In the "Stranger People's" country

by Charles Egbert Craddock

XIII.

With all this in his mind, the little house, coming in sight below the massive dark-green slope of the great mountain, seemed to Guthrie to hold peculiar significance. With a poignant sentiment which he might not analyze, he watched it grow from a mere speck into its normal proportions. The sun flashed from its roof, still wet with the dew, but the shadows were sombrely green in the yard. Such freshness the great oaks breathed, such fragrance the pines! Adown the lane the cows loitered, going forth to their pastures. He saw a mist, dully white, move in slow convolutions along a distant purple slope, pause for a glistening moment, then vanish into thin air. Away up the gorge all diurnal fancies trooped into the wide liberties of endless luminous vistas of azure sunlit mountains beneath the shining azure heavens, the ranges and valleys changing with every mood of the atmosphere, with the harlequinade of the clouds and the wind. The river, with all the graces of reflection, presented a kaleidoscopic comminglement of color—it showed the grim gray rocks, the blue sky, the glow of the rose-red azalea, the many gradations of tint in the overhanging foliage and in the umber and ochre of the soil of the steep banks. The ponderous cataract fell ceaselessly with its keen, swift, green rush above and its maddening white swirl below. On the bank the pygmy burying-ground seemed by contrast the fullest expression of quiet, with its deep shadows and its restful sheen, and naught to come and go but a booming bee or a bird upspringing from the long grass.

All was imprinted upon his consciousness with a distinctness which he had never before known, which he did not seek to interrogate now. It seemed to partake of the significance of a crisis in his life, and every trifle asserted itself and laid hold upon him.

Letitia was sitting upon the porch in a low rocking-chair. He recognized her from far away; but when he had hitched the horse at the gate and came walking slowly up the path, and she lifted her eyes to meet his grave, fixed look, there was something in them that he thought he had never before seen—infinitely beautiful, indescribable; a mere matter of expression, perhaps, for the luminous quality and the fine color of the deep-blue iris were as familiar even to his dreams as to his waking sense. It seemed a something added; it served, in some sort, to embellish the very curve of her cheek, the curl of her delicate lip, the waving of her hair where it was gathered out of the way at the nape of her white neck.

He had known that her beauty was generally held in scant esteem, and he had vaguely wondered to find himself in contradictory conviction to the popular sentiment. He had welcomed Shattuck's protestation of its charm as a trophy of its high deserts. He remembered this now. "Shattuck 'lowed she war plumb beautiful, an' hed a rare face; an' she hev! she hev! Thar's nobody looks like her."

More than the usual interval of survey warranted by the etiquette of salutation passed as he stood by the step of the porch, and gazed at her with absorbed, questioning eyes. Her light, caustic laughter roused him.

"What ails ye ter kem hyar with the manners o' a harnt, Fee Guthrie; not speakin' till ye air spoke ter; stare-gazin'"—she opened her eyes wide with the exaggeration of mimicry—"ez ef me an' Moses war some unaccountable animals ez ye hed kem ter trap?"

Then, with a smile that seemed to have all the freshness of the matutinal hour in it, she bent again to her work of hackling flax. No arduous job was she making of it. The hackle was placed upon the low shelf-like balustrade close by, and as the swaying of the rocking-chair brought her forward she would sweep the mass of flax in her hands across its sharp wires, drawing all the fibres through as she swung back again. She had hardly more industrial an aspect than a thrush poised on a blooming honeysuckle vine that ran over the porch, idly rocking in the wind, with not even a trill in his throat to attest his vocation as musician. A bundle of the flax lay in a chair at her side, and another in her lap; and as she swayed back and forth some of the fine, silvery white stuff slipped down over her light-blue dress and on the floor in the reach of Moses. He was beginning to appreciate the value of occupation, and could not all day quiescently resign himself to the passive development of teeth. He had attained the age when the imitative faculties assert themselves. He had furnished himself with a wisp of flax from the floor, and now and again bent his fat body forward, swaying the wisp to and fro in his hand, after the manner in which Letitia passed the flax over the hackle, then sought to stuff it into his mouth—with him a test of all manner of values. Somehow the meeting of his callow, unmeaning, casual glance, for he was very busy and ignored the new-comer, disconcerted Guthrie. So forlorn was he, and little!—his future was an unwritten page, and what bitter history might it not contain! And those who were nearest to him were framing the words and fashioning the periods. But it was to be his to read! A heavy intimation of its collocations was given by the recollection of his father yesterday in the horse-thief's gang—and Stephen Yates once had an honest name, and came of honest stock! Then Guthrie thought of the deceitful mother, and he sat down on the step with a sigh.

"Mought ez well! mought ez well!" he said, lugubriously, unconsciously speaking aloud, as Letitia adjured Moses not to swallow the flax and choke himself.

"He hedn't 'mought ez well,'" she retorted, tartly. Then, for the infant's benefit, "I reckon, though, I could get hold o' the eend of it in his throat, but Mose would feel mighty bad when I h'isted him up on my spinnin'-wheel an' tuck ter spinnin' him all up!"