In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Rhodes did not change color. There may have been those in his grandmother's days ready to break a lance in support of the supremacy of her charms, but her grandson had no mind to enter such antiquated lists. He only said, with electioneering subtlety—the development of which Shattuck watched with the admiring curiosity and wonder that he might feel concerning some acrobatic feat which he should, nevertheless, never desire to imitate or emulate—"Yes, pretty girls had mighty little need of bank-stock and lands then, as now. Beauty always will be chosen. If you had a daughter now, you might make it up to me for having given my grandad the go-by."

She looked at him with narrowing lids, wondering if he truly thought it possible that his grandfather had been her rejected suitor—a gay gallant, who had danced with all the country-side beauties, among whom he was a toast with his soft words and his flatteries sown broadcast, but who, when about to settle down, had chosen a staid, pious, educated wife, whose social status was such as to make his marriage a decided looking-up, even for him. Leonard Rhodes's claim to rank with "the quality" was largely dependent upon her side of the house. The assumptions of vanity, however, have an elastic limit. Mrs. Guthrie stretched it, convinced that he believed that the rich, dashing, flirting son of the judge was in the old days the disappointed swain of a simple mountain girl. Thenceforward, when she set herself to boast of her youth, she claimed the trophy of his heart, dust and ashes long ago in the grave of the simple-minded old gentleman, who had grown sober under life's discipline before he was forty, and had forgotten his merry youth save for a casual reminiscence.

"Yes," continued Rhodes, "I ought to be coming up here to see some lettuce-bird of a girl, instead of those hulking step-sons of yours, Fee and Ephraim, to humbug 'em into voting for me. Make 'em vote for me, Mrs. Guthrie. You owe me one now—you owe me one for the old time's sake."

"They needn't kem home ter me ef they don't vote fur ye," she said, fascinated with this fictitious conquest. She bore herself more proudly for it to the day of her death, although she knew in her secret soul the falsity of what he seemed to believe. On such slight fare as this can the vanity of a woman subsist.

And when he turned casually and asked, "Where are the boys, anyhow?" she directed him to a barley field, where they were cradling barley, and told him to come back that way with his friend, and she would have a "snack" for them. Shattuck marked, as they started, the alacrity with which she was rolling up the stocking that she had been knitting, and sticking the needles into the ball of yarn, her fine head, with its wealth of gray hair, distinct against the heavy vines that draped the porch. Their way took them around the side of the house in the deep lush grass, past the beehives all ranged by the fence, which was ascended and descended by a flight of steps, and surmounted by a small platform, and thence down through the orchard. Here the birds congregated in the thickly matted foliage. Only now and then at long intervals its dark-green shadow was penetrated by the sun. The warm fragrance of the so-called June apples was on the July air; the clover bloomed underfoot, and the bees boomed; the call of the jay, the sweet pensive cooing of a dove, sounded; then all was silence, save for a mere whisper of the sibilant wind.

Rhodes took off his hat as he walked, with the air of a need to refresh himself, his richly brown hair slightly stirring in the breeze. He cast his absorbed glance at his friend.

"Ain't she tur'ble 'oman?" he said, his electioneering ellipses sticking to his speech.

"Not so very 'tur'ble,' that I can see," said his friend, with unnoticed mimicry.

"Oh, Lord! yes, she is!" And Rhodes wagged his head with an unequivocal sincerity. "I know folks say she was an awful termagant with her first husband, who was a consumptive; and they did have a story"—he lowered his voice, and glanced cautiously around him—"that she hastened his end to be rid of the bother of nursing him. And then she married this fellow Guthrie's father. And she made a perfect jubilee up here a-beatin' the childern. I know the tales about it useter skeer me! I was a little shaver then, and I wouldn't go in the dark for fear of meeting her, though I had never seen her. At last one day Felix got his chance, and bit her arm nearly through, and ever afterward he clawed and bit and fought till she let him and Ephraim alone. Yes, my grandfather said she turned out exactly like he always knew she would."

"Why, I thought you said he was in love with her," exclaimed Shattuck, for Rhodes's representation had borne such verisimilitude as might deceive a casual on-looker as well as one eager to be convinced. Rhodes cast upon him an amazed glance.