“I wanter hear a bear tale,—I wanter hear a bear tale.”
Thus Basil must needs knock the ashes from his pipe the better to devote himself to the narration,—a prince of raconteurs, to judge by the spell-bound interest of the youngster who stood at his knee and hung on his words. Even Aurelia checked the whir of her wheel to listen smilingly. She broke out laughing in appreciative pleasure when Basil took up the violin to show how a jovial old bear, who intruded into this very house one day when all the family were away at the church in the cove, and who mistook the instrument for a banjo, addressed himself to picking out this tune, singing the while a quaint and ursine lay. Basil embellished the imitation with a masterly effect of realistic growls.
“Ef ye keep goin' at that gait, Basil,” Aurelia admonished him, “daylight will ketch us all wide awake around the fire,—no wonder the child won't go to bed.” She seemed suddenly impressed with the pervasive cheer. “What a fool that man, Jube Kennedy, must be! How could ennybody hev a sweeter, darlinger home than we uns hev got hyar in Sunrise Gap!”
On the languorous autumn a fierce winter ensued. The cold came early. The deciduous growths of the forests were leafless ere November waned, rifled by the riotous marauding winds. December set in with the gusty snow flying fast. Drear were the gray skies; ghastly the sheeted ranges. Drifts piled high in bleak ravines, and the grim gneissoid crags were begirt with gigantic icicles. But about the little house in Sunrise Gap that kept so warm a heart, the holly trees showed their glad green leaves and the red berries glowed with a mystic significance.
As the weeks wore on, the place was often in Kennedy's mind, although he had not seen it since that autumn afternoon when he had bestirred himself to rebuke its owner concerning the inadequacies of the domestic provision. His admonition had been kindly meant and had not deserved the retort, the flippant ridicule of his spiritual yearnings. Though he still winced from the recollection, he was sorry that he had resisted the importunacy of Basil's apology. He realized that Aurelia had persisted to the limit of her power in the embitterment of the controversy, but even Aurelia he was disposed to forgive as time passed on. When Christinas Day dawned, the vague sentiment began to assume the definiteness of a purpose, and noontide found him on his way to Sunrise Gap.
There was now no path through the woods; the snow lay deep over all, unbroken save at long intervals when queer footprints gave token of the stirring abroad of the sylvan denizens, and he felt an idle interest in distinguishing the steps of wolf and fox, of opossum and weasel. In the intricacies of the forest aisles, amid laden boughs of pine and fir, there was a suggestion of darkness, but all the sky held not enough light to cast the shadow of a bole on the white blank spaces of the snow-covered ground. A vague blue haze clothed the air; yet as he drew near the mountain brink, all was distinct in the vast landscape, the massive ranges and alternating valleys in infinite repetition.
He wondered when near the house that he had not heard the familiar barking of the old hound; then he remembered that the sound of his horse's hoofs was muffled by the snow. He was glad to be unheralded. He would like to surprise Aurelia into geniality before her vicarious rancor for Basil's sake should be roused anew. As he emerged from the thick growths of the holly, with the icy scintillations of its clustering green leaves and red berries, he drew rein so suddenly that the horse was thrown back on his haunches. The rider sat as if petrified in the presence of an awful disaster.
The house was gone! Even the site had vanished! Kennedy stared bewildered. Slowly the realization of what had chanced here began to creep through his brain. Evidently there had been a gigantic landslide. The cliff-like projection was broken sheer off,—hurled into the depths of the valley. Some action of subterranean waters, throughout ages, doubtless, had been undermining the great crags till the rocky crust of the earth had collapsed. He could see even now how the freeze had fractured outcropping ledges where the ice had gathered in the fissures. A deep abyss that he remembered as being at a considerable distance from the mountain's brink, once spanned by a foot-bridge, now showed the remnant of its jagged, shattered walls at the extreme verge of the precipice.
A cold chill of horror benumbed his senses. Basil, the wife, the children,—where were they? A terrible death, surely, to be torn from the warm securities of the hearth-stone, without a moment's warning, and hurled into the midst of this frantic turmoil of nature, down to the depths of the gap,—a thousand feet below! And at what time had this dread fate befallen his friend? He remembered that at the cross-roads' store, when he had paused on his way to warm himself that morning, some gossip was detailing the phenomenon of unseasonable thunder during the previous night, while others protested that it must have been only the clamors of “Christmas guns” firing all along the country-side. “A turrible clap, it was,” the raconteur had persisted. “Sounded ez ef all creation hed split apart.” Perhaps, therefore, the catastrophe might be recent. Kennedy could scarcely command his muscles as he dismounted and made his way slowly and cautiously to the verge.
Any deviation from the accustomed routine of nature has an unnerving effect, unparalleled by disaster in other sort; no individual danger or doom, the aspect of death by drowning, or gunshot, or disease, can so abash the reason and stultify normal expectation. Kennedy was scarcely conscious that he saw the vast disorder of the landslide, scattered from the precipice on the mountain's brink to the depths of the Gap—inverted roots of great pines thrust out in mid-air, foundations of crags riven asunder and hurled in monstrous fragments along the steep slant, unknown streams newly liberated from the caverns of the range and cascading from the crevices of the rocks. In effect he could not believe his own eyes. His mind realized the perception of his senses only when his heart suddenly plunged with a wild hope,—he had discerned amongst the turmoil a shape of line and rule, the little box-like hut! Caught as it was in the boughs of a cluster of pines and firs, uprooted and thrust out at an incline a little less than vertical, the inmates might have been spared such shock of the fall as would otherwise have proved fatal. Had the house been one of the substantial log-cabins of the region its timbers must have been torn one from another, the daubing and chinking scattered as mere atoms. But the more flimsy character of the little dwelling had thus far served to save it,—the interdependent “framing” of its structure held fast; the upright studding and boards, nailed stoutly on, rendered it indeed the box that it looked. It was, so to speak, built in one piece, and no part was subjected to greater strain than another. But should the earth cave anew, should the tough fibres of one of those gigantic roots tear out from the loosened friable soil, should the elastic supporting branches barely sway in some errant gust of wind, the little box would fall hundreds of feet, cracked like a nut, shattering against the rocks of the levels below.