THE heat of a late July afternoon made the leaves crinkle and creak, and the harsh snapping of twigs beneath the feet of the three mountain men cut into the droning air as they stepped up Cragg Hill and dropped aslant to Lowe’s cabin.

It was Sunday, and the people were gathering into Glen Hazard for the second meeting, so the men — Virgil Howard, Rashe Lowe, and his son, Wait-Still-on-the-Lord—met many a neighbor facing toward them. The old people were striding smoothly, but the young ones, brightly dressed in new mail-order clothes, were prancing shamefully with the mischief of living.

‘How you?' was the passing greeting of all; and Virgil Howard answered for the three, ‘Well as otherwise.’

The three were bound for Bart’s Deadening over beyond Lowe’s cabin, for old John Bart lay stricken soul and body and they went to comfort him. For this reason their backs were turned to the church house. The sun was already westering, else they would have stayed for meeting first.

Directly Rashe spoke. ‘He’s been bedfast these six weeks with scarcely the spirit to live, yet seems he can’t let slip for the heavy matter that is resting upon him.’

‘He’d ought to make a struggle,’ said Howard. ‘It’s not in reason for a man to lay down inviting death.’

‘So I told him,’ Rashe answered. ‘I said, “Get up, John, and try to live. Don’t you lie there like a dried apple and jes’ wither.” And he made answer,

“What’s to get up for?”’

‘It’s the crowding is on his mind,’ Waits broke in thoughtfully. ‘And he’s right about we’re getting powerful cluttered. Times have got so a man can’t possess his soul with all the matters he’s bound to do and own.’

This was a thought large enough to fill their minds in silence as they went forward singly through the laurel scrub. They dropped beneath the shoulder of the hill and lost the last of that day’s sun. A growl of thunder rolled around the back of the hills.

Presently Virgil Howard said:‘Tell us how he came by his fear, Rashe. It will shorten the way.’

So Rashe began and said: —

‘When John and Luther were fifteen years old apiece they went to Mexico in the following of a Confederate officer to see the outside world and hunt a fortune. They set forth in homespun shirts and trousers and rawhide shoes, and fur caps they’d trapped the forerunning winter. They carried for weapons each a long knife, welded and beaten sharp upon their forge.

‘Two years after that — about '68, it must ’a’ been — John and Lute walked home again in the top ends of their trousers, and without cap or shoe between them. But they carried each an old army gun, and they wore each a store-boughten shirt. They came home covered with experiences and a dread of the outside world.’

Waits interrupted: ‘Lute used to tell about that time, but John’d never let go of his tongue, though he made plenty free of it with every other thing.’

‘John was more afraid than Lute. He had longer sight, and he feared that talking about many things might bring them in train. Both had seen inventions and discoveries that looked to them to be ogres that fair et up men. Lute talked like a child talks about wild beasts to scare itself; but John was too scairt a’ready. It was Lute took in the twice-a-week paper that made them keep shet of all goings on.

‘You recollect, Virge, how they’d never get things out of a mail-order house even when money was free with them. They’d say it would be letting in the outside to barter to and fro like that and they’d goon till a man would feel the outside was a contaminating disease.’

‘ ’T is,’ said Waits sorrowfully.

‘You hush,’ said Rashe. ‘John and Lute fought roads and telephomes and automobiles and moving pictures, each as they came, and all was too strong for them. So they backed up and backed up till they fair hid in their own place. They’d go down to mail-gathering to meet neighbors and get corn-credit at the store for meat, but every other way they lived lonely.’

As the three went forward, storm clouds climbed heavily up the sky; the world turned copper-colored. A weariness came upon them, but they kept their way and Rashe held to his story.

‘ Come a time when John began to go a little mite strange. It was n’t so much the outside pressing in, as the much he made of it. First thing that told us he was not in his own senses was when he took a notion and stole and buried Mist’ Carr’s radio-box. The day before that night, Mist’ Carr edzacted it all out to him, how it brought voices and music in from outside without wires or anything — just fetched it, you might say, through the air. Mist’ Carr, being half-outland, was proud of it, but John carried on a sight and said nothing less than the Devil could do such tricks. Mist’ Carr said John had an obsession, which is the same as being fair et up with one notion till you’ve got no sense left for use; he claimed the notion of being crowded had et into John’s mind, like.

‘Well, sir. Lute’s being took for killing Creed Morgan took up John’s mind for a while, and the next thing was the airplane. It sent John right away from himself. You recollect the man that lit in the bottoms beyond Flat Rock Branch? Maybe you did n’t come in that day, Virge, but the rest of us all stepped over to see an airplane close to.’

‘On the ground it’s no better’n a mud wasp wrong way to,’ said Waits.

‘You hush,’ Rashe went on. ‘Well, sir, we looked and saw; but nothing would do John but touch and feel. He took ahold of it by the wires and then stepped back to see all of it again and he swore the thing was trag. The driver saw John was very old and strange, and for his fun, like, he said would he fly off with him.

‘Now I’m telling you, Virge, that while my mouth was yet hanging open John says “Yes,” and we all looked like we’d been stuck in a maze forever. John says to the driver, “It can carry me out as well as it carried you in,” and when he’d made the flyer promise to bring him home he got in.'

A crack of thunder capped Rashe’s words, and while it rolled off the three made their way over Lowe’s snake fence and out to the stream side that led to Bart’s Deadening.

’He told me next day,’ Rashe went on, unwinding his feet from the honeysuckle where it tangled him, ‘that trip was the end of him. After he got over feeling sick, he took notice, and what did he see but all his evil dreams come true. The outside was creeping up the mountains on both sides. He seen white lines that was hard roads linking across. He seen line wires from where the electric light company built their dam, and before long they went over where the dam itself was choking Green River. The driver took John so far as a big city, and it was terrible close against the edge of the hills. And, looking down on the hills, there was more town patches than a man could believe in.

‘John was clean outside of himself all the next week, and before it was up he’d gone up to the Pen where Lute was and begged them to take him in with his brother so’s the crowd could n’t get at him. Of course they could n’t put him in jail, but seeing he was touched a little, and Lute was failing from old age, they took John in as day visitor.

‘After Lute died, John was turned away and had nearly escaped home when a mission house that took him in over a night held him. They was bound to keep him and do for him, but he got them to back a letter to me telling where he was and to go and loose him, so I went up and unloosed him. They said, “He’ll die all alone in some awful backwoods cabin,” and I told them that’s where and how he wants to die and to leave him go; and they called us a pair of ungrateful old stubborns and we got free.

‘John would n’t have gotten home but that he was running all the time from the crowd. “It’s creeping up on me,” he kept on saying, “and it makes a noise till you can’t hear and it stinks till you can’t breathe.” And soon’s he got home he lay down on his pallet and says: “Say a prayer, Rashe; I’m prayed out same as I’m crowded out.” Some words we’d learned when we were younglings came back to me: “Give unto Thy servant the peace that the world cannot give, and defend us from our enemies so’s we may pass our time in peace and quietness.” Maybe that’s not the perfect of it, but it kind of eased him and he kept saying it over and again.'

And they had come at this time to the place of Bart’s Deadening; and healthy corn stood green in the clearing among the ghosts of giant trees that had been deadened to keep them from drawing all the good from the earth. Storm and night closing in made a basin of heat and fear, and the gray tree trunks stood iron-strong in death.

‘Corn in the clearing crowding in among the old trees makes a man think about John’s being right,’ Waits said in a low voice. ‘Every year it’s something new, and one day the trees ’ll fall and then it’ll all be corn.’ His words fell slower, as if he were feeling for something that had gotten caught in the back of his mind. ‘The corn’ll win because it keeps on being new — and the trees just get older and older—’ His voice stopped thickly and he looked at his old companions to see if they took his meaning to mind.

‘You hush,’ said his father. ‘A young-un had n’t ought to talk so. First thing you know you’ll go strange like John. You mind me and hush.’

The slanted log cabin stood over against them. It settled into the slope of the far hillside, trying to bury itself. It looked as if nobody lived there, but that a trickle of blue smoke came from the crow-stick chimney and flattened in the storm-bound air. The yard before the house — unswept since Luther went away — was littered with tree scourings and trash of last winter, and upstart weeds grew in lusty bunches on the path. In the side yard a cow and a mule lay dead, nigh skeletoned for lack of food.

While they went forward to the cabin some hens, gone back half wild, gave a screeching from the tree where they roosted above the well roof.

‘ Wish I’d thought me to tote some feed for them brutes,’ Rashe said, ’but I was took up with John, and they being strayed off till their last minute, they leapt my mind.’

They shoved back the door of the cabin till it stuck against the earthen floor, and edging inside they found all dark save for a spark of fire. They gathered at the fire, judging old John to be sleeping on his pallet beyond. Their feet made no sound on the usedhard dirt floor.

Except the fire, there were only the hewn log table and stool and John’s bed, homemade of slab siding. For all the hot night, a fire was a living thing to push back fear.

Presently a sharp thin voice came to them, commanding: ’Rashe, come hyar! ’

Rashe trod quietly to the bed; the other two crouched by the fire, not moving.

‘ Rashe,’ John whispered, ‘ you reckon Heaven’s got as crowd-filled as some folks say?’

Rashe looked down on the withered old man, who lay like a crumpled leaf the kind wind has thrown in a warm corner. John’s eyes were alight, but the rest of him had been struck motionless forever.

' Judgmatically, I don’t know, John; but not likely it’s altered much since you and me were to Sunday School down Mill Creek. ’T was a good place then, and likely ’t is now.’

Old John Bart rested quietly. Then: ‘It’s liable to be a heap crowded with all the folks’ talk about going there —’

‘Not all’s going says they is.’

‘Maybe,’ said John, his eyes smiling, ‘maybe I’ll go to the one of the Many Mansions kept for our kind of folks. And from what I seen of my kin and kind this eighty year they won’t be a stifling lot.’

‘Take shame, John Bart, to talk that way of your neighbor-people with what any minute is liable to be your last breath!’

‘Only my fun, like,’ John made answer. ‘They’s several I’d be proud to meet. They’s Lute — he’ll be there, even if he did die out of the Pen. He done a good deed when he killed Creed Morgan, let law say what it will.’

All rested silent, till directly John turned his eyes upon the two by the fire. A flicker of its light showed that he scowled.

‘What is it, John?’

‘Crowding,’ said John, ‘crowding my last breath away.’

‘You want we should all step out awhile?’

John’s eyes agreed and all three moved through the door and across the yard to the woodpile, where they let themselves down restfully to wait.

Full dark had fallen. The heat lightning ran behind the ridge above them and the katydids argued in the near trees. Clouds thickened and lightened again for an hour and further. Then Waits spoke: ‘He’s in no way aghast at dying. I trust the Lord I’ll be as easy when my time comes.’

‘Some say his never talking about the outside kept his mind from getting air and light; but there’s more light than comes from east or west,’ said Rashe.

They rested on the firewood through the night; the storm threatened and drew off, and when the dawn came it was neither raining nor letting it alone. Day came slowly, and it was silent of birds and beasts. The smoke had stopped from out the chimney and it was certain now that nobody lived there.

‘I’ll step in and see how he fares,’ said Rashe.

‘And I — when you are come out,’ said Virge. '’T would be unseemly to crowd.’

So they went in and came out singly, and Waits locked the cabin door and they turned again toward Glen Hazard to give the notice.