In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

"I look at myself in the mirror with a good deal more pleasure than is proper, I expect," said Rhodes, smoothing his handsome and lustrous red-brown beard. He tipped his straw hat over his smiling, full-lashed dark eyes, for they were out of the shadows at last, and in the sun amongst a stretch of the barley. The wind bent it; long glintings of pale light pervaded it. The whole field was of a delicate, fluctuating green, with these fine undulations like quicksilver running over it. Sometimes the shadow of a cloud came, a thing swiftly scudding and noiseless too, and the green, hitherto held in indefinite solution, was precipitated into a pure emerald tint, for this was a later sowing than the spaces further down the slope, which had grown tawny with ripeness, and showed on the hither side the long swaths from the cradling, drying upon the ground. The cradles lay there too, and beneath the dark shadow of a great spreading buckeye-tree in a corner of the fence—the only one in the field that bore its pristine richness of foliage, for the rest, gaunt and bare, girdled long ago, towered into the air, dead, white, and unsightly—lounged the two brothers, loitering away the heated hour.

From the depths of the cove below, this field on the mountain slope was visible a long way. Shattuck remembered having observed it as a dull, light-tinted, tiny square in the midst of the dense primeval woods that encompassed it. Now he looked with interest to identify in turn the landmarks of the cove. So purple it was in the distance, save where the slopes rose on either hand, and the summits of the forest grew gradually into a bronze hue, and thence to the deep, restful green of the full summertide. Far away all the horizon was bounded by many a range and peak, painted in all the gradations of blue, from a dull, blurred tint to the finest turquoise delicacy, and rising tier upon tier, till at last the enamelled sky limited the climbing heights. Here and there in the depths below, vague lines marked where the fences ran. A tiny curl of smoke first betokened the Yates cabin; he saw the sun strike full on its shining roof. But most salient of all, the river gleamed a steely gray beneath the craggy walls of the gorge, and the cataract danced all white and green, like a jewel endowed with a flashing life. This only, in the sweet serenity and peace of the scene, seemed to move. The wind came and went, it is true, but with scant token of its presence; only now and again a suggestion of the pallid reverse side of the leaves bestreaked the mountain slopes and marked its path. A flock of sheep feeding in a brambly, rocky space were as motionless as a pastoral scene on canvas. Once a glow of an intense blood-bay color struck his keen eye, and made him aware that a horse was tethered a little way down from the house; the sun struck upon the glossy flank; then the animal slipped into the deep shadow, and was seen no more.

None of this had Rhodes observed. His eyes were fixed upon the two brothers as they lounged amongst the grass and weeds in the fence corner, culpably overgrown in the eyes of a farmer, but cool and sweet in the dense shade of the buckeye-tree, and with sundry long tangled vines of the purple and white passion-flowers, clear-eyed in the grass, and the scarlet trumpet-blossom flaring over the staked and ridered rail-fence. There could hardly be two men less alike, the difference accented since they were both bareheaded—the one with his grave, forceful features, at once sullen and sad, his long curling hair hanging on the shoulders of his blue cotton shirt; the other bullet-headed, close-cropped, with a twinkling, merry eye, a propitiatory expression, a broad face that would look young even when it should be withered and wrinkled like a shrivelled apple, and the coarse brown tufty hair should be as white as snow. The latter looked up with a ready-made, adjustable smile as Rhodes's hearty "Howdy, boys?" rang upon the perfumed air. The candidate did not wait for them to rise, but flung himself at length into the sweet grass, taking his hat off his head and leaning his shoulders against the big buckeye-tree.

"Waal, how do you-uns do, Mr. Rhodes?" said Ephraim, with smooth cordiality. "How be you-uns a-kemin' on these days? A month o' Sundays sence we hev seen ye."

He then looked quickly at his brother, with an anxious submission of his conduct for the fraternal approval. For Ephraim Guthrie labored heavily between the quick geniality of a mercurial temperament, a lack of confidence in his own judgment, and a childlike reliance on his brother's opinion: without its coincidence with his own he could not be at ease for a moment. He always spoke precipitately on the impulse of the first, was checked by the second, and waited with pathetic anxiety for the third. He was all things to all men, and this vacillating lack of consistency rendered his amiability of little value in the estimation of the candidate. Rhodes saw with disappointment the other brother, the valid object of conciliation, rise, after a mutter of salutation, to join Shattuck, who, with a nod to the two, had turned away, and stood, with one hand in his pocket, silently surveying the scene below him. He only lifted his eyes slightly in recognition of Guthrie's approach as the burly young mountaineer drew near him, and it was his uncommunicative host who spoke first.

"Glad ter see ye, Mr. Shattuck—glad ter see ye on the mounting."

Shattuck divined that he enjoyed unusual cordiality in being deemed by his host preferable for conversation to Rhodes. The injury which Guthrie had inflicted upon the candidate, and which he had been thought to so magnify, recurred to his mind, with the further fact that it was no accident. Guthrie evidently still cherished the motive that prompted it, and bore malice. It was intention that had led him to leave the candidate to talk to the plastic younger brother while he himself held aloof under the guise of joining the other guest. Nevertheless, his ear was keen for the conversation between the two, which the crafty Rhodes may have in part designed for him, and Shattuck was aware that it was only a divided attention with which he was favored. He responded, however, with equal courtesy.

"A fine view you have here, Mr. Guthrie—a very fine view. I don't know its equal anywhere."

Guthrie glanced quickly at him, then ran his eye over the scene, with the effect of seeing it for the first time. He knew no other aspect of the world. It had never occurred to him that the lives of many other people were not bounded by these fine and massive symmetries of mountain ranges in every tender phase of purest color; by infinite distances, challenging the capacities of farthest vision; by softest pastoral suggestions of cove and slope; by primeval wildernesses and stern and rugged solemnities of crags; by phantasmal chutes of flying mountain torrents. His sense of its beauty was blunted by the daily habit of its presence; paradoxically, it could be brought home to him only if it were swept away.

"Yes," he said, uncertainly, "an' we'd hev a good lookout fur corn ef we could hev mo' rain." And he cast a weatherwise eye angrily at the sky, where all the clouds seemed gadding abroad a-pleasuring only, and with no idea of utility as they dallied with the wind. "Not," he added, with an after-thought and a certain precipitation, as if he were afraid that the remark might be overheard, and forthwith acted upon—"not ez I want ter hev enny fallin' weather nuther till we-uns git in this hyar barley."