New elements of gossip were added now and then, vivaciously canvassed among the knots of men perched on barrels in the stores, or congregated in the post-office, or sitting on the steps of the courthouse, and were ruthlessly detailed to the ex-sheriff, whose starts of rage, unthinking relapses into official speech, jerks of convulsive surprise, prolonged the amusement beyond its natural span.
It ceased suddenly. The adjustment to a new line of thought and to a future under altered conditions was facilitated by the inception of an immediate definite intention and a sentiment co-equal with the passion of despair. The idlers of the town might not have been able to accurately define the moment when the drama of defeat, with which he had prodigally entertained them, lost its interest. But there was a moment that differed from all the others of the lazy August hours; the minimum of time charged with disproportionate importance. It might be likened to a symbol of chemistry, which, though the simplest alphabetical character, is significant of an essential element involving life—perhaps death.
That moment the wind came freshly down from the mountains; the glare of the morning sun rested on the empty, sandy street of the village, the weeds and grass that obscured the curbing of the pavement were still overhung by a glittering gossamer net of dew. A yellow butterfly flitted over it, followed by another so like that it could not be distinguished from its aërial counterpart. The fragrance of new-mown hay somewhere in the rural metropolis was sweet on the air. A blue-bottle, inside the window of the store hard by, droned against the glass, and seemed in some sort an echo to the monotonous drawl of a man who had lately been up in the Big Smoky, and who had gleaned fresh points concerning the recent election.
'What did ye ever do ter the Cayces, 'Cajah, or what did Bluff Peake ever do fur 'em?' he asked, as preliminary to detailing that the Cayces had turned out and pervaded the Great Smoky Mountains, electioneering against the incumbent. 'They rid hyar an' they rid thar—up in the mountings an' down in the coves; an' some do say thar war one o' 'em in ev'y votin'-place in all the mounting deestric's the day the 'lection kem off, jes' a-stiffenin' up the Peake men, an' a-beggin', an' a-prayin', an' a-wraslin' in argymint with them ez hed gin out they war a-goin' ter vote fur you-uns. Bluff Peake say they fairly 'lected him, though he 'lowed 'twarn't fur love o' him. I wonder ye done ez well ez ye did, 'Cajah, though ye couldn't hev done much wuss, sure enough. All o' 'em war out, from old Groundhog down ter Sol, when they war 'lectioneerin', an' the whisky ez war drunk round the Settlemint an' sech war 'sprisin'. Some say old Groundhog furnished it free.'
The ex-sheriff made no reply. There was a look in his eye that gave his long, lean head, deeply sunken at the temples, less the aspect of that of a whipped hound than it had worn of late. One might have augured that he was a dangerous brute. And after that, the conversation with the recent election as a theme flagged, and died out gradually.
It was only a few days before he had occasion to go up into the Great Smoky Mountains, on matters, he averred, connected with closing unsettled business of the office which he held.
As he jogged along, he moodily watched the distant mountains, growing ever nearer, and engirdled here and there with belts of white mists, above whose shining silver densities sometimes would tower a gigantic 'bald,' with a suspended, isolated effect, like some wonderful aërial regions unknown to geography, foreign to humanity.
The supreme dignity of their presence was familiar to him. Their awful silence, like the unspeakable impressiveness of some overpowering thought, affected him not. The vastness of the earth which they suggested, beneath the immensities of the sky, which leaned upon them, found no responsive largeness in his emotions.
Those barren domes of an intense blue, tinged with purple where the bold rocks jutted out, flushed where the yellow sunshine languished to a blush; those heavily wooded slopes below the balds, sombre and rich in green and bronze and all darkling shades—touched, too, here and there with a vivid crimson where the first fickle sumach flared; those coves in which shadows lurked and vague sentiments of colour were abroad in visionary guise, in unexplained softness of greys and hardly realized blues, in dun browns and sedate yellows, vanishing before the plain prose of an approach,—he had reduced all this to a scale of miles, and the splendours of the landscape were not more seemly or suggestive than the colours of a map on the wall. It was a mental scale of miles, for the law decreeing a sufficiency of mileposts seemed to weaken in the ruggedness of the advance, and when he was fairly among the coves and ravines they disappeared.
He pushed his horse rather hard, as the time wore on, but sunset was on the mountains before he came upon the great silent company of dead trees towering above the Settlement in the reddening light, and tracing their undeciphered hieroglyphics across the valley beneath and upon the heights beyond. The ringing vibrations of the anvil were on the air; the measured alternations of the hand-hammer and the sledge resounded in a clear, metallic fugue; the flare from the forge fire streamed through the great door of the blacksmith's shop, giving fluctuating glimpses of the interior, but fainting and fading into impotent artificiality before the gold and scarlet fires ablaze in the western sky.