V.

Except in so far as his sedulously cultivated fraternal sentiments

were concerned, the peculiar domestic training to which Ben Hanway had

been subjected had had slight effect in softening a somewhat hard and

stern character. To continue the canine simile by which his mother had

described him, his gentleness and watchful care toward his sister were

not more reassuring to the public at large than is the tender loyalty

of a guard-dog toward the infant of a house which claims his fealty;

that the dog does not bite the baby is no fair augury that he will not

bite the peddler or the prowler. The fact that the traveler had borne

letters addressed to Alan Selwyn, and no other papers, and yet Alan

Selwyn could not or would not identify him, had already furnished

Hanway with an ever-recurrent subject of cogitation. It had been the

presumption of the coroner's jury, since confirmed by inquiry of the

postmaster, that, going for some purpose to Alan Selwyn's lodge in the

wilderness, the unknown traveler had, in passing, called for his

prospective host's mail at the Cross-Roads, some fifteen miles distant

and the nearest post-office, such being the courtesy of the region. A

visitor often insured a welcome by thus voluntarily expediting the

delivery of the mail some days, or perhaps some weeks, before its

recipient could have hoped to receive it otherwise. Hanway had long

been cognizant of this habit of the Cross-Roads postmaster to accede

to such requests on the part of reputable people, but he was reminded

forcibly of it the next morning. A neighbor, homeward bound from a

visit to the valley, had paused at Hanway's house to leave a letter,

with which he had charged himself, addressed to Selwyn.

"I 'lowed ye mought be ridin' over thar some day, bein' ez ye air

toler'ble nigh neighbors," he said.

And Hanway the more willingly undertook the delivery of the missive

since it afforded him a pretext for the reconnoissance which he had

already contemplated.

Rain-clouds had succeeded those fine aerial flauntings of the sunset

splendors, and he set out in the pervasive drizzle of a gray day. Torn

and ragged with the rain and the gusts, the white mist seemed to come

to meet him along the vistas of the dreary dripping woods. The tall

trees that shut off the sky loomed loftily through it. Sometimes, as

the wind quickened, it deployed in great luminously white columns,

following the invisible curves of the atmospheric current; and anon,

in flaky detached fragments, it fled dispersed down the avenues like

the scattered stragglers of a routed army. The wind was having the

best of the contest; and though it still rained when he reached the

vicinity of Alan Selwyn's lonely dwelling, the mist was gone, the

clouds were all resolved into the steady fall of the torrents, and the

little house on the slope of the mountain and all its surroundings

were visible.

A log cabin it was, containing two rooms and the unaccustomed luxury

of glass windows; so new that the hewn cedar logs had not yet

weathered to the habitual dull gray tone, but glowed jauntily red as

the timbers alternated with the white and yellow daubing. A stanch

stone chimney seemed an unnecessary note of ostentation, since the

more usual structure of clay and sticks might serve as well. It

reminded Ben Hanway that its occupant was not native to the place, and

whetted anew his curiosity as he looked about, the reins on his

horse's neck in his slow approach. It was a sheltered spot; the great

mountain's curving summit rose high toward the north and west above

the depression where the cabin stood; across the narrow valley a still

more elevated range intercepted the east wind. Only to the south was

the limited plateau open, sloping down to great cliffs, giving upon a

vast expanse of mountain and valley and plain and far reaches of

undulating country, promising in fair weather high, pure, soft air, a

tempered gentle breeze, and the best that the sun can do.

He noted the advantages of the situation in reference to the "lung

complaint," feeling a loser in some sort; for he had begun to suspect

that the consumptive tendencies of the stranger were a vain pretense,

assumed merely to delude the unwary. He could not have doubted long,

for when he dismounted and hitched his horse to the rail fence he

heard the door of the house open, and as its owner, standing on the

threshold in the wind and the gusty rain, called out to him a

welcoming "Hello," the word was followed by a series of hacking coughs

which told their story as definitely as a medical certificate.

Ben Hanway was not a humane man in any special sense, but he was

conscious of haste in concluding the tethering of the animal and in

striding across the vacant weed-grown yard striped with the

ever-descending rain.

"Ye'd better git in out'n all this wind an' rain," he said in his

rough voice. "A power o' dampness in the air."

"No matter. There's no discount on me. Don't take cold nowadays. I've

got right well here already."

The passage-way was dark, but the room into which Ben was ushered,

illumined by two opposite windows, was as bright as the day would

allow. A roaring wood fire in the great chimney-place reinforced the

pallid gray light with glancing red and yellow fluctuations. The

apartment was comfortable enough, although its uses were evidently

multifarious,--partly kitchen, and dining-room, and sitting-room. Its

furniture consisted of several plain wooden chairs, a table and

crockery, a few books on a shelf, a lounge in the corner, and a rifle,

after the manner of the mountaineers, over the mantelpiece. Upon the

shelf a cheap clock ticked away the weary minutes of the lonely hours

of the long empty days while the valley man abode here, exiled from

home and friends and his accustomed sphere, and fought out that

hopeless fight for his life.

Ben Hanway gave him a keen, covert stare, as he slowly and clumsily

accepted the tendered chair and his host threw another log on the

fire. Hanway had seen him previously, when Selwyn testified before the

coroner's jury, but to-day he impressed his visitor differently. He

was tall and slight, twenty-five years of age, perhaps, with light

brown hair, sleek and shining and short, a quick blue eye, a fair

complexion with a brilliant flush, and a long mustache. But the

bizarre effect produced by this smiling apparition in the jaws of

death seemed to Hanway's limited experience curiously enhanced by his

attire. Its special peculiarity was an old smoking-jacket, out at the

elbows, ragged at the cuffs, and frayed at the silk collar; Hanway had

never before seen a man wear a red coat, or such foot-gear as the

slipshod embroidered velvet slippers in which he shuffled to a chair

and sat down, tilted back, with his hands in the pockets of his gray

trousers. To be sure, he could but be grave when testifying before a

coroner's jury, but Hanway was hardly prepared for such exuberant

cheerfulness as his manner, his attire, and his face seemed to

indicate.

"Ain't ye sorter lonesome over hyar?" he ventured.

"You bet your sweet life I am," his host replied unequivocally. A

shade crossed his face, and vanished in an instant. "But then," he

argued, "I didn't have such a soft thing where I was. I was a

clerk--that is, a bookkeeper--on a salary, and I had to work all day,

and sometimes nearly all night!"

He belittled his former vocation with airy contempt, as if he did not

yearn for it with every fibre of his being,--its utility, its

competence, its future. The recollection of the very feel of the fair

smooth paper under his hand, the delicate hair-line chirography

trailing off so fast from the swift pen, could wring a pang from him.

He might even have esteemed an oath more binding sworn on a ledger

than on the New Testament.

"And we were a small house, anyway, and the salary was no great

shakes," he continued jauntily, to show how little he had to regret.

"An' now ye ain't got nuthin' ter do but ter read yer book," said the

mountaineer acquiescently, realizing, in spite of his clumsy mental

processes, how the thorn pierced the bosom pressed against it.

Selwyn followed his guest's glance to the shelf of volumes with an

unaffected indifference.

"Yes, but I don't care for it. I wish I did, since I have the time.

But the liking for books has to be cultivated, like a taste for beer;

they are both a deal too sedative for me!" The laugh that ensued was

choked with a cough, and the tactless Hanway was moved to expostulate.

"I wonder ye ain't 'feared ter be hyar all by yerse'f hevin' the lung

complaint."

"Why, man alive, I'm well, or so near it there's no use talking. I

could go home to-morrow, except, as I have had the house built, I

think I'd better stay the winter in it. But before the cold weather

comes on they are going to send up a darky to look after me. I only

hope _I_ won't have to wait on _him_,--awful lazy nigger! He used to

be a porter of ours. Loafing around these woods with a gun on his

shoulder, pretending to hunt, will be just about his size. He's out of

a job now, and comes cheap. I couldn't afford to pay him wages all the

time, but winter is winter."

He was silent a moment, gazing into the fire; then Hanway, gloomily

brooding and disturbed, for the conversation had impressed him much as

if it had been post-mortem, so immediate seemed his companion's doom,

felt Selwyn's eye upon him, as if his sentiment were so obvious that

the sense of sight had detected it.

"You think I'm going to die up here all by myself. Now I tell you, my

good fellow, dying is the very last thing that I expect to do."

He broke out laughing anew, and this time he did not cough.

Hanway could not at once cover his confusion. He looked frowningly

down at the steam rising from his great cowhide boots, outstretched as

they dried in the heat of the fire, and slowly shifted them one above

the other. The flush on his sunburned cheek rose to the roots of his

dark hair, and overspread his clumsy features. His appearance did not

give token of any very great delicacy of feeling, but he regretted his

transparency, and sought to nullify it.

"Not that," he said disingenuously; "but bein' all by yerse'f, I

wonder ye ain't willin' fur the county road ter be put through. 'T

would run right by yer gate, an' ye could h'ist the winder an' talk to

the folks passin'. Ye wouldn't be lonely never."

For the first time Selwyn looked like a man of business. His eyes grew

steady. His face was firm and serious and non-committal. He said

nothing. Hanway cleared his throat and crossed his legs anew. The

thought of his true intention in coming hither, not his ostensible

errand, had recurred more than once to his mind,--to lay bare the

secret touching the visitor to Selwyn's remote dwelling, whom he could

not or would not identify; and if there were aught amiss, as the

mountaineer suspected, to take such action thereupon as in the

fullness of his own good judgment seemed fit. But since the man was

evidently so sharp, Hanway had hitherto feared even indirectly to

trench upon it; here, however, the opening was so natural, so

propitious, that he was fain to take advantage of it.

"An' see," he resumed, "what dangers kem o' hevin' no road. That thar

man what war killed las' month, ef we hed hed a reg'lar county road,

worked on an' kep' open, stiddier this hyar herder's trail, this-a-way

an' that, he could hev rid along ez free an' favored, an'"--

"Why," Selwyn broke in, "the testimony was to the effect that he was

riding a young, skittish horse, which was startled by stray hogs

breaking at a dead run through the bushes, and that the horse bolted

and ran away. And the man died from concussion of the brain. That

would have happened if we had had a road of the first class, twenty

feet wide, instead of this little seven-foot freak you all are so

mashed on."

His face had not lost a tinge of its brilliant color. His animated

eyes were still fired by that inward flame that was consuming his

years, his days, even his minutes, it might seem. His hands, fine,

white, and delicate, were thrust jauntily into the pockets of his red

jacket, and Hanway felt himself no nearer the heart of the mystery

than before. The subject, evidently, was not avoided, held naught of

menace. He went at it directly.

"Seems strange he war a-comin' ter visit you-uns, an' hed yer mail in

his pocket, an' ye never seen him afore," he hazarded, "nor knowed who

he war."

"But I have found out since," Selwyn said, his clear eyes resting on

his visitor without the vestige of an affrighted thought. "He was Mr.

Keith, a chemist from Glaston; he was quite a notable authority on

matters of physical science generally. I had written to him

about--about some points of interest in the mountains, and as he was

at leisure he concluded to come and investigate--and--take a holiday.

He didn't let me know, and as I had never seen him I didn't at first

even imagine it was he."

There was a silence. Selwyn's blue eyes dwelt on the fast-descending

lines of rain that now blurred all view of the mountains; the globular

drops here and there adhering to the pane, ever dissolving and ever

renewed, obscured even the small privilege of a glimpse of the

dooryard. The continual beat on the roof had the regularity and the

tireless suggestion of machinery.

"How did ye find out?" demanded Hanway, his theory evaporating into

thin air.

"Why, as he didn't reply to my letter about a matter of such

importance"--he checked himself suddenly, then went on more

slowly--"it occurred to me that he might have decided to come, and

might have been the man who was killed. So I wrote to his brother. He

had not been expected at home earlier. His brother doesn't incline to

the foul-play theory. The horse he rode is a wild young animal that

has run away two or three times. He had been warned repeatedly against

riding that horse, but he thought him safe enough. The horse has

returned home,--got there the day my letter was received. So the

brother and an officer came and exhumed the body: he was buried, you

know, after the inquest, over in the little graveyard yonder on the

slope of the mountain."

Selwyn shivered slightly, and the fine white hands came out of the

gaudy red pockets, and fastened the frogs beneath the lapels across

his chest, to draw the smoking-jacket closer.

"Great Scott! what a fate,--to be left in that desolate

burying-ground! Death is death, there."

"Death is death anywhar," said the mountaineer gloomily.

"No. Get you a mile or two of iron fence, and stone gates, and lots of

sculptured marble angels around, and death is peace, or rest, or

heaven, or paradise, according to your creed and the taste of the

subject; but here you are done for and dead."

Hanway, in the limited experience of the mountaineer, could not follow

the theory, and he forbore to press it further.

"Well," Selwyn resumed, "they took him home, and I was glad to see him

go. I was glad to see them filling that hole up. I took a pious

interest in that. I should have felt it was waiting for me. I shoveled

some of the earth back myself."

The wind surged around the house, and shook the outer doors. The rain

trampled on the roof like a squadron of cavalry. With his fate

standing ever behind him, almost visibly looking over his shoulder,

although he saw it not, the valley man was a pathetic object to the

mountaineer. Hanway's eyes were hot and burned as he looked at him; if

he had been but a little younger, they might have held tears. But

Hanway had passed by several years his majority, and esteemed himself

exempt from boyish softness.

Selwyn shook off the impression with a shiver, and bent forward to

mend the fire.

"Where were you yesterday?" he asked, seeking a change of subject.

"At home sowin' turnip seed, mos'ly. I never hearn nuthin' 'bout'n it

all."

Selwyn threw himself back in his chair, his brow corrugated

impatiently at this renewal of the theme, and in the emergency he even

resorted to the much-mooted point of the thoroughfare.

"I suppose all the family there are dead gone on that road?" he sought

to make talk.

"Dad an' aunt M'nervy don't keer one way nor another, but my sister

air plumb beset fur the jury of view to put it through."

"Why?" Selwyn had a mental vision of some elderly, thrifty mountain

dame with a long head turned toward the enhancement of the values of a

league or so of mountain land.

Hanway, slow and tenacious of impressions, could not so readily rouse

a vital interest in another subject. He still gazed with melancholy

eyes at the fire, and his heart felt heavy and sore.

"Waal," he answered mechanically, "she 'lows she wants ter see the

folks go up an' down, an' up an' down."

Selwyn's blue eyes opened. "Folks?" he asked wonderingly. The rarest

of apparitions on Witch-Face Mountain were "folks."

Hanway roused himself slightly, and raucously cleared his throat to

explain.

"She 'lows thar'll be cornsider'ble passin'. Folks, in the fall o' the

year, mought be a-wagonin' of chestnuts over the mounting an' down ter

Colb'ry; an' thar's the Quarterly Court days; some attends, leastwise

the jestices; an' whenst they hev preachin' in the Cove; an' wunst in

a while thar _mought_ be a camp-meetin'. She sets cornsider'ble store

on lookin' at the folks ez will go up an' down."

There was a swift movement in the pupils of the valley man's eyes. It

was an expression closely correlated to laughter, but the muscles of

his face were still, and he remained decorously grave.

There was some thought in his mind that held him doubtful for a

moment. His craft was cautious of its kind, and his manner was quite

incidental as he said, "And the others of the family?"

"Thar ain't no others," returned Hanway, stolidly unmarking.

"Oh, so you are the eldest?"

"By five year. Narcissa ain't more 'n jes' turned eighteen."

The valley man's face was flushed more deeply still; his brilliant

eyes were elated.

"_Narcissa!_" he cried, with the joy of delighted identification.

"She is the girl, then, that testified at the inquest. _Narcissa!_"

Hanway lifted his head, with a strong look of surly objection on his

heavy features. Selwyn noted it with a glow of growing anger. He felt

that he had said naught amiss. People could not expect their sisters

to escape attracting notice, especially a sister with a remarkable

name and endowed with a face like this one's.

"Narcissa,--that's an odd name," he said, partly in bravado, and

partly in justification of the propriety of his previous mention of

her. "I knew a man once named Narcissus. Must be the feminine of

Narcissus. Good name for her, though." The recollection of the white

flower-like face, the corolla of red-gold hair, came over him. "Looks

just like 'em."

Hanway, albeit all alert now, descried in this naught more poetical

than the fact that Selwyn considered that his sister resembled a man

of his acquaintance. As for that fairest of all spring flowers, it had

never gladdened the backwoods range of his vision.

The exclusive tendency of the human mind is tested by this discovery

of a casual resemblance to a stranger. One invariably sustains an

affront at its mention. Whatever one's exterior may be, it possesses

the unique merit of being one's own, and the aversion to share its

traits with another, and that other a stranger, is universal. In this

instance the objection was enhanced by the fact that the stranger was

a man; _ergo_, in Hanway's opinion, more or less clumsy and burly and

ugly; the masculine type of his acquaintance presenting to his mind

few of the superior elements of beauty. He resented the liberty the

stranger took in resembling Narcissa, and he resented still more

Selwyn's effrontery in discovering the likeness.

"Not ez much alike ez two black-eyed peas, now. I reckon not,--I

reckon not," he sneered, as he rose to bring his visit to an end.

His host's words of incipient surprise were checked as Hanway slowly

drew forth from his pocket a letter.

"Old man Binney war at the Cross-Roads Sad'day, an' he fotched up some

mail fur the neighbors. He lef' this letter fur you-uns at our house,

'lowin' ez I would fetch it over."

Selwyn sat silent for a moment. He felt that severe reprehension and

distrust which a man of business always manifests upon even the most

trifling interference with his vested rights in his own mail matter.

The rural method of aiding in distributing the mail was peculiarly

unpalatable to him. He much preferred that his letters should lie in

the post-office at the Cross-Roads until such time as it suited his

convenience to saddle his horse and ride thither for them. The

postmaster, on the contrary, seized the opportunity whenever

responsible parties were "ridin' up inter the mounting" to entrust to

them the neighborhood mail, thus expediting its delivery perhaps by

three weeks, or even more, and receiving in every instance the

benediction of his distant beneficiaries of the backwoods.

"I'll write to the postmaster this very day!" Selwyn thought, as he

tore the envelope open and mastered its contents at a swift glance. A

half-suppressed but delighted excitement shone suddenly in his eyes,

and smoothed every line of agitation and anxiety from his brow.

"I'm a thousand times obliged to you for bringing it," he exclaimed,

"and for staying awhile and talking! I wish you would come again. But

I'm coming to see you, to return your call." He laughed gayly at the

sophisticated phrase. "Coming soon."

Hanway's growl of pretended pleasure in the prospect was rendered

nearly inarticulate by the thought of Narcissa. He had not anticipated

a return of the courtesy. He had no welcome for this stranger, and

somehow he felt that he did not altogether understand Narcissa at

times; that she had flights of fancy which were beyond him, and took a

mischievous pleasure in tantalizing him, and was freakish and hard to

control.

Moreover, under the influence of this reaction of feeling, a modicum

of his doubts of Selwyn had revived. Not that he suspected him, as

heretofore, but a phrase that had earlier struck his attention came

back to him. Selwyn had written, he said, to the traveler to come and

"investigate," and he had hesitated and chosen his phrases, and half

discarded them, and slurred over his statement. What was there to

"investigate" in the mountains? What prospect of profit worth a long,

lonely journey and a risk that ended in death? The capture of

moonshiners was said to be a paying business, and an informer also

reaped a reward. Hanway wondered if Con Hite could be the point of

"investigation," if the dead man were indeed of the revenue force.

"Oh, you needn't shut the door on me," Selwyn said, as they stood

together in the passage, and Hanway, with his instinct to cut him off,

had made a motion to draw the door after him; "this mountain air is so

bland, even when it is damp." He paused on the dripping threshold,

with his hands in the pockets of his red jacket, and surveyed with

smiling complacence the forlorn, weeping day, and the mountains

cowering under their misty veil, and the sodden dooryard, and the

wild rocks and chasms of the gorge, adown the trough of which a stream

unknown to the dry weather was tumbling with a suggestion of flight

and trouble and fear in its precipitancy. "I'm well, well as a bear;

and I'm getting fat as a bear, doing nothing. Feel my arm. I'm just

following the example of the bears about this time of the

year,--hibernating, going into winter quarters. I'm going to get this

place into good shape to sell some day. I have bought that land over

there all down the gorge from Squire Helm; and last July I bought all

that slope at the tax sale, but that is subject to redemption; and

then I am trying to buy in the rear of my wigwam, too,--a thousand

acres."

"Ye kin sell it higher ef the road goes through," said Hanway

doubtfully.

It seemed very odd that the man who protested that his stay in the

mountains was so temporary, and whose stay in the world was evidently

so short, should spend his obviously scanty substance in purchase

after purchase of the worthless mountain wilderness. To be sure, the

land was cheap, but it cost something. And Hanway looked again at the

frayed cuffs and elbows of the red smoking-jacket. In his infrequent

visits to Colbury, he had noted the variance of the men's costumes

with the mountain standard of dress. He saw naught like this, but he

knew that if ever the sober burghers lent themselves to this sort of

fantastic toggery, it was certainly whole.

"Say, my friend, what day does the jury of view hold forth?" Selwyn

called out after the slouching figure, striped with the diagonal lines

of rain and flouted by the wind, tramping across the weeds of the yard

to his horse.

"Nex' Chewsday week," Hanway responded hoarsely.

"Well, if this weather holds out, it is to be hoped that the gentlemen

of the jury are web-footed!" Selwyn exclaimed.

He shut the door, and as he went back to his lonely hearth his eyes

fell upon the letter lying on the table.

"Now," he said as he took it again in his hand, "if fate should truly

cut such a caper as to make my fortune in this forlorn exile, I could

find it in my heart to laugh the longest and the loudest at the joke."