The invoked Jer'miah did not materialize at once. When a small tow-headed boy of ten came from a house among the stumps, with that peculiar deftness of tread characteristic of the habitually barefoot, he had an alert, startled expression, as if he had just jumped out of a bush. His hair stood up in front; he had wide pop-eyes, and long ears, and a rabbit-like aspect that was not diminished as he scudded round the heels of Rick Tyler's horse, at which he looked apprehensively.
'Jer'miah,' said his father, with a pathetic cadence, 'go into the store, bub, an' git Rick Tyler a pound o' powder.'
As Jeremiah started in, the paternal sentiment stirred in Nathan Hoodendin's breast.
'Jer'miah,' he wheezed, bringing the fore-legs of the chair to the ground, and craning forward with unwonted alacrity to look into the dusky interior of the store, 'don't ye be foolin' round that thar powder with no lighted tallow dip nor nuthin'. I'll whale the life out'n ye ef ye do. Jes' weigh it by the winder.'
Whether from fear of a whaling by his active parent, or of the conjunction of a lighted tallow dip and powder, Jeremiah dispensed with the candle. He brought the commodity out presently, and Rick stowed it away in his saddle-bags.
'Can't ye 'light an' sot a while 'an talk, Rick?' said the storekeeper. 'We-uns hev done hed our supper, but I reckon they could fix ye a snack yander ter the house.'
Rick said he wanted nothing to eat, but, although he hesitated, he could not finally resist the splint-bottomed chair tilted against the wall of the store, and a sociable pipe, and the countryside gossip.
'What's goin' on 'round the mounting?' he asked.
Gid Fletcher, the blacksmith, came and sat in another chair, and the man on the fence got off and took up his position on a stump hard by. The great red sun dropped slowly behind the purple mountains; and the full golden moon rose above the corn-field that lay on the eastern slope, and hung there between the dark woods on either hand; and the blades caught the light, and tossed with burnished flashes into the night; and the great ghastly trees assumed a ghostly whiteness; and the mystic writing laid on the landscape below had the aspect of an uninterpreted portent. The houses were mostly silent; now and then a guard-dog growled at some occult alarm; a woman somewhere was softly and fitfully singing a child to sleep, and the baby crooned too, and joined in the vague, drowsy ditty. And for aught else that could be seen, and for aught else that could be heard, this was the world.
'Waal, the Tempter air fairly stalkin' abroad on the Big Smoky—leastwise sence the summer season hev opened,' said Nathan Hoodendin. His habitual expression of heavy, joyless pondering had been so graven into his face that his raised grizzled eye-brows, surmounted by a multitude of perplexed wrinkles, his long, dismayed jaw, his thin, slightly parted lips, and the deep grooves on either side of his nose, were not susceptible of many gradations of meaning. His shifting eyes, cast now at the stark trees, now at the splendid disk of the rising moon, betokened but little anxiety for the Principle of Evil aloose in the Big Smoky. 'Fust—lemme see—thar war Eph Lowry, ez got inter a quar'l with his wife's half-brother's cousin, an' a-tusslin' 'roun' they cut one another right smart, an' some say ez Eph'll never hev his eyesight right good no more. Then thar war Baker Teal, what the folks in Eskaqua Cove 'low let down the bars o' the milk-sick pen, one day las' fall, an' druv Jacob White's red cow in; an' his folks never knowed she hed grazed thar till they hed milked an' churned fur butter, when she lay down an' died o' the milk-sick. Ef they hed drunk her milk same ez common, 'twould hev sickened 'em, sure, 'an mebbe killed 'em. An' they've been quar'lin' 'bout'n it ever sence. Satan's a-stirrin'—Satan's a-stirrin' 'roun' the Big Smoky.'