forty times a day.

"I wish to God I knew where that confounded fellow Yates was!" he exclaimed. "They'll all have it that he died on account of my selfishness, being forced into Lord knows what dangers in my service." Then, with the politician's instinct for a popular pose—although at his own fireside, and with a man whom he did not care nor seek to deceive—he continued: "And for his sake, Shattuck, I'm more troubled than for my own. Why, I give you my word of honor, 1 hardly knew how to speak to his wife—I nearly said his widow—when I went to the house yesterday. And I couldn't look at that child of his. It's a calamity to them—a tremendous calamity—and I am concerned in it; and the Lord above knows I had no more to do with it than if I had been as dead as Hector!"

Shattuck had seated himself, his elbow over the back of the chair, his chin in his hand. He frowned heavily as he looked absently out of the tiny window-panes at the blue mountains, with so unseeing and troubled a gaze that Rhodes began to perceive that he had not only his own anxieties to restrain, but those of his friend as well. He sighed to assume the double load. He had a definite appreciation, however, that his position would hardly be bettered by his friend's desertion of him now, when he could not control the reasons therefore which Shattuck might give in his anger, and his opponent devise with so illimitable a license as speculation. He came to wish that he had let him go, but at that moment he exerted all his reserve force of geniality to heal the wound and frustrate his guest's departure.

"Oh, come on!" he cried out, suddenly, springing up actively, stretching both arms above his head, shaking out first one leg and then the other, that the trousers might slip down over his long boots, and seeking to rid himself of that stupor which waits on drowsing before a fire out of season—"come on! We are fairly baked before this fire. What ails that old nigger to build a big enough fire this weather to barbecue himself—and I wish he would! I'll order both the horses, and we will get out into the air, and get the cobwebs out of our brains. We'll ride up to Fee Guthrie's on the mountain, and I'll do a little electioneering, and show I bear no malice to him. And you'll see if he won't let you go digging around on his land in the cove for your pygmies. I declare I haven't treated you right, old fellow;" he clapped his hand jocularly on his guest's shoulder as they stood facing each other, and his manner of friendliness was not impaired, although he did not fail to see that Shattuck winced almost imperceptibly at his touch. "You haven't got a thing in the world but that old jug out of my mound"—and he glanced with a careless eye at a strangely decorated jar on the high mantel-piece—"and not a bone of a pygmy yet. Maybe Aunt Chancy could fool you with a beef bone or two—ha! ha! ha!—hearing you set such store on bones, hey?"

His discretion and his intuition were at fault. There is naught of which the man of science, albeit the veriest amateur, is so intolerant as ignorant ridicule. His fleering laugh jarred Shattuck's nerves, made sensitive by the ordeal of the morning, and his utter lack of appreciation of the meaning of that bit of pottery was as pitiable as if he lacked a sense—that of sight, for instance, and jeered at the idea of light. The human significance of it; the lost history of lands and peoples and civilization, of which it was a dim, vague intimation; the flight of time that it so fully expressed; the idea of death, of oblivion, of which it was so apt an exponent! Shattuck could not look at it without the thought of the hands that had carried it; the lips that had touched it; the strange, strange faces that had bent above it, reflected within its walls when full of water; the words, spoken in an unknown, forgotten language, of ambition or love or homely household usage, to which it had echoed—for a vibrant quality it had, porcelain-like. These immortal-seeming essences were all gone; yet here was the dumb insensate bit of clay left for him to turn in his foreign hands and ponder over with his foreign fancies—the idea wrung every fibre of feeling within him! And Rhodes's laugh was the vulgarity of the vandal.