The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains

VI.

THREE sides of the blacksmith-shop, the door, and the window were in full view from the little hamlet ; the blank wall of the rear was close to a sheer precipice. The door was locked, and the key was in the sheriff’s pocket. The prisoner, bound with cords around his ankles and limbs, and with his wrists manacled, was gone !

Every detail was as it had been left, except that at the rear, the only point secure from observation, there were traces of burrowing in the earth. In the cavity thus made between the lowest log and the dirt floor a man’s body might with difficulty have been compressed, — but a man so shackled ! Undoubtedly he had had assistance. This was a rescue.

Only a moment elapsed before the great barn-like doors were widely flaring and the anxious care of the officers and the eager curiosity of the crowd had explored every nook and cranny within. The ground was dry, and there was not even a footprint to betoken the movements of the fugitive and his rescuers; only in the freshly upturned earth where he effected escape were the distinct marks of the palms of his hands, significantly close together. Evidently he was still handcuffed when he had crawled through.

“He’s a-wearin’ my bracelets yit!” exclaimed the sheriff, excitedly. “ Him an’ his friends warn’t able ter cut them off, like they done the ropes.”

A search was organized in hot haste. Every cabin, the corn-fields, the woods near at hand, were ransacked. Parties went beating about through the dense undergrowth. They climbed the ledges of great crags. They hovered with keen eyes above dark abysses. They pursued for hours a tortuous course down a deep gorge, strewn with gigantic bowlders, washed by the wintry torrents into divers channelings, overhung by cliffs hundreds of feet high, honeycombed with fantastic niches and rifts. What futile quest! What vastness of mountain wilderness !

The great sun went down in a splendid suffusion of crimson color and a translucent golden haze, with a purple garb for the mountains and a glamourous dream for the sky, and bestowing far and near the gilded license of imagination.

The searchers were hard at it until late into the night; never a clue to encourage them, never a hope to lure them on. More than once they flagged, these sluggish mountaineers, who had passed the day in unwonted excitement, and had earned their night’s rest. But the penalties of refusing to aid the officer of the law spurred them on. Even old Hoodendin — not so old as to be exempt from this duty, for the sheriff had summoned every available man at the Settlement to his assistance — hobbled from stone to stone, from one rotting log to another, where he sat down to recuperate from his exertions. The search degenerated into a mere form, an aimless beating about in the brush, before Micajah Green could be induced to relinquish the hope of capture, and blow the horn as a signal for reassembling. The bands of fagged-out men, straggling back to the Settlement toward dawn, found reciprocal satisfaction in expressing the opinion that ‘Cajah Green had “ keerlessly let Rick git away, an’ warn’t a-goin’ ter mend the matter by incitin’ the mounting ter bust ’round the woods like a lot o’ crazy deer all night, ter find a man ez warn’t nowhar.”

Copyright, 1885, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co.

They wore surly enough faces as they gathered about the door of the store, or lounged on the stumps and the few chairs, waiting for a mounted party that had been ordered to extend the search down in the adjacent coves and along the spurs. The agile Jer’miah scudded about, furnishing such consolation as can be contained in a jug. Had the quest resulted differently, they would have laughed and joked and caroused till daybreak. As it was, their talk was fragmentary ; slight and innuendo were in every word. The sheriff had supplemented his own negligence by a grievous disregard of their comfort, and the sense of defeat, so bitter to an American citizen, completed the æsthetic misery of the situation.

The wagons still stood about in the clearing ; here and there the burly dark steers lay ruminant and half asleep among the stumps. Among them, too, were the cattle of the place ; the cows, milked late the evening before, had not yet roamed away. Against a dark background of blackberry bushes a white bull stood in the moonlight, motionless, the lustre gilding his horns and touching his great sullen eyes with a spark of amber light. In his imperious stillness he looked like a statue of a masquerading Jupiter.

A sound. “ Hist! ” said the sheriff.

The moon, low in the west, was drawing a seine of fine-spun gold across the dark depths of the valley. In that enchanted enmeshment were tangled all the fancies of the night ; the vague magic of dreams; vagrant romances, dumb but for the pulses; the gleams of a poetry, too delicately pellucid to be focused by a pen. The mountains maintained a majesty of silence. All the world beneath was still. The wind was laid. Far, far away, once again, a sound.

So indistinct, so undistinguishable, — they hardly knew if they had heard aright. There was a sudden scuffle near at hand. Over one of the rail fences, gleaming wet with dew, and rich with the loan of a silver beam, there climbed a long, lean old hound ; with an anxious aspect he ran to the verge of the crag. Once more that sound, alien alike to the mountain solitudes and the lonely sky; then the deep-mouthed baying broke forth, waking all the echoes, and rousing all the dogs in the cove as well as the canine visitors and residents at the Settlement.

“ Dod-rot that critter! ” exclaimed the sheriff, angrily. “ We can’t hear nothink now but his long jaw.”

“ Jes’ say ‘ Silence in court! ’ ” suggested Amos James from where he lay at length in the grass.

The sheriff nimbly kicked the dog instead, and the night was filled with wild shrieks of pain and anger. When the cur’s barking was renewed it was punctuated with sharp, reminiscent yelps, as the injustice of his treatment ever and anon recurred to his mind. The sound of human voices grew very distinct when it could be heard at all, and the tramp of approaching horses shook the ground.

Every eye was turned toward the point at which the road came into the Settlement, between the densities of the forest and the gleaming array of shining, curved blades and tossing plumes, where the corn-field spread its martial suggestions. When an equestrian shadow suddenly appeared, the sheriff saluted it in a tremor of excitement.

“ Hello ! ” he shouted. “ Did ye ketch him ? ”

The foremost of the party rode slowly forward : the horse was jaded ; the rider slouched in the saddle with an aspect of surly exhaustion.

“ Ketch him ! ” thundered out Gid Fletcher’s gruff voice. “ Ketch the devil! ”

The bold-faced deputy was brazening it out. He rode up with as dapper a style as a man may well maintain who has been in the saddle ten hours without food, sustained only by the strength of a “ tickler ” in his pocket, whose prospects are jeopardized and whose official prestige is ruined. The demeanor of the other riders expressed varying degrees of injured disaffection as they threw themselves from their horses.

The blacksmith dismounted in front of the cumbersome doors of his shop, on which still hung the sheriff’s padlock, and with the stiff gait of one who has ridden long and hard he strode across the clearing, and stopped before the group in front of the store.

He looked infuriated. It might have been a matter of wonder that so tired a man could nourish so strong and active a passion.

“ Look a hyar, ’Cajah Green ! ” he exclaimed, with an oath, “folks ’low ter me ez I ain’t got no right ter my reward fur ketchin’ that thar greased peeg, — ez ye hed ter leave go of, — kase he warn’t landed in jail or bailed. That air the law, they tells me.”

“ That’s the law,” replied the sheriff. His chair was tilted back against the wall of the store, his hat drawn over his brow. He spoke with the calmness of desperation.

“ Then ’pears-like ter me ez I hev hed all my trouble fur nuthin’, an’ all the resk I hev tuk,” said the blacksmith, coming close, and mechanically rolling up the sleeve of his hammer-arm.

“ Edzac’ly.”

The blacksmith turned on him a look like that of a wounded bear. “ An’ ye sit thar ez peaceful ez skim-milk, an’ ’low ez ye hev let my two hunderd dollars slip away ? ” he demanded. “ Dadburn yer greasy soul ! ”

“ I hopes it air all I hev let slip,” said the sheriff quietly. There was so much besides which he had cause to fear that it did not occur to him to be afraid of the blacksmith.

Perhaps it was the subacute perception that he shared the officer’s attention with more engrossing subjects which had the effect of tempering Gid Fletcher’s anger.

The rim of the moon was slipping behind the purple heights of Chilhowee. Day was suddenly upon them, though the sun had not yet risen, — when did the darkness flee? — the day, cool, with a freshness as of a new creation, and with an atmosphere so clear that one might know the ash from the oak in the deep green depths of the wooded valley. The hour had not yet done with witchery : the rose-red cloud was in the east, and the wild red rose had burst its bud; a mocking-bird sprung from its nest in a dogwood-tree, with a scintillating wing and a soaring song, and a ray of sunlight like a magic wand fell athwart the landscape.

Gid Fletcher sat vaguely staring. Presently he lifted his hand with a sudden gesture demanding attention.

“ Ye ain’t goin’ ter be ’lected, air ye, ’Cajah Green ? ”

The sheriff stirred uneasily. His ambition, a little and a selfish thing, was the index to his soul. Without it he himself would not be able to find the page whereon was writ all that there was of the spiritual within him. He writhed to forego it.

“ Naw,” he said desperately, “ I s’pose I ain’t.” He pushed his hat back nervously.

He heard, without marking, the sudden rattling of one of the wagons that had left more than an hour ago : it was crossing a rickety bridge near the foot of the mountain ; the hollow reverberations rose and fell, echoed and died away. One of the cabin doors opened, and a man came out upon the porch. He washed his face in a tin pan which stood on a bench for the public toilet, treated his head to a refreshing souse, and then, with the water dripping from his long locks upon the shoulders of his shirt, the bold-faced deputy, much refreshed by a snack and his recent ablutions, came lounging across the clearing to join them.

Suddenly Micajah Green noted that the blacksmith was looking at him, with a significant gleam in his black eye and a flush on his swarthy face.

“ Who said ye warn’t goin’ ter be ‘lected ? ”

“ Why, this hyar prophet o’ yourn on the Big Smoky.”

“ Why did he ’low ez that warn’t ter kem ter pass ? ”

“ He would n’t give no reason.”

“ He lef’ ye ter find that out. An’ ye fund it out ? ”

The sheriff said nothing. He was breathlessly intent.

“ An’ he met me in the woods, an’ ’lowed ez Rick Tyler ought n’t ter be tuk, an’ he hed done no wrong ; an’ he called the gov’nor’s reward blood money, an worked hisself nigh up ter the shoutin’ p’int; an’ called me ‘Judas’ fur takin’ the boy, sence me an’ him hed been frien’ly, an’ ’lowed ez them thar thirty pieces o’ silver warn’t out o’ circulation yit.”

“ An’ then,” the bold-faced deputy struck in, “ he rode up yestiddy, a-raisin’ a great myration over a gaynder-pullin’, ez if thar’d never been one before; purtendin’ ’t war wicked, like he ’d never killed an’ eat a fowel, an’ drawin’ pistols, an’ raisin’ a great commotion an’ excitement, an’ destradin’ the Settlemint, so a man handcuffed, an’ with a rope twisted round his arms an’ legs, gits out of a house right under thar nose, an’ runs away. Rick Tyler could n’t hev done it ’thout them ropes war cut, an’ he war giv a chance ter sneak out. Now, I ain’t a prophet by natur, but I kin say who cut them ropes, an’ who raised a disturbament outside ter give him a chance ter mosey.”

“Whar’s he now?” demanded the sheriff, rising from his chair and glancing about.

“ He was a-huntin’ with the posse, las’ night,” said the deputy. “ He never lef’ till ’bout an hour ago. He never wanted nobody ter ’spicion nuthin’, I reckon. Mebbe that’s him now.”

He pointed to a road in the valley, a tawny streak elusively appearing upon a hilltop or skirting a rocky spur, soon lost in a sea of foliage. Beside a harvested wheat-field it was again visible, and a tiny moving object might be discerned by eyes trained to the long stretches of mountain landscape. The sun was higher, the dew exhaled in warm and languishing perfume, the mocking-bird filled the air with ecstasy. The men stood among their elongated shadows on the crag staring at the moving object until it reached the dense woods, and so passed out of sight.

VII.

Down a precipitous path, hardly more civilized of aspect than if it were trodden by the deer, filled with interlacing roots, barricaded by long briery tangles, overhung by brush and overshadowed by trees, — down this sylvan way Dorinda, followed by Jacob and one or two of the companionable old hounds, was wont to go to the spring under the crag.

The spot had its fascinations. The great beetling cliff towered far above, the jagged line of its summit serrating the zenith. Its rugged face was seamed with many a fissure, and here and there were clumps of ferns, a swaying vine, a whortleberry bush that fed the birds of the air. Below surged the tops of the trees. There was a shelving descent from the base of the crag, and Jacob must needs have heed of the rocky depths in treading the narrow ledge that led to a great cavernous niche in the face of the rock. Here in a deep cleft welled the never-failing spring. It always reminded Doriuda of that rock which Moses smote; although, of course, when she thought of it, she said, she knew that Mount Horeb was in Jefferson County, because a man who had married her brother’s wife’s cousin had an aunt who lived there. And when she had abandoned that unconscious effort to bring the great things near, she would sit upon a rock and look with a sigh of pleasure at that pure, oufgushing limpidity, unfailing and unchanging, and say it reminded her of the wellsprings of pity.

One day, as she sat there, her dreaming head thrown back upon her hands clasped behind it, there sounded a sudden step close by. The old hounds, lying without the cavernous recess, could see along the upward vista of the path, and their low growl was rather in surly recognition than in active defiance. Dorinda and Jacob, within the great niche, beheld naught but the distant mountain landscape framed in the rusrged arch above their heads. The step did not at once advance; it hesitated, and then Amos James came slowly into view. Dorinda looked up dubiously at him, and it occurred to him that this was the accepted moment to examine the lock of his gun.

“ Howdy,” he ventured, as he turned the rifle about.

She had assumed a more constrained attitude, and had unclasped her hands from behind her head. The seat was a low one, and the dark blue folds of her homespun dress fell about her with simple amplitude. Her pink calico sunbonnet lay on the rock under her elbow. The figure of the pudgy Jacob in the foreground had a callow grotesqueness. He, too, undertook the demeanor he had learned to discriminate as “ manners.” Outside, the old dog snapped at the flies.

Amos James seemed to think an account of himself appropriate.

“ I hev been a-huntin’,” he said, his grave black eyes on the rifle and his face in the shadow of his big white hat. “ I happened ter pass by the house, an’ yer granny said ez ye hed kem doun hyar arter a pail o’ water, an’ I ’lowed ez I ’d kem an’ fetch it fur ye.”

Dorinda murmured that she was “much obleeged,” and relapsed into silent propriety.

Extraordinary gun ! It really seemed as if Amos James would be compelled to take it to pieces then and there, so persistently did it require his attention.

Jacob, whose hearing was unimpaired, but whose education in the specious ways of those of a larger growth was as yet incomplete, got up briskly. Since Amos had come to fetch the pail he saw no reason in nature why the pail should not be fetched, and he imagined that the return was in order. He paused for a moment in surprise; then seeing that no one else moved, he sat down abruptly. But for her manners Doriuda could have laughed. Amos James’s cheek flushed darkly as he still worked at the gun.

“ I s’pose ez you-uns hev hearn the news?” he remarked presently. As he asked the question he quickly lifted his eyes.

Ah, what laughing lights in hers, — what radiant joys ! She did not look at him. Her gaze was turned far away to the soft horizon. Her delicate lips had such dainty curves. Her pale cheek flushed tumultuously. She leaned her head back against the rock, the tendrils of her dark hair spreading over the unyielding gray stone, which, weathershielded, was almost white. In its dead, dumb finality — the memorial of seas ebbed long ago, of forms of life extinct — she bore it a buoyant contrast. She looked immortal!

“ I hev hearn the news,” she said, her long lashes falling, and with quiet circumspection, at variance with the triumph in her face.

He looked at her gravely, breathlessly. A sudden new idea had taken possession of him. The rescue, — it was a strange thing! Who in the Great Smoky Mountains had an adequate temptation to risk the penalty of ten years in the state-prison for rescuing Rick Tyler from the officers of the law? His brothers? — they were step-brothers. His father was dead. Affection could not be accounted a factor. Venom might do more. Some reckless enemy of the sheriff’s might thus have craftily compassed his ruin. Then there suddenly came upon Amos James a recollection of the Cayces’ grudge against Micajah Green, and of the fact that they had already actively bestirred themselves to electioneer against him. Once, before it all happened, Rick Tyler had hung persistently about Dorinda, and perhaps the “ men-folks ” approved him. Amos remembered too that a story was current at the gander-pulling that the reason the Cayces had absented themselves and were lying low was because a party of revenue raiders had been heard of on the Big Smoky. Who had heard of them, and when did they come, and where did they go ? It seemed a fabrication, a cloak. And Dorinda, — she was the impersonation of delighted triumph.

“ Agged the men-folks on, I reckon,” he thought,—“agged ’em on, fur the sake o’ Rick Tyler ! ”

A sense of despair, quiet, numbing, was creeping over him.

“ ’T ain’t no reg’lar ail. I know,” he said to himself, “ but I b’lieve it ’ll kill me.”

Conversation in the mountains is a leisurely procedure, time being of little value. The ensuing pause, however, was of abnormal duration, and at last Amos was fain to break it, albeit irrelevantly.

“ This hyar weather is gittin’ mighty hot,” he observed, taking off his hat and fanning himself with it. “ I feel like I hed been dragged bodaciously through the hopper.”

From the shaded coolness of the grotto the girl admitted that it was “ middlin’ warm.”

Despite the slumberous sunshine here, all the world was not so quiet. Over the valley a cloud was hovering, densely black, but with a gray nebulous margin ; now and then it was rent by a flash of lightning in swift zigzag lines, yet the mountains beyond were a tender blue in the golden glow of a sunshine yet more tender.

“ ’Pears like they air gittin’ a shower over yander, at the furder eend o’ the cove,” Dorinda remarked, encouragingly. “ Ef it war ter storm right smart, mebbe the thunder would cool the air some.”

“ Mebbe so,” he assented.

Then he marked again the new beauty abloom in her face, and his heart sank within him. His pride was touched, too. He was a man well to do for the “mountings,” with his own grist-mill, and a widowed mother whose plaint it was, night and day, that Amos was “ sech a slowly boy ter git married, an’ the Lord knows thar oughter be somebody roun’ the house spry’r ’n a pore ole woman mighty nigh fifty year old, — yes, sir ! a-goin’ on fifty. An’ I want ter live down ter Emmert’s Cove along o’ Malviny, my merried darter,” she would insist, “ whar thar air chillert, an’ babies ter look arter, an’ not sech a everlastin’ gang o’ men, a-lopin’ ’round the mill. But I dunno what Amos would do ef I lef’ him.”

Evidently it was a field for a daughter-in-law. Amos felt in his secret soul that this was not the only attraction. He was well favored and tall and straight, and had a good name in the county, despite his pranks, which were leniently regarded. He honestly thought that Dorinda might do worse. Whether it was tact or whether it was delicacy, he did not allude to the worldly contrast with the fugitive from justice.

“ I s’pose they won’t ketch Rick agin,” he hazarded.

“I reckon not,” she said, demurely, her long black lashes again falling.

He leaned uneasily on his gun, looked down at his great boots drawn over his brown jeans trousers to his knees, adjusted his leathern belt, and pulled his hat a trifle further over his eyes.

“ D’rindy,” he said suddenly, “ ye set a heap o’ store on Rick Tyler.”

Then he was doubtful, and feared he had offended her.

Her sapphire eyes, with their leaping blue lights and dark clear depths, all blended and commingled in the softest brilliancy, shone upon him. The bliss of the event was supreme.

“ Mebbe I do,” she said.

He turned and looked away at the storm, seeming ineffective as it surged in the distance. The trees in the cove were tossed by a wind that raged on a lower level, as if it issued from Æolian caverns in the depths of the range. It was a wild, aerial panorama, — the black clouds, and the rain, and the mist rolling through the deep gorge, veined with lightnings and vocal with thunder, and the thunderous echoes among the rocks.

Not a leaf stirred on the mountain’s brow, and the great “ bald ” lifted its majestic crest in a sunshine all unpaled, and against the upper regions of the air, splendidly blue. There was an analogy in the scene with his mood and hers.

A moment ago he had been saying to himself that he did not want to be “ turned off ” in favor of a man who was hunted like a wild animal through the woods ; who, if his luck and his friends should hold out, and he could evade capture, might look forward to nought but uncertainty and a fearful life, like others in the Big Smoky, who dared not open their own doors to a summons from without, skulking in their homes like beasts in their den.

The dangers, misfortunes, and indignities suffered by his preferred rival were an added slur upon him, who had all the backing of propitious circumstance. Since there was nothing to gain, why humble himself in vain ?

This was his logic, — sound, just, approved by his judgment; and as it arranged itself in his mind with all the lucidity of pure reason, he spoke from the complex foolish dictates of his unreasoning heart.

“ I hev hoped ter marry you, D’rindy, like I hev hoped fur salvation,” he said, abruptly.

He looked at her now, straight and earnestly, with his shaded, serious black eyes. Her rebuking glance slanted beyond him from under her half-lifted lashes.

“ I thought ye war a good church member,” she said, unexpectedly.

“ I am. But that don’t make me a liar ez I knows on. I’d ruther hear ye a-singin’ ’roun’ the house in Eskaqua Cove, an’ a-callin’ the chickens, an’ sech, ’n ter hear all the angels in heaven a-quirin’ tergether.”

“ That ain’t religion, Amos Jeemes,” she said, with cool disapproval.

“ Waal,” he rejoined, with low-spirited obstinacy, “ mebbe’t ain’t.”

There was a delicate odor of ferns on the air; the cool, outgushing water tinkled on the stones like a chime of silver bells ; his shadow fell athwart the portal as he leaned on his rifle, and his wandering glance mechanically swept the landscape. The sudden storm had passed, the verge of the cloud hovering so near that they could hear the last heavy raindrops pattering on the tops of the trees in Eskaqua Cove. Vapors were rising from the ravine ; the sun shone upon them, throwing a golden aureola about the opposite mountains, and all the wreathing mists that the wind whirled down the valley had elusive, opalescent effects. The thunder muttered in the distance; the sharp-bladed lightnings were sheathed ; a rainbow girdled the world, that had sprung into a magie beauty as if cinctured by the zone of Venus. The arch spanned the blue sky, and on the dark mountains extended the polychromatic reflection. The freshened wind came rushing up the gorge, and the tree-tops bent.

“ Look a hyar, D’rindy,” said Amos James, sturdily, “ I want ye ter promise me one thing.”

Dorinda had risen in embarrassment. She looked down at Jacob.

“ It air about time fur we-uns ter be a-goin’ ter the house, I reckon,” she said.

But Jacob sat still. He was apt in “ takin’ l’arnin’,” and he had begun to perceive that his elders did not always mean what they said. lie was cool and comfortable, and content to remain.

“ I want ye ter promise me that ef ever ye find ez ye hev thunk too well o’ Rick Tyler, an’ hev sot him up too high in yer mind over other folks, ye ’ll let me know.”

Her cheek dimpled ; her rare laughter fell on the air ; a fervid faith glowed in her deep, bright eyes.

“ I promise ye ! ”

“ Ye think Rick Tyler air mighty safe in that promise,” he rejoined, crestfallen.

But Dorinda would say no more.

VIII.

The disappointment which Amos James experienced found expression in much the same manner as that of many men of higher culture. He went down to his home in Eskaqua Cove, moody and morose. He replied to his chirping mother in discouraging monosyllables. In taciturn disaffection he sat on the step of the little porch, and watched absently a spider weaving her glittering gossamer maze about an overhanging mass of purple grapes, with great green leaves that were already edged with a rusty red and mottled with brown. A mocking-bird boldly perched among them, ever and anon, the airy grace of his pose hardly giving, in its exquisite lightness, the effect of a pause. The bird swallowed the grapes whole with a mighty gulp, and presently flew away with one in his bill for the refreshment of his family, whose vibratory clamor in an althea bush hard by mingled with the drone of the grasshoppers in the wet grass, loader than ever since the rain, and the persistent strophe and antistrophe of the frogs down on the bank of the mill-pond.

“ Did they git enny shower up in the mounting, Amos ? ” demanded his mother, as she sat knitting on the porch, — a thin little woman, with a nervous, uncertain eye and a drawling, high-pitched voice.

“ Naw ’m,” said Amos, “ not ez I knows on.”

“ I reckon ye ’d hev knowed ef ye hed got wet,” she said, with asperity. “Ye hain’t got much feelin’, no ways, — yer manners shows it, — but I ’low ye would feel the rain ef it kem down right smart, or ef ye war streck by lightnin’.”

There was no retort, and from the subtle disappointment in the little woman’s eye it might have seemed that to inaugurate a controversy would have been more filial, so bereft of conversational opportunity was her lonely life, where only a “gang o’ men loped ’round the mill.”

She knitted on with a sharp clicking of the needles for a time, carrying the thread on a gnarled fourth finger, which seemed unnaturally active for that member, and somehow officious.

“ I ’ll be bound ye went ter Cayce’s house,” she said, aggressively.

There was another long pause. The empty dwelling behind them was so still that one could hear the footsteps of an intruding rooster, as he furtively entered at the back door.

“ Shoo ! ” she said, shaking her needles at him, as she bent forward and saw him standing in the slant of the sunshine, all his red and yellow feathers burnished. He had one foot poised motionless, and looked at her with a reproving side-glance, as if he could not believe he had caught the drift of her remarks. Another gesture, more pronounced than the first, and he went scuttling out, his wings half spread and his toe-nails clattering on the puncheon floor. “ Ye went ter Cayce’s, I ‘ll be bound, and hyar ye be, with nuthin’ ter tell. Ef I war free ter jounce ’round the mountings same ez the idle, shif’less men-folks, who hev got nuthin’ ter do but eye a mill ez the water works, I’d hev so much ter tell whenst I got home that ye ’d hev ter tie me in a cheer ter keep me from talkin’ myself away, like somebody happy with religion. An’ hyar ye be, actin’ like ye hed no mo’ gift o’ speech ’n the rooster. Shoo ! Shoo ! Whar did ye go, ennyhow, when ye war on the mounting ? ”

“ A-huntin’,” said Amos.

“ Huntin’ D’rindy Cayce, I reckon. An’ ye never got her, ter jedge from yer looks. An I hain’t got the heart ter blame the gal. Sech a lonesome, say-nuthin’ husband ye’d make!”

The sharp click of her knitting-needles filled the pause. But her countenance had relaxed. She was in a measure enjoying the conversation, since the spice of her own share atoned for the lack of news or satisfactory response.

“ Air old Mis’ Cayce’s gyarden-truck suff’rin’ fur rain ? ”

There was a gleam of hopeful expectation behind her spectacles. With her reeking “ gyarden-spot” dripping with raindrops, and the smell of thyme and sage and the damp mould on the air, she could afford some pity as an added flavor for her pride.

“ Never looked ter see,” murmured her son, between two long whiffs from his pipe.

His mother laid her knitting on her lap. “I ’ll be bound, Amos Jeemcs, ez ye never tole her how ’special our’n war a-thrivin’ this season.”

“ Naw ’m,” said Amos, a trifle more promptly than usual, “I never. ’Fore I’d go a-crowin’ over old Mis’ Cayce ’bout’n our gyarden-truck I ’d see it withered in a night, like Jonah’s gourd.”

“It’s the Lord’s han’,” said his mother quickly, in self-justification. “ I ain’t been prayin’ fur no drought in Mis’ Cayce’s gyarden-spot.”

Another long pause ensued. The sun shining through a bunch of grapes made them seem pellucid globes of gold and amber and crimson among others darkly purple in the shadow. The mockingbird came once more a-foraging. A yellow and red butterfly flickered around in the air, as if one of the tiger-lilies there by the porch had taken wings and was wantoning about in the wind. On the towering bald of the mountain a cloud rested, obscuring the dome, — a cloud of dazzling whiteness, — and it seemed as if the mountain had been admitted to some close communion with the heavens. Below, the color was intense, so deeply green were the trees, so clear and sharp a gray were the crags, so blue were the shadows in the ravines. Amos was looking upward. He looked upward much of the time.

“See old Groundhog?” inquired his mother, suddenly.

“ Whar ?” He demanded with a start, breaking from his reverie.

“ Laws a massy, boy ! ” she exclaimed, in exasperation. “ Whenst ye war up ter the Cayces’, this mornin’.”

“ Naw ‘m,” said Amos. He had never admitted, save by indirection, that he had been to the Cayces’.

“ War he gone ter the still ? ”

“ I never axed.”

“ I s’pose not, bein’ ez ye never drinks nuthin’ but buttermilk,” — this with a scathing inflection.

She presently sighed deeply. “ Waal, waal. The millinium an’ the revenue will git thar rights one of these days, I hopes an’ prays. I ’m a favorin’ of ennythin’ ez ’ll storp sin an’ a-swillin’ o’ liquor. Tax ’em all, I say! Tax the sinners! ”

She had assumed a pious aspect, and spoke in a tone of drawling solemnity, with a vague idea that the whisky tax was in the interest of temperance, and the revenue department was a religious institution. The delusions of ignorance !

“Thar ain’t ez much drunk nohow now ez thar useter war. I ’members when I war a gal whisky war so cheap that up to the store at the Settlemint they ’d hev a bucket set full o’ whisky an’ a gourd, free fur all comers, an’ another bucket alongside with water ter season it. An’ the way that thar water lasted war surprisin,’ — that it war ! Nowadays ye ain’t goin’ ter find liquor so plenty nowhar, ’cept mebbe at old Groundhog’s still.”

Amos made no reply. His eyes were fixed on the road. A man on an old white horse had emerged from the woods, and was slowly ambling toward the mill. The crazy old structure was like a caricature; it seemed that only by a lapse of all the rules of interdependent timbers did it hang together, with such oblique disregard of rectangles. Its doors and windows were rhomboidal ; its supports tottered in the water. The gate was shut. The whir was hushed. A sleep lay upon the pond, save where the water fell like a silver veil over the dam. Even this motion was dreamy and somnambulistic. On the other side of the stream the great sandstone walls of the channel showed here and there the water-marks of flood and fall of past years, cut in sharp levels and registered in the rock. They beetled sometimes, and the verdure on the summits looked over and gave the deep waters below the grace of a dense and shady reflection. Above the dark old roof on every hand the majestic encompassing mountains rose against the sky, and the cove nestled sequestered from the world in this environment.

The man on the gaunt white horse suddenly paused, seeing the mill silent and lonely ; his eyes turned to the little house further down the stream.

“ Hello ! ” he yelled. “ I hev kem ter git some gris’ groun’.”

“ Grin’ yer gris’ yerse’f,” vociferated the miller, cavalierly renouncing his vocation. “ I hev no mind ter go a-medjurin o’ toll.”

Thus privileged, the stranger dismounted, went into the old mill, himself lifted the gate, and presently the musical whir broke forth. It summoned an echo from the mountain that was hardly like a reflection of its simple, industrial sound, so elfin, so romantically faint, so fitful and far, it seemed ! The pond awoke, the water gurgled about the wheel, the tail-race was billowy with foam.

Presently there was silence. The gate had fallen ; the farmer had measured the toll, and was riding away. As he vanished Amos James rose slowly, and began to stretch his stalwart limbs.

“ I ’m glad ye ain’t palsied with settin’ so long, Amos,” said his mother. “ Ye seem ter hev los’ interes’ in everythink ’ceptin’ the doorstep. Lord A’mighty ! I never thunk ez ye’d grow up ter be sech pore comp’ny. No wonder ez D’rindy hardens her heart ! An’ when ye war a baby, — my sakes ! I could set an’ list’n ter yer jowin’ all day. An’ sech comp’ny ye war, when ye could n’t say a word an’ hed n’t a tooth in yer head! ”

He lived in continual rivalry with this younger self in his mother’s affections. She was one of those women whose maternal love is expressed in an idolatry of infancy. She could not forgive him for outgrowing his babyhood, and regarded every added year upon his head as a sort of affront and a sorrow.

He strode away, still gloomily downcast, and when the woman next looked up she saw him mounted on his bay horse, and riding toward the base of the mountain.

“ Waal, sir ! ” she exclaimed, taking off her spectacles and rubbing the glasses on her blue-checked apron, “ D’rindy Cayce ’ll hev ter marry that thar boy ter git shet o’ him. I hev never hearn o’ nobody ridin’ up that thar mounting twict in one day ‘thout they hed suthin’ ’special ter boost ’em, — a-runnin’ from the sher’ff, or sech.”

But Amos James soon turned from the road, that wound in long, serpentine undulations to the mountain’s brow, and pursued a narrow bridle-path, leading deep into the dense forests. It might have seemed that he was losing his way altogether when the path disappeared among the bowlders of a stream, half dry. He followed the channel up the rugged, rock - girt gorge for perhaps a mile, emerging at length upon a slope of outcropping ledges, where his horse left no hoof-print. Soon he struck into the laurel, and pressed on, guided by signs distinguishable only to the initiated: some grotesque gnarling of limbs, perhaps, of the great trees that stretched above the almost impenetrable undergrowth ; some projecting crag, visible at long intervals, high up and cut sharply against the sky. All at once, in the midst of the dense laurel, he came upon a cavity in the side of the mountain. The irregularly shaped fissure was more than tall enough to admit a man. He stood still for a moment, and called his own name. There was no response save the echoes, and, dismounting, he took the bridle and began to lead the horse into the cave. The animal shied dubiously, protesting against this unique translation to vague subterranean spheres. The shadow of the fissured portal fell upon them ; the light began to grow dim ; the dust thickened. As he glanced over his shoulder he could see the woods without as if suffused with a golden radiance, and there was a freshness on the intensely green foliage as if it were newly washed with rain. The world seemed suddenly clarified, and tiny objects stood out with strange distinctness; he saw the twigs on the great trees and the white tips of the tail-feathers of a fluttering bluejay. Far down the aisles of the forest the enchantment held its wonderful sway, and he felt in his own ignorant fashion how beautiful is the accustomed light. When the horse’s stumbling feet had ceased to sound among the stones, the wilderness without was as lonely and as unsuggestive of human occupation or human existence as when the Great Smoky Mountains first rose from the sea.

Charles Egbert Craddock.