In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

"Somebody ez likes ter feed on beef," he muttered his conclusion. "They 'lowed I'd never find it out till the cattle war rounded up in the fall; then think a wolf cotch 'em so fur from home." Suddenly the conviction smote him that the larder which the beef had served could hardly be distant. "They wouldn't want ter lug the meat fur," he said. He flung himself into the saddle, riding slowly through the pathless forest, guided only by the sun in the sky, the shadows on the ground. He seemed as native to these deep seclusions as if he had been bred a savage thing in their midst. And yet he had never before traversed their intricacies. His adaptation to the conditions of these unknown fastnesses was like a worldling's facile mastery of the ways of a strange city. He looked about him with the speculative interest of a new-comer. Once, when the woods gave way upon the crest of a precipice, he rose in his stirrups to gaze over the jungle of the laurel and upon the great mountain panorama stretching to the horizon. Here were landmarks that he recognized, and again features of the landscape all strange to his experience.

"I never knowed ez folks lived hyarabouts," he observed, in surprise. "Ef I ain't powerful out'n my reckoning, Crazy Zebedee's cell mus' be somewhar nigh."

He sighed deeply for the thought as he slowly took his way once more into the dense dark-green leafage of the woods; the very sky was shut out, and the ethereal blue and purple tints of the great mountain masses, that seemed to express the idea of light almost as definitely as the luminous heavens, were withdrawn, leaving a sense of loss and monotony, like the vanishing mirage of a desert. And in the more heavy glooms of the shadows he sighed again as if they weighed upon him.

"Zeb hed ruther hev hed this than the jail in town," he muttered, "an' so he runned away, an' hid hyarabouts. I dun'no' ef he war so durned crazy; the trees air mighty green, an' it air sorter peaceful out'n the sight an' the sound o' folks."

He had a melancholy affinity with sorrow—from so long ago had its fellowship with him dated. He realized, with almost the strength of divination, the sentiments of the fate that the distraught creature had wrought out here. He gazed with a sort of vicarious recognition at the shadows, at the grewsome crags, at the deep, dark waters of a pool, where some riving of the rocks suffered them to gather lake-like. He wondered, with a morbid alertness of fancy, how did the forest look to the hot and fevered brain?—what strange distortions of fact metamorphosed these simple and majestic dendritic forms, and the crags, and the waters? It was a severe tension of the sympathetic power of reduplicating another's sentiment. He hardly knew what hideous phantasy of speculation had crept into his mind. So far it had swung from its wonted poise that when a sudden, faint, blood-curdling shriek of foolish laughter rang through the utter silence, he did not for an instant credit its reality. He only drew up his horse with a hasty convulsive clutch upon the rein, a cold tremor stealing over him, and sat motionless, a terrible superstition quickening his breath and dilating his eye.

Naught stirred. The gloomy primeval magnificence of the forest seemed tenantless. Adown none of those green ferny aisles, where the light trembled to intrude, could a willing fancy discern even a flitting dryadic shape, so native to these haunts. A fairy ring was on the grass beneath a tulip-tree. But who did see the dance? Not even the wind might come and go, for the woods would be lonely and were all a-brooding. Far, far less possible than any was the wild, dishevelled, haggard apparition that Felix Guthrie strained his eyes, yet feared, to see. And when the laugh rose again, faint, faint from the depths of the earth, ending in a wild derisive cackle, he became all at once impressed with its genuineness, and the idea of "Crazy Zeb's cell" flashed into his mind again, coupled with the recollection of his injury and the object of his search.

"The very place! Hevin' a reg'lar barbecue off'n my beef, the lazy, shif'less half-livers," he exclaimed, angrily, forgetting his terrors, although his face had not regained its wonted hue.

He was all alert now, erect in the saddle, the reins drawn closely in his hand, keenly peering to the right, and again to the left, as if he had some definite goal in mind. For alien though he was to the place, he had heard it frequently described in those horror-loving tales of the winter-night firesides.

"A gate"—he repeated the oft-spoken words—"a gate of rocks that looks like it mought open on hell; a gate, an' a windin' way walled in, an' a big hollow in the solid cliff ez would be a cave 'ceptin' it air open on one side, high, high above the ruver."

And then the pulsing of the current of a stream made its impression upon his senses. He had not heard it before, so essentially sylvan a sound it was, its monotony so germane to the silence. It was near at hand, this river; and here was the deep pool wherein its hurrying tributary was lulled, and dallied quiescent by the way. He lifted his eyes to two great neighboring crags, each beetling toward the other, the first of a tunnel-like series. A gateway? Could even fancy have wrought these simple forms into the semblance of a portal?—he marvelled with that incredulity which possesses the mind when looking for the first time upon some reputed similitude in nature to an artificial object. Nevertheless, he slowly dismounted, intently gazing all the while, and as he gazed the resemblance grew upon him. So definitely had the idea tutored his fancy that he had not a doubt when he hitched his horse in the dense covert of the laurel, and took his way across the narrowest portion of the stream by means of scrambling cat-like along a pendulous branch of an overhanging tree, and springing lightly from its elastic extremity near to the opposite bank. He waded out, his long boots full of water—a small matter to a hardy woodsman, save that he could hear the splash which thereafter accompanied each step, as his feet were lifted in the roomy integuments, thus preventing a noiseless approach. When he was at last beneath the great jagged gray rocks, with their niches filled here with moss, and again flaunting a tangled vine, he paused and looked up, a smile of iconoclastic ridicule upon his face. So this was what was thought to resemble a gate by the few who knew the place. And then he was minded to imagine how like an infinitely magnified portal it was—so gaunt, so vast, so grim and grewsome, leading down to the dark unknown! "Like the gates o' hell fur true," he muttered, plunging into the gloomy, tunnel-like way.