In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

Guthrie realized the situation only when Cheever, whose grip prevented the use of the pistols, cried suddenly, "Take that!" and he heard his flesh tear under the knife, and felt a pain like the pangs of dissolution, as his warm blood gushed forth—"an' that! an' that!"

The next moment all the thunders of heaven seemed loosed in the cavern. How he wrenched himself away he could never say. He only knew that he was firing alternately the pistols in both hands, retreating backward through the dark tunnel. He flung himself upon the horse that stood saddled and bridled cropping the grass without, and he was miles away before he realized that the hot pursuit, which he had heard at first in full hue and cry after him, must of necessity be futile, since it was Cheever's incomparable steed that in his haste he bestrode, and not his own.

He felt a certain glow of achievement, a fervor of pride in his prowess; no slight thing it was to have escaped with his life from that desperate gang of outlaws. With a kind of valiant boastfulness he made light of his wounds as his step-mother dressed them, herself the impersonation of a panther whose young is wounded, snarling and fierce and tender. She had a sort of reverential admiration of his courage, his ferocity, that her own savagery had fostered. It was said in the cove that her semblance of kindness and affection for him was the natural outgrowth of her respect for anybody that was a "better man" than she—a pluckier fighter. She, too, would admit no efficacy in aught that Cheever could do.

"I'll be bound them pistol balls o' yourn worked many a button-hole whar thar warn't no buttons in the gyarmints ter match!" she cried, bitterly joying in the possible execution of the shots.

But Ephraim surveyed the yawning slashes with a groan, and went with averted eyes hastily out of the door, and an old house-dog stood beside Felix, and wheezed pitifully and licked his hand with an unrecked-of sympathy.

Felix was out next day, but with that singular parchment-like pallor that ensues on a great loss of blood. Mrs. Guthrie had remonstrated against all exertion, then openly applauded his decision.

"Ef 'twar you-uns, Eph," she said, looking after Felix as he rode Cheever's horse down the winding mountain way, "I mought look for'ard ter three solid weeks a-nussin' ye; ye would be tucked up in bed. But twenty yoke o' oxen couldn't hold Fee Guthrie down; he couldn't even die handy, like other folks. He hev got the very sperit o' livin' in him. Ye mark my words, he ain't a-goin' ter die handy."

And in truth it was a very spirited and gallant figure that the fine, clean-limbed roan carried down into the cove. Guthrie's curling hair flaunted back from his broad shoulders; his wide-brimmed hat was cocked to one side; his spurs jingled on the heels of his great boots. And he sat in the saddle proudly erect, in defiance of the sore-rankling wounds—the knife had not had the mercy to be sharp, and in lieu of clean cuts had torn and jagged the flesh. There was one wound sharper than all, that no blade had dealt, that was so keen, so deep, so insidious that it made a coward of him, and set astir a chill in his blood and a quiver in his heart.

It was one word—Letitia—from lips that he had never thought to hear it. Letitia! So she knew of Steve Yates's crime; and more than once he wondered what it might be, pausing to look absently down with unseeing eyes, as his stirrup-irons, sweeping through the blooming weeds that bordered the bridle-path, sent the petals flying. Was she a party, too, to the deception the wife maintained, to her pretended desertion, her affected ignorance of Yates's whereabouts? "Letishy oughtn't ter be mixed up in sech," Guthrie said to himself. "She oughtn't ter be abidin' along o' Mis' Yates, whose husband air hid out with a gang o' evil-doers, purtendin' ter be dead an' disappeared. Litt oughtn't ter know about thar thieveries an' dens. It can't tech her—thar ill-got gains—but she oughtn't ter know secrets agin the law."

He remembered, with a throb between anger and pain, the evenings that he had spent at the Yates cabin, the air of desolate sorrow that the deserted wife maintained, even when she seemed to seek to cast it off, and to respond to neighborly kindness. A flush mounted to his pallid cheek, he so resented a deceit sought to be practised upon him. And how ready a gull he must have seemed, he thought, with a sneer at the memory of his cumbrous phrases of hope and consolation, at which Letitia had not scrupled to laugh. "She warn't puttin' on no lackadaisical pretence," he thought, with a glowing eye. "She hev got the truth in her too deep. She jes' busied herse'f a-spinnin' ez gay ez a bird, an' tole them queer tales ez Mr. Shattuck hev gin out, 'bout cave-dwellers long time ago, an' sun-worshippers, an' a kentry sunk in the sea, named Atlantis or sech outlandish word; tole 'em over agin nearly every evenin'. An' I could listen through eternity! She hev got sech smartness an' mem'ry. I dun'no' how she do make out ter remember sech a lot o' stuff. An' Mis' Yates—a deceitful sinner that woman air!—a-bustin' out cryin' agin, fust thing ye know. Litt oughtn't ter 'sociate with sech ez knows secrets agin the law."