"Don't see him so powerful frequent. When a thing is sca'ce, it's apt
ter be ch'ice," she retorted.
She experienced a certain satisfaction in her acridity. For his sake,
lest suspicion befall him, she had sought to inaugurate an
investigation--nay, a persecution--of this man, and he a stranger; and
but that circumstance was kind to him, her effort might have resulted
cruelly. And now that she had done so much for Con Hite, it was her
pleasure to take it out on him, as the phrase goes. All unaware of
this curious mental attitude, he winced under her satire.
"Waal, I kin make myself sca'ce, too," he said, an impulse of pride
surging in his heart.
"It mought be better fur ye," she replied indifferently.
His momentary independence left him suddenly.
"Narcissa," he said reproachfully, "ye didn't always talk this way ter
me."
"That ain't news ter me. Ben 'lows ez I talk six ways fur Sunday."
"Ye dunno how I feel, not knowin' how ye be set towards me, an'
hevin' ter see ye so seldom, a-workin' all the time down yander,
a-moonshinin'"--
"I wouldn't talk 'bout it so turr'ble loud." She glanced
apprehensively over her shoulder. "An' ye'd better quit it, ennyhows."
"Ye 'lows it be wrong," he said, his bold bright eyes all softened as
he looked at her, "bein' agin the law?"
"I ain't keerin' fur the law. Ef the truth war knowed, the law is
aimin' ter git all the benefit o' whiskey bein' drunk itself. That's
whar the law kems in. I only keer fur"--She stopped abruptly. She had
nearly revealed to him that she cared only lest some disaster come to
him in his risky occupation; that she would like him to be ploughing
in a safe level field at the side of a cabin, where she might sit by
the window and sew, and look out and see that no harm befell this big
bold man, six feet two inches high. "Con Hite!" she exclaimed, her
face scarlet, "I never see a body ez hard-hearted an' onmerciful ez
ye air. Whyn't ye water that sufferin' beast, ez air fairly honing
ter drink? Waal," she continued, after a pause in which he
demonstrated the axiom that one may lead a horse to water, but cannot
make him drink, "then whyn't ye go? I ain't got time ter waste, ef ye
hev."
She rose as if for departure, and he put his foot in the stirrup. "I
wish ye wouldn't be so harsh ter me, Narcissa," he said meekly.
"Waal, thar be a heap o' saaft-spoken gals ter be hed fur the askin'.
Ye kin take yer ch'ice."
And with this he was fain to be content, as he mounted and rode
reluctantly away.
She sat down again, and was still for a long time after the last echo
of his horse's hoofs had died on the air. Her thoughts did not follow
him, however. They turned again with renewed interest to the
fair-haired young stranger. Somehow she was ill at ease and vaguely
disillusioned. She watched mechanically, and with some unaccustomed
touch of melancholy, the burnished shimmering golden haze gradually
invest far blue domes and their purple slopes, and the brown valleys,
and the rugged rocky mountains nearer, with a certain idealized
slumberous effect like the landscape of a dream. In these still spaces
naught moved now save the imperceptible lengthening of the shadows. It
had never occurred to her to deem the scene beautiful; it was the
familiar furniture of her home. Upon this her eyes had first opened.
She had never thought to compare it to aught else,--to the suffocating
experience of one visit to the metropolitan glories of the little town
in the flat woods known as Colbury. It had seemed, indeed, magnificent
to her ignorance, and the temerity of the architecture of a two-story
house had struck her aghast. She had done naught but wonder and stare.
The trip had been a great delight, but she had never desired to linger
or to dwell there. Certain sordid effects came over her; reminiscences
of the muddy streets, the tawdry shops, the jostling, busy-eyed
people.
"Ain't this ez good?" she said to herself, as the vast scene suddenly
fluctuated beneath a flare of wind amidst the sunshine, and light,
detached white flakes of cloud went winging athwart the blue sky;
their shadows followed them fast across the sunlit valley,--only their
dark and lifeless semblances, like the verbal forms of some white
illumined thought that can find no fit expression in words. The breath
of the pines came to her, the sound of the water, the sudden fanfare
of the unseen wind in the sky heralding the clouds. "Ain't this ez
good?" she said again, with that first deadly, subtle distrust of the
things of home, that insidious discontent so fatal to peace. He
evidently did not deem it as good, and the obvious fact rankled in
her. The mountain men, and their lack of enterprise, and their
drawling speech which he had mimicked,--they too shared his
disparagement; and she was conscious that she herself did not now
think so well of them,--so conscious that she made a loyal struggle
against this sentiment.
"So shif'less, so thrif'less," she echoed his words. "An' I dunno ez
_I_ ever viewed a waste-fuller critter'n this hyar very Mister Man."
She stooped down, gathering together the handful of matches that
Selwyn had inadvertently pulled from his pocket with the one which he
had used in illustrating his suggestion of setting the waters of a
spring afire. "Ef he keeps on ez wasteful ez this, he'll get out o'
matches whar he lives over yander; an' I misdoubts ef, smart ez he
'lows he be, he could kindle the wood ter cook his breakfus' by a
flint rock,--ef he air so boastful ez ter 'low ez he kin set spring
water afire."
She made the matches into a compact little budget and slipped them
into her pocket, and as she rose and looked about uncertainly, she
heard her aunt Minerva calling to her from the house that it was high
time to go and drive up the cows.
Aunt Minerva had not bethought herself to summon the girl to dinner.
The whole world seemed surfeited to her, so had dinner occupied her
day. Narcissa herself, under the stress of the abnormal excitements,
felt no lack as she slowly trod the familiar paths in search of the
bovine vagrants.
Her thoughts bore her company, and she was far from home when the
aspect of the reddening sun smote her senses. She stood and watched
the last segment of the vermilion sphere sink down out of sight, and,
as she turned, the October dusk greeted her on every side. The
shadows, how dense in the woods; the valleys, darkling already! Only
on the higher eastern slopes a certain red reflection spoke of the
vanishing day. She looked vainly as yet for some faint silvery
suffusion which might herald the rising of the moon; for it was to be
a bright night. She was glad of the recollection. She had not hitherto
realized it, but she was tired. She would rest for a little while, and
thus refreshed she would be the sooner home. She sat down on a ledge
of the outcropping rock and looked about her. The spot was unfamiliar,
but in the far stretch of the darkening scene she identified many a
well-known landmark. There was the gleaming bend of the river in the
valley, lost presently amidst the foliage of its banks; and here was
an isolated conical peak on a far lower level than the summit of the
range, and known as Thimble Mountain; and nearer still, across a
narrow bight of the Cove, was a bare slope. As she glanced at it she
half rose from her place, for there was the witch-face, twilight on
the grim features, yet with the aid of memory so definitely discerned
that they could hardly have been more distinct by noonday,--a face of
inexplicably sinister omen. "Oh, why did I see it to-day!" she
exclaimed, the presage of ill fortune strong upon her, with that
grisly mask leering at her from across the valley. But the day was
well-nigh gone; only a scant space remained in which to work the evil
intent of fate. She seated herself anew, for in the shadowy labyrinth
of the woods her path could scarcely be found. She must needs wait for
the moon.
She wondered, as she sat and gazed about, how far she might be from
that new dwelling where he lived who so scorned the mountain, and who
owed to it his every breath. There was no sound, no suggestion of
human habitation. The shadowy woods stood dense about the little open
ledgy space on three sides; toward the very verge of the mountain the
rocks grew shelving and precipitous, and beyond the furthest which she
could see, the gray edge of which cut sharply against the base of a
distant dun-tinted range, she knew the descent was abrupt to the
depths of the valley. Looking up, she beheld the trembling lucid
whiteness of a star; now and again the great rustling boughs of an
oak-tree swayed beneath it, and then its glister was broken and
deflected amidst the crisp autumnal leaves, but still she saw it
shine. It told, too, that there was water near; she caught its radiant
multiplied reflection, like a cluster of scintillating white gems, on
the lustrous dark surface of a tiny pool, circular and rock-bound,
close beneath the ledge on which she sat. She leaned over, and saw in
its depths the limpid fading red sky, and the jagged brown border of
the rocks, and a grotesque moving head, which she recognized, after a
plunge of the heart, as her own sunbonnet. She drew back in dismay;
she would have no more of this weird mirror of the rocks and woods,
and looked up again at the shining of the star amidst the darkening
shadows of the scarlet oak. How tall that tree was, how broad of
girth! And how curiously this stranger talked! What was there to do
with all these trees! Would he cut down all the trees on the mountain?
A sudden doubt of his sanity crossed her mind. It was the first, and
her heart stood still for a moment. But as she slowly canvassed the
idea, it accounted for much otherwise impossible to comprehend: his
evident poverty and his efforts toward the purchase of lands; his
illness and his bluff insistence on his strength; his wild talk of
enterprise and his mysterious intimations of phenomenal opportunities.
Confirmations of the suspicion crowded upon her; above all, the mad
boast that with a match he could set the waters of a spring afire.
With a sad smile at the fatuity of the thing, in her idle waiting she
drew one of his matches from her pocket; then she struck it briskly on
the rugged rock, and cast it, blazing lightly, into the bubbling
waters of the spring.
The woods, the rocks, the black night, the fleering, flouting
witch-face, all with an abrupt bound sprang into sudden visibility. A
pyramid of yellow flame was surging up from the bubbling surface of
the water. Long, dark, slim shadows were speeding through the woods,
with strange slants of yellow light; the very skies were a-flicker.
She cowered back for a moment, covering her face with her hands. Then,
affrighted at her own sorceries, she fled like a deer through the
wilderness.