He walked slowly, and with lordly dignity, about the enclosure, apparently conscious of the wonder and admiration he was attracting. He seemed like some rare exotic—entirely foreign to the strange environment into which an indiscriminate fate had thrust him.
“Let joy be unconfined! We’ve got Hyder Ali!” shouted Bill, half sarcastically, as he joined the awe stricken crowd. He had arrived too late to witness the unloading, but he was impressed with the fact that Varney had, at least in some measure, “made good.” However, the demon of distrust still lingered in his heart. He had never seen or heard of anything that looked like Hyder Ali before, but was disposed to restrain his enthusiasm and await further developments.
Sophy Perkins came late in the afternoon and was in a highly flustered state. She spent a long time at the chicken yard with her wistful eyes riveted on the distinguished guest. To own that bird would crown her futile and disappointed life with bliss. She longed for its possession as one who beseeches fate for the unattainable.
Seemingly in response to her fervent gaze, Hyder Ali spread his tail feathers into vast fan-like forms over his downy back. His pink eyes glistened with alluring and changing beams from amid the fluffy white array of distended plumage, as he turned slowly round and round, posed, and strutted, quite human like, before Sophy’s bewildered vision.
His prolonged gobbles, as he majestically patrolled the chicken pen, had for her an ineffable musical charm.
She had once read a syndicated story in a newspaper magazine supplement, in which reincarnation and transmigration of souls figured in a supernatural and flesh creepy plot. After she had heard Josh Varney’s allusion to reincarnation in his first talk with us at the store, she had hunted it up and reread it carefully. In the woful and sobby tale a beautiful princess and her affinity discovered that they had once loved as shell-fish, and through countless ages had periodically met in other strange forms, which did not happen to be identical until the time of the story, when they met in a phosphorescent light in the dusty tomb of a Manchu ancestor.
During her second day’s visit to Hyder Ali a mysterious and indefinable thrill had crept into Sophy’s sterile heart. She pondered much over the resistless fascination that the bird exercised over her, and suddenly became obsessed with the idea that this was possibly the reincarnation of a soul mate that she might have had in some far off previous existence, somewhere in the star swept æons that were gone, that had drifted through the ages in various forms, until predestination had again brought them face to face. She had a hazy idea of the theory of reincarnation, but she had an instinctive feeling that, if there was anything of that sort, this was probably it, and a long lost affinity was before her.
The “loose wires in her upper story” that Rat Hyatt had mentioned at the turkey shoot began to rattle hopelessly on the subject of the white gobbler.
Into her mind there came a desperate resolve to acquire that bird, by fair means or foul. All of her persistence, and every form of artifice and cunning of which she was capable would thenceforth be devoted to that end.
After Hyder Ali had sojourned a week in Posey’s pen, attended with adoration, and fed with selected worms, corn meal mush, and other dainties by the faithful Sophy, Mr. Flaherty came with his little spring wagon and took him away. He said that the man who was to keep him for Mr. Varney had returned home, but he did not say where he lived.