At that instant, far and faint came a little twittering note from under the leaf carpet. It was only the shadow of a sound, but in a wink the shrew was gone, following the love call of his mate underground. Overhead sounded the deep and dreadful voice of a barred owl, as it floated back to its tree top, disappointed for once of its prey.
At midnight Ben Gunnison, the peddler, reached the little glade where the shrew had disappeared. Trying for a short cut through the Barrens, Ben had followed the old cattle-trail from Perth Ambov, unused for more than a century. At first it stretched straight and plain through the pitch-pine woods. Beyond Double Trouble and Mount Misery, it began to wind, and by the time he had reached Four Mile he was lost. For long he staggered under his heavy pack through thickets of scrub oak, white-cedar swamps, and tangles of greenthorn. By the time he had reached the little opening, he was exhausted, and putting his pack under his head for a pillow, lay down under a great sweet-gum tree to sleep out the night.
Just before dawn he was awakened by high-pitched, trilling, elfin music. Opening his eyes, he saw in the light of the setting moon two tiny things chasing each other round and round his pack, singing as they ran. Even as he listened, he heard from overhead an ominous cracking noise, and leaped to his feet just as a decayed stub whizzed down, landing with a crash on his pack. As long as he lives, Ben will believe that two fairies saved his life.
“Don’t tell me,” he would say. “I saw ’em. Little weeny fellows half the size of a mouse callin’ me to get up. An’ I got up. That’s the reason I’m here to-day, bless ’em.”
[IX]
BLACKCROSS
After running twenty miles, old Raven Road stopped to rest under a vast black-oak tree. Beyond its sentinel bulk was Wild-Folk Land. Where hidden springs had kept the wet grass green all winter, the first flower of the year had forced its way through the cold ground. Smooth as ivory, all crimson-lake and gold-green on the outside, the curved hollow showed a rich crimson within. Cursed with an ill name and an evil savor, yet the skunk cabbage leads the year’s procession of flowers.
Among the dry leaves of the thickets showed the porcelain petals of a colony of hepatica, snow-white, pale pink, violet, deep purple, pure blue, lilac, and lavender. Beyond them was a patch of spice-bush, whose black fragrant branches snapped brittle as glass, and whose golden blossoms appear before the leaves. At the foot of a bank, hidden by the scented boughs, bubbled a deep unfailing spring, and from it a little trickle of water wound through the thicket into the swale beyond. Growing wider and deeper with every rod, it ran through a little valley hidden between two round, green hills, which widened into a stretch of marshland filled with reeds and thickets of wild rose, elderberry, and buttonbush, laced and interlaced with the choking orange strands of that parasite, the dodder.