In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

He was not sorry that farther conversation was precluded by the necessity of riding in single file, for the road, rocky and narrow, hardly more than a bridle-path, indeed, was beset by precipices, now on one side, now on the other, and again sheer down on both, their way lying along the crest of a high comb-like ridge, above abysses veiled by the heavy growth of pines, the plumy tops waving far below. Rhodes and Shattuck found it needful to give careful heed to their steps, for their horses, bred in the "flat woods," trod this narrow ridge with a gingerly gait as if the ground were hot, with pricked-up ears, and with now and again a convulsive snort of surprise and disparagement. But the sure-footed mountain mare, well inured to the craggy heights, went deftly and carelessly along at a sharp trot, occasionally snatching a casual mouthful from the bushes that precariously clung to the wayside, while the colt, with the nimblest disregard of lurking dangers, caracoled and curveted, now in advance and now behind the party, showing its flying, unshod heels in almost impossible attitudes against the sky, inconsistent with the laws of gravity and of standing upon the earth at all. Here could be seen the great contours of the range, invisible from the cove, or but dimly suggested by variant shades. The massive slopes rose on every hand; from deep intervenient ravines came now and then silver gleams of mountain torrents among the crags and the pines. Often and often the tremors and tinklings of hidden streams struck clearly on the ear, mingled with the sigh of the rustling foliage, and their breath gave to the fragrant air freshness. A great peak near at hand loomed up high against the sky; as the horsemen made a sudden turn the massive shoulder of the mountain intervened and the dome disappeared. The cove seemed nearer and nearer whenever a glimpse of it was vouchsafed from amidst the dark-green forest that presently towered about them, for the road now ran through the woods upon a broad slope, with ever and anon a cliff beetling over their way. The dense foliage of the laurel jungles was bronzed by the sunlight, growing ever more tawny as the afternoon waned. Purple shadows were lurking in the midst of the valley. Farthest mountains, blue once, were violet now and faintly flushed. And when at last the horsemen emerged from the densities of the woods into the clifty gorge, and rode still in single file upon the swaying, hollow-sounding bridge, they found a deep red cloud reflected in the river, and all the harbingers of twilight abroad in the cove. The smoke from the Yates cabin, seeming nearer than the fact might warrant, since the undulations of the land, which plodding feet must measure, were not a part of the line of sight, curled up with a brisk convolution and a volume that heralded the evening meal. All adown the lane the cows were coming home, and the mellow clanking of their bells accented the quietude. Some night-blooming flower was awake in the woods with a sweet, wild, indefinite odor. Here and there on the purple slope, reputed to be the pygmy burying-ground, a fire-fly flickered, swift, elusive, evanescent. And on a great blooming laurel-bush the mocking-bird sang, heedless of the darkness to come, heedless of the day gone by, possessed by its fervor of music that made gloom light and all life a joyance, like some enthusiast soul in the ecstasy of a gift, unmindful of the world and of all the paltry outward aspects.

"This hyar big laurel-bush air a good landmark," Ephraim said, turning in his saddle, his hand on his mare's back, that he might better reverse his posture as he spoke to the two men that followed. "About the only one thar be, too. We had better begin thar, I reckon. Fur ef ye find nuthin,' ye'd know whar ye started ef ever ye kem ter dig ag'in. The t'other trees air all too much alike." And he turned his face again toward the mare's head, and surveyed anew the space before him.

Singularly clear it was and free from underbrush; the steepness of the slope and the great draught of the gorge made it a fair field for the fierce autumn fires that annually swept over it. Only the gigantic oak and poplar and chestnut-trees were spared, standing full-leaved and in a heavy phalanx upon the declivity. Beneath their boughs mystery lurked unsolved. A sentiment of awe, of doubt, of reluctance took possession even of Rhodes's prosaic mind as he reined up in the deep shadow. He drew out his watch, albeit he had resolved that he would not remonstrate.

"Will you have time, Shattuck?" he said. "Hadn't you better wait until to-morrow?"

"I war a-thinkin' ez much myself," said Ephraim, turning a hopeful face toward Shattuck, who had drawn rein, and sat motionless upon his horse, looking about him with a quick dilated eye, as if he hardly heard.

The strange place! The thronging shadows! How many times had they mustered here! With what pathetic sense was the silence replete! What tears had been shed for those who lay here hushed, and themselves would weep no more, as once they had wept in that universal heritage of sorrow! What hearts had bled that these hearts, dust now, should cease to beat! Time—there is no time, when man through all the vain centuries can feel so close to man, can think his thoughts and measure the throb in pulses long ago stilled. Ah! the confusion of tongues wrought no divergence here! The conclusiveness of the grave, however named; the yearning sense of loss; the insistent expectation, nay, the imperative demand of the soul that this terrible pause, this nullity, should not be the final period of that fair promise called life—all hung about the forgotten pygmy burying-ground with infinite mystery, with unassuaged pathos. Only science, of all the developments of the human mind, might fitly take account of the mere functional disabilities which it represented—might speculate and exert its fine rational inferential imagination, and construct a status from assumed facts, and promulgate dicta so founded, to be received and accepted for a time, and then demolished by a still more fine-spun theory in what is called the march of progress. These forces were astir in Shattuck as he flung himself from the saddle. His brow was slightly corrugated, his eyes were alight, his pulses beat at fever-heat; not that he entertained so far-fetched a theory as that these poor mortal relics were aught but the infant remains of the American Indian, or, perhaps, of earlier aboriginal people, but the talk of strange myths, and that inexplicable Tennessee tradition of pygmy dwellers, colored even his mind, which he sedulously sought to hold blank for the correct impression, and made his hand tremble as he laid hold of the pickaxe, extended down to him by Ephraim Guthrie, as if he were indeed on the verge of some superlatively strange discovery discounting all human experience, and befitting the realm of a fairy tale.

"Hyar they air, pick an' spade, ef ye be a-goin' ter dig yerse'f," remarked Ephraim. He did not realize any difference in social status that might have relegated the manual labor to him, nor even the fact that it was better suited to his massive and burly frame. He had intended to perform it, in his character of host, to shield his guest from the discomfort of the slight exertion. He relinquished the implements with reluctance, remembering this resolution; but superstition, now that he was upon the spot, prevailed, and overbore even the instinct of hospitality native in the mountaineer's heart. The two implements clashed together, the sound loud and metallic in the stillness; he looked a little wistfully after his guest as Shattuck bore them away out into the more open spot where the laurel bush grew almost to the proportions of a tree, unimpeded by others of its kindred. He had no wish, this simple Ephraim, to peer in at the strange sepulchre—the six-slab stone coffin he had often heard of in the terrible fireside stories; he cared naught for curiously woven shrouds, and feathered mantles, and carcanets of pearl beads, and jars of quaint pottery; nor for questions of race and time and civilization these may betoken and solve. Rhodes still sat in the saddle, as motionless as an equestrian statue, sharply outlined against the crimson sky, and beneath an oak bough as dark, as heavy, and as massive as if it were wrought of bronze. The light was clearer in the open space where the branches could not fling their gloom, and as Shattuck ran swiftly down through the long grass he could still see a flower here and there smile up at him—the tawny red of the jewel-weed, and the close-tufted ball of the "mountain snow." The range loomed far above. A star was on its crest, faintly scintillating. The door and window of the Yates cabin, farther down the cove, were illumined from the fire-lit hearth, a dimly fluctuating radiance, sidereal too in the midst of the gathering shadows. The falls still showed their gleaming green and white, and the mists, exhaled from the depressions between the purple slopes, wore a gentle dove-like gray. A tender hour of reveries, and blurring tints, and restful recollections of the day done, but still far from the morrow. The two men under the tree did not speak; the horses did not stir; only the vague rustling of the saddle betokened the regular rise and fall of respiration; even the frisky colt stood motionless, and gazed at the flashing river with a full and meditative eye. Shattuck had paused before the laurel on the side toward the water; neither of the other men, albeit country-bred, might have noticed that here the grass and weeds were a trifle bent—under the recent rain, perchance; a trifle withered—by the sun, it might have been. Nor did he; he chose the spot, remembering Yates's words that here the ground sounded hollow.

But no man who had ever wielded a pickaxe could have failed to discern, as he lifted it high, and the sharp point sank into the ground, that it was merely a replaced turf that yielded so readily to the blow—replaced with its mat of roots severed—and not the tough earth bound by a thousand veinous fibres to the full-pulsed herbage. He was unaccustomed to the earth save geologically or geographically considered, and to herbage except in its botanical aspects. He only lifted the pickaxe high above his head once more, and once more the point struck down into the loosened mould—struck down with a sharp metallic clangor, as of steel upon stone. It rang far through the quiet cove. A low, hollow, vibratory, vault-like resonance followed—mute, indeed, to all ears save his own, but what significance that murmur held for him! He lifted his head to look at the two men who had turned toward him upon the sudden smiting of the rock, and were gazing at him. The next moment—a moment confused forever after in his recollection—something invisible passed him in the air, singing shrilly, a high-keyed tone; a sharp report, and all the echoes of mountain and crag were clamoring. He hardly realized its meaning. He turned dully in the direction whence the sound seemed to come, and so trivial a thing as the movement saved his life. Close by his head again a rifle ball whizzed; it kept the line unswervingly, entered the skull of the staring, amazed colt upon the slope, pierced his brain, and the creature dropped dead without a struggle on the long grass. The sight served to convince the stupefied, reluctant faculties of Shattuck that some enemy in the dusk was firing at him. He could not, in the bewilderment of the moment, distinguish the words that Rhodes shouted to him. It was rather in obedience to his gesture, as he rode a little way out from the gloom, leading by the bridle his friend's plunging and frightened horse, that Shattuck dropped pickaxe and spade, and ran toward him across the dusky, tangled grasses. He caught the reins as they were flung to him; but it was no easy matter to mount the rearing and snorting animal. The other two men were fairly in retreat before Shattuck, running by the horse's side, and hanging with all his weight upon the bridle, contrived to get his foot into the stirrup. Rhodes, riding down the smooth slopes of the pygmy burying-ground, across unnumbered graves, the heavy shadow of the forest trees shielding the party, and making further attack futile, heard at last the hoof-beats of his friend's horse at a regular gallop pressing hard behind him, and turned to see Shattuck once more safe in the saddle. He put spurs to his own steed without more ado. The dank evening air fanned his face; he could hear its silken rustle as it was stirred into seeming activity by his own quick rush through it. This vague simulation of a sound, the horses' muffled hoof-beats barely distinguishable in the thick grass, the drowsy chant of the cicada, the dull monotone of the river—all hardly impinged upon the sense of primordial stillness that pervaded the eventide; it might have seemed that that keen, menacing note of the rifle, the sharp shibboleth of doom, was but some jarring incongruity of a morbid fancy.

The trees began to give way; the more open, level spaces of the cove were at hand; the darkness gradually diminished. Rhodes again clapped spurs to his horse, since here they were to leave the protecting shade. Foremost of the three, he was already in the lane when he became aware that he was not followed; his companions had fallen away. His first impulse, as he glanced over his shoulder into the vacant gloom, was to pursue his own way, and make good his escape. Then he reined up so suddenly that the horse, still trembling and wild and frightened, fell back upon his haunches. Rhodes sat motionless for a moment, gazing over his shoulder.

Night possessed the pygmy burying-ground, and the great phalanx of oak and chestnut-trees was lost in an indistinguishable gloom; but here, where no shadow hindered, he could see the contours of the wide landscape, from which color had faded, and, above its dusky, blurring expanse, the dark sky embossed with a myriad of stars. The fences on either hand of the grass-grown way were dimly visible to his alert senses. Along their parallel lines naught was to be seen, save once a flash betokening the striking of a spark betwixt flint and iron; and in that moment he thought he heard the thud of hoofs. He ground a curse between his teeth as he wheeled his horse. Shattuck, it seemed, had seen fit not to follow his host's lead, and doubtless the dull Ephraim was not yet aware, as he cantered along in the rear, that Rhodes did not still guide the little party. The candidate was a brave man, and in any sufficient quarrel could have stood his ground with equanimity. To be the target, however, for a mysterious enmity that lurked in ambush and in the nightfall promised heavy draughts upon the resources of his courage. The prosaic and utilitarian phase of his mind took account of his candidacy in this connection. No man is so heavily handicapped in a race as he who bears the imputation of unpopularity. The public expectation of success is as a loadstone to the event. He sustained a positive loss in the mere fact that he or his friend had been fired upon. And whither was Shattuck bound now, and what to do? With a determination to hold him in check and to thwart his purpose, Rhodes galloped in the direction whence the faint hoof-beats sounded, albeit the darkness held unknown terrors, the thought of which shook his nerves, and although silence as profound as this had but now been rent by that tense report of the rifle. It was only for a few moments that the successive cross-stakes of the zigzag rail-fences, seeming disconnected from the rest, and high as the horse's head, flew by him on either side in relief against the lighter tones of the fields they enclosed. The river suddenly shows between its banks, gleaming darkly with the night sky, all the splendors of the stars shattered in the ripples, and is gone as he dashes on. He hears the booming of the cataract; and from the pygmy burying-ground, where late the mocking-bird sang, the sudden ill-omened shrilling of an owl. He sees above the western mountains a dull red after-glow of the sunset, and below its darkling pine-grown slopes the little Yates cabin, its windows shining squares of yellow light. The radiance issued forth so far as to reveal Shattuck alighting from his horse at the bars, and the clumsier figure of Ephraim Guthrie still mounted, and looking over his shoulder, as he perceived for the first time that Rhodes was not in the lead.