the disgust which this effeminate adornment must occasion, forgetting
that it was possible that they did not even observe it. In the gala-days
of the old hotel, before the war, they had seen much "finicking finery"
in garb and equipage and habits affected by the _jeunesse doree_ who
frequented the place in those halcyon times, and were accustomed to such
details. It might be that they and Millicent approved such flimsy
daintiness. He began to fume inwardly with a sense of inferiority in her
estimation. One of his fingers had been frosted last winter, and with
the first twinge of cold weather it was beginning to look very red and
sad and clumsy, as if it had just remembered its ancient woe; he glanced
from it once more at the delicate ringed hand of the stranger.
Dundas was looking up with a slow, deferential, decorous smile that
nevertheless lightened and transfigured his expression. It seemed
somehow communicated to Millicent's face as she looked down at him from
beneath her white eyelids and long, thick, dark lashes, for she was
standing beside him, handing him the plate of bread. Then, still
smiling, she passed noiselessly on to the others.
Emory was indeed clumsy, for he had stretched his hand downward to offer
a morsel to a friend of his under the table--he was on terms of
exceeding amity with the four-footed members of the house hold--and in
his absorption not withdrawing it as swiftly as one accustomed to canine
manners should do, he had his frosted finger well mumbled before he
could, as it were, repossess himself of it.
"I wonder what they charge fur iron over yander at the settlemint,
Em'ry?" observed Sim Roxby presently.
"Dun'no', sir," responded Emory, glumly, his sullen black eyes full of
smouldering fire--"hevin' no call ter know, ez I ain't no blacksmith."
"I war jes' wonderin' ef tenpenny nails didn't cost toler'ble high ez
reg'lar feed," observed Roxby, gravely.
But his mother laughed out with a gleeful cracked treble, always a ready
sequence of her son's rustic sallies. "He got ye that time, Em'ry," she
cried.
A forced smile crossed Emory's face. He tossed back his tangled dark
hair with a gasp that was like the snort of an unruly horse submitting
to the inevitable, but with restive projects in his brain. "I let the
dog hyar ketch my finger whilst feedin' him," he said. His plausible
excuse for the tenpenny expression was complete; but he added, his
darker mood recurring instantly, "An', Mis' Roxby, I hev put a stop ter
them ez hev tuk ter callin' me Em'ly, I hev."
The old woman looked up, her small wrinkled mouth round and amazed. "_I_
never called ye Emily," she declared.
Swift repentance seized him.
"Naw, 'm," he said, with hurried propitiation. "I 'lowed ye did."
"I didn't," said the old woman. "But ef I war ter find it toothsome ter
call ye 'Emily,' I dun'no' how ye air goin' ter pervent it. Ye can't go
gunnin' fur me, like ye done fur the men at the mill, fur callin' ye
'Emily.'"
"Law, Mis' Roxby!" he could only exclaim, in his horror and contrition
at this picture he had thus conjured up. "Ye air welcome ter call me
ennything ye air a mind ter," he protested.
And then he gasped once more. The eyes of the guest, contemptuous,
amused, seeing through him, were fixed upon him. And he himself had
furnished the lily-handed stranger with the information that he had been
stigmatized "Em'ly" in the banter of his associates, until he had taken
up arms, as it were, to repress this derision.
"It takes powerful little ter put ye down, Em'ry," said Roxby, with
rallying laughter. "Mam hev sent ye skedaddlin' in no time at all. I
don't b'lieve the Lord made woman out'n the man's rib. He made her out'n
the man's backbone; fur the man ain't hed none ter speak of sence."
Millicent, with a low gurgle of laughter, sat down beside Emory at the
table, and fixed her eyes, softly lighted with mirth, upon him. The
others too had laughed, the stranger with a flattering intonation, but
young Keenan looked at her with a dumb appealing humility that did not
altogether fail of its effect, for she busied herself to help his plate
with an air of proprietorship as if he were a child, and returned it
with a smile very radiant and sufficient at close range. She then
addressed herself to her own meal. The young dogs under the table ceased
to beg, and gambolled and gnawed and tugged at her stout little shoes,
the sound of their callow mirthful growls rising occasionally above the
talk. Sometimes she rose again to wait on the table, when they came
leaping out after her, jumping and catching at her skirts, now and then
casting themselves on the ground prone before her feet, and rolling over
and over in the sheer joy of existence.
The stranger took little part in the talk at the table. Never a question
was asked him as to his mission in the mountains, or the length of his
stay, his vocation, or his home. That extreme courtesy of the
mountaineers, exemplified in their singular abstinence from any
expressions of curiosity, accepted such account of himself as he had
volunteered, and asked for no more. In the face of this standard of
manners any inquisitiveness on his part, such as might have elicited
points of interest for his merely momentary entertainment, was tabooed.
Nevertheless, silent though he was for the most part, the relish with
which he listened, his half-covert interest in the girl, his quick
observation of the others, the sudden very apparent enlivening of his
mental atmosphere, betokened that his quarters were not displeasing to
him. It seemed only a short time before the meal was ended and the
circle all, save Millicent, with pipes alight before the fire again. The
dogs, well fed, had ranged themselves on the glowing hearth, lying prone
on the hot stones; one old hound, however, who conserved the air of
listening to the conversation, sat upright and nodded from time to time,
now and again losing his balance and tipping forward in a truly human
fashion, then gazing round on the circle with an open luminous eye, as
who should say he had not slept.
It was all very cheerful within, but outside the wind still blared
mournfully. Once more Dundas was sorry that he had declined the
invitation to remain, and it was with a somewhat tentative intention
that he made a motion to return to the hotel. But his host seemed to
regard his resolution as final, and rose with a regret, not an
insistence. The two women stared in silent amazement at the mere idea of
his camping out, as it were, in the old hotel. The ascendency of
masculine government here, notwithstanding Roxby's assertion that Eve
was made of Adam's backbone, was very apparent in their mute
acquiescence and the alacrity with which they began to collect various
articles, according to his directions, to make the stranger's stay more
comfortable.
"Em'ry kin go along an' holp," he said, heartlessly; for poor Emory's
joy in perceiving that the guest was not a fixture, and that his
presence was not to be an embargo on any word between himself and
Millicent during the entire evening, was pitiably manifest. But the
situation was still not without its comforts, since Dundas was to go
too. Hence he was not poor company when once in the saddle, and was
civil to a degree of which his former dismayed surliness had given no
promise.
Night had become a definite element. The twilight had fled. Above their
heads, as they galloped through the dank woods, the bare boughs of the
trees clashed together--so high above their heads that to the town man,
unaccustomed to these great growths, the sound seemed not of the
vicinage, but unfamiliar, uncanny, and more than once he checked his
horse to listen. As they approached the mountain's verge and overlooked
the valley and beheld the sky, the sense of the predominance of darkness
was redoubled. The ranges gloomed against the clearer spaces, but a
cloud, deep gray with curling white edges, was coming up from the west,
with an invisible convoy of vague films, beneath which the stars,
glimmering white points, disappeared one by one. The swift motion of
this aerial fleet sailing with the wind might be inferred from the
seemingly hurried pace of the moon making hard for the west. Still
bright was the illumined segment, but despite its glitter the shadowy
space of the full disk was distinctly visible, its dusky field spangled
with myriads of minute, dully golden points. Down, down it took its way
in haste--in disordered fright, it seemed, as if it had no heart to
witness the storm which the wind and the clouds foreboded--to fairer
skies somewhere behind those western mountains. Soon even its vague
light would encroach no more upon the darkness. The great hotel would be
invisible, annihilated as it were in the gloom, and not even thus dimly
exist, glimmering, alone, forlorn, so incongruous to the wilderness that
it seemed even now some mere figment of the brain, as the two horsemen
came with a freshened burst of speed along the deserted avenue and
reined up beside a small gate at the side.
"No use ter ride all the way around," observed Emory Keenan. "Mought jes
ez well 'light an' hitch hyar."
The moon gave him the escort of a great grotesque shadow as he threw
himself from his horse and passed the reins over a decrepit
hitching-post near at hand. Then he essayed the latch of the small gate.
He glanced up at Dundas, the moonlight in his dark eyes, with a smile as
it resisted his strength.
He was a fairly good-looking fellow when rid of the self-consciousness
of jealousy. His eyes, mouth, chin, and nose, acquired from reliable and
recognizable sources, were good features, and statuesque in their
immobility beneath the drooping curves of his broad soft hat. He was
tall, with the slenderness of youth, despite his evident weight and
strength. He was long-waisted and lithe and small of girth, with broad
square shoulders, whose play of muscles as he strove with the gate was
not altogether concealed by the butternut jeans coat belted in with his
pistols by a broad leathern belt. His boots reached high on his long
legs, and jingled with a pair of huge cavalry spurs. His stalwart
strength seemed as if it must break the obdurate gate rather than open
it, but finally, with a rasping creak, dismally loud in the silence, it
swung slowly back.
The young mountaineer stood gazing for a moment at the red rust on the
hinges. "How long sence this gate must hev been opened afore?" he said,
again looking up at Dundas with a smile.
Somehow the words struck a chill to the stranger's heart. The sense of
the loneliness of the place, of isolation, filled him with a sort of
awe. The night-bound wilderness itself was not more daunting than these
solitary tiers of piazzas, these vacant series of rooms and corridors,
all instinct with vanished human presence, all alert with echoes of
human voices. A step, a laugh, a rustle of garments--he could have sworn
he heard them at any open doorway as he followed his guide along the dim
moonlit piazza, with its pillars duplicated at regular intervals by the
shadows on the floor. How their tread echoed down these lonely ways!
From the opposite side of the house he heard Keenan's spurs jangling,
his soldierly stride sounding back as if their entrance had roused
barracks. He winced once to see his own shadow with its stealthier
movement. It seemed painfully furtive. For the first time during the
evening his jaded mind, that had instinctively sought the solace of
contemplating trifles, reverted to its own tormented processes. "Am I
not hiding?" he said to himself, in a sort of sarcastic pity of his
plight.
The idea seemed never to enter the mind of the transparent Keenan. He
laughed out gayly as they turned into the weed-grown quadrangle, and the
red fox that Dundas had earlier observed slipped past him with
affrighted speed and dashed among the shadows of the dense shrubbery of
the old lawn without. Again and again the sound rang back from wall to
wall, first with the jollity of seeming imitation, then with an appalled
effect sinking to silence, and suddenly rising again in a grewsome
_staccato_ that suggested some terrible unearthly laughter, and bore but
scant resemblance to the hearty mirth which had evoked it. Keenan paused
and looked back with friendly gleaming eyes. "Oughter been a leetle
handier with these hyar consarns," he said, touching the pistols in his
belt.
It vaguely occurred to Dundas that the young man went strangely heavily
armed for an evening visit at a neighbor's house. But it was a lawless
country and lawless times, and the sub-current of suggestion did not
definitely fix itself in his mind until he remembered it later. He was
looking into each vacant open doorway, seeing the still moonlight
starkly white upon the floor; the cobwebbed and broken window-panes,
through which a section of leafless trees beyond was visible; bits of
furniture here and there, broken by the vandalism of the guerillas. Now
and then a scurrying movement told of a gopher, hiding too, and on one
mantel-piece, the black fireplace yawning below, sat a tiny tawny-tinted
owl, whose motionless bead-like eyes met his with a stare of stolid
surprise. After he had passed, its sudden ill-omened cry set the silence
to shuddering.
Keenan, leading the way, paused in displeasure. "I wisht I hed viewed
that critter," he said, glumly. "I'd hev purvented that screechin' ter
call the devil, sure. It's jes a certain sign o' death."
He was about to turn, to wreak his vengeance, perchance. But the bird,
sufficiently fortunate itself, whatever woe it presaged for others,
suddenly took its awkward flight through sheen and shadow across the
quadrangle, and when they heard its cry again it came from some remote
section of the building, with a doleful echo as a refrain.
The circumstance was soon forgotten by Keenan. He seemed a happy,
mercurial, lucid nature, and he began presently to dwell with interest
on the availability of the old music-stand in the centre of the square
as a manger. "Hyar," he said, striking the rotten old structure with a
heavy hand, which sent a quiver and a thrill through all the
timbers--"hyar's whar the guerillas always hitched thar beastises. Thar
feed an' forage war piled up thar on the fiddlers' seats. Ye can't do no
better'n ter pattern arter them, till ye git ready ter hev fiddlers an'
sech a-sawin' away in hyar agin."
And he sauntered away from the little pavilion, followed by Dundas, who
had not accepted his suggestion of a room on the first floor as being
less liable to leakage, but finally made choice of an inner apartment in
the second story. He looked hard at Keenan, when he stood in the doorway
surveying the selection. The room opened into a cross-hall which gave
upon a broad piazza that was latticed; tiny squares of moonlight were
all sharply drawn on the floor, and, seen through a vista of gray
shadow, seemed truly of a gilded lustre. From the windows of this room
on a court-yard no light could be visible to any passer-by without.
Another door gave on an inner gallery, and through its floor a staircase
came up from the quadrangle close to the threshold. Dundas wondered if
these features were of possible significance in Keenan's estimation. The
young mountaineer turned suddenly, and snatching up a handful of slats
broken from the shutters, remarked:
"Let's see how the chimbly draws--that's the main p'int."
There was no defect in the chimney's constitution. It drew admirably,
and with the white and red flames dancing in the fireplace, two or three
chairs, more or less disabled, a table, and an upholstered lounge
gathered at random from the rooms near at hand, the possibility of
sojourning comfortably for a few days in the deserted hostelry seemed
amply assured.
Once more Dundas gazed fixedly at the face of the young mountaineer, who
still bent on one knee on the hearth, watching with smiling eyes the
triumphs of his fire-making. It seemed to him afterwards that his
judgment was strangely at fault; he perceived naught of import in the
shallow brightness of the young man's eyes, like the polished surface of
jet; in the instability of his jealousy, his anger; in his hap-hazard,
mercurial temperament. Once he might have noted how flat were the spaces
beneath the eyes, how few were the lines that defined the lid, the
socket, the curve of the cheekbone, the bridge of the nose, and how
expressionless. It was doubtless the warmth and glow of the fire, the
clinging desire of companionship, the earnest determination to be
content, pathetic in one who had but little reason for optimism, that
caused him to ignore the vacillating glancing moods that successively
swayed Keenan, strong while they lasted, but with scanty augury because
of their evanescence. He was like some newly discovered property in
physics of untried potentialities, of which nothing is ascertained but
its uncertainties.
And yet he seemed to Dundas a simple country fellow, good-natured in
the main, unsuspicious, and helpful. So, giving a long sigh of relief
and fatigue, Dundas sank down in one of the large arm-chairs that had
once done duty for the summer loungers on the piazza.
In the light of the fire Emory was once more looking at him. A certain
air of distinction, a grace and ease of movement, an indescribable
quality of bearing which he could not discriminate, yet which he
instinctively recognized as superior, offended him in some sort. He
noticed again the ring on the stranger's hand as he drew off his glove.
Gloves! Emory Keenan would as soon have thought of wearing a petticoat.
Once more the fear that these effeminate graces found favor in
Millicent's estimation smote upon his heart. It made the surface of his
opaque eyes glisten as Dundas rose and took up a pipe and tobacco pouch
which he had laid on the mantel-piece, his full height and fine figure
shown in the changed posture.
"Ez tall ez me, ef not taller, an', by gum! a good thirty pound
heavier," Emory reflected, with a growing dismay that he had not those
stalwart claims to precedence in height and weight as an offset to the
smoother fascinations of the stranger's polish.
He had risen hastily to his feet. He would not linger to smoke
fraternally over the fire, and thus cement friendly relations.
"I guided him hyar, like old Sim Roxby axed me ter do, an' that's all. I
ain't keerin' ef I never lay eyes on him again," he said to himself.
"Going?" said Dundas, pleasantly, noticing the motion. "You'll look in
again, won't you?"
"Wunst in a while, I reckon," drawled Keenan, a trifle thrown off his
balance by this courtesy.
He paused at the door, looking back over his shoulder for a moment at
the illumined room, then stepped out into the night, leaving the tenant
of the lonely old house filling his pipe by the fire.
His tread rang along the deserted gallery, and sudden echoes came
tramping down the vacant halls as if many a denizen of the once populous
place was once more astir within its walls. Long after Dundas had heard
him spring from the lower piazza to the ground, and the rusty gate clang
behind him, vague footfalls were audible far away, and were still again,
and once more a pattering tread in some gaunt and empty apartment near
at hand, faint and fainter yet, till he hardly knew whether it were the
reverberations of sound or fancy that held his senses in thrall.
And when all was still and silent at last he felt less solitary than
when these elusive tokens of human presence were astir.
Late, late he sat over the dwindling embers. His mind, no longer
diverted by the events of the day, recurred with melancholy persistence
to a theme which even they, although fraught with novelty and presage of
danger, had not altogether crowded out. And as the sense of peril
dulled, the craft of sophistry grew clumsy. Remorse laid hold upon him
in these dim watches of the night. Self-reproach had found him out here,
defenceless so far from the specious wiles and ways of men. All the line
of provocations seemed slight, seemed naught, as he reviewed them and
balanced them against a human life. True, it was not in some mad quarrel
that his skill had taken it and had served to keep his own--a duel, a
fair fight, strictly regular according to the code of "honorable men"
for ages past--and he sought to argue that it was doubtless but the
morbid sense of the wild fastnesses without, the illimitable vastness of
the black night, the unutterable indurability of nature to the
influences of civilization, which made it taste like murder. He had
brought away even from the scene of action, to which he had gone with
decorous deliberation--his worldly affairs arranged for the possibility
of death, his will made, his volition surrendered, and his sacred honor
in the hands of his seconds--a humiliating recollection of the sudden
revulsion of the aspect of all things; the criminal sense of haste with
which he was hurried away after that first straight shot; the agitation,
nay, the fright of his seconds; their eagerness to be swiftly rid of
him, their insistence that he should go away for a time, get out of the
country, out of the embarrassing purview of the law, which was prone to
regard the matter as he himself saw it now, and which had an ugly trick
of calling things by their right names in the sincere phraseology of an
indictment. And thus it was that he was here, remote from all the usual
lines of flight, with his affectation of being a possible purchaser for
the old hotel, far from the railroad, the telegraph, even the postal
service. Some time--soon, indeed, it might be, when the first flush of
excitement and indignation should be overpast, and the law, like a
barking dog that will not bite, should have noisily exhausted the gamut
of its devoirs--he would go back and live according to his habit in his
wonted place, as did other men whom he had known to be "called out," and
who had survived their opponents. Meantime he heard the ash crumble; he
saw the lighted room wane from glancing yellow to a dull steady red, and
so to dusky brown; he marked the wind rise, and die away, and come
again, banging the doors of the empty rooms, and setting timbers all
strangely to creaking as under sudden trampling feet; then lift into the
air with a rustling sound like the stir of garments and the flutter of
wings, calling out weirdly in the great voids of the upper atmosphere.
He had welcomed the sense of fatigue earlier in the evening, for it
promised sleep. Now it had slipped away from him. He was strong and
young, and the burning sensation that the frosty air had left on his
face was the only token of the long journey. It seemed as if he would
never sleep again as he lay on the lounge watching the gray ash
gradually overgrow the embers, till presently only a vague dull glow
gave intimation of the position of the hearth in the room. And then,
bereft of this dim sense of companionship, he stared wide-eyed in the
darkness, feeling the only creature alive and awake in all the world.
No; the fox was suddenly barking within the quadrangle--a strangely wild
and alien tone. And presently he heard the animal trot past his door on
the piazza, the cushioned footfalls like those of a swift dog. He
thought with a certain anxiety of the tawny tiny owl that had sat like
a stuffed ornament on the mantel-piece of a neighboring room, and he
listened with a quaking vicarious presentiment of woe for the sounds of
capture and despair. He was sensible of waiting and hoping for the fox's
bootless return, when he suddenly lost consciousness.