An election of civil and judicial officers was impending in Kildeer
County when a comet appeared in the July sky, a mysterious, aloof,
uncanny presence, that invaded the night and the stereotyped routine
of nature with that gruesome effect of the phenomenal which gives to
the mind so definite a realization of how dear and secure is the
prosaic sense of custom.
All the lenses of the great observatories of the world had, in a
manner, sought to entertain the strange visitant of the heavens. The
learned had gone so far as to claim its acquaintance, to recognize it
as the returning comet of a date long gone by. It even carried amidst
its shining glories, along the far unimagined ways of its orbit, the
name of a human being--of the man who had discovered it on its former
visit, for thus splendidly does astronomy honor its votaries. Less
scientific people regarded it askance as in some sort harbinger of
woe, and spoke of presage, recalling other comets, and the commotions
that came in their train--from the Deluge, with the traditional
cometary influences rife in the breaking up of "the fountains of the
great deep," to the victories of Mohammed II. and the threatened
overthrow of Christendom, and even down to our own war of 1812.
Others, again, scorned superstition, and entertained merely practical
misgivings concerning the weight, density, and temperature of the
comet, lest the eccentric aerial wanderer should run amuck of the
earth in some confusion touching the right of way through space.
Meanwhile, it grew from the semblance of a vaporous tissue--an
illuminated haze only discernible through the telescope, the private
view of the favored few--till it gradually became visible to the
unassisted eye of the _profanum vulgus_, and finally it flamed across
the darkling spaces with its white crown of glory, its splendid
wing-like train, and its effect of motion as of a wondrous flight
among the stars--and all the world, and, for aught we know, many
worlds, gazed at it.
Only in some great desert, the vast stretches of unsailed seas, or the
depths of uninhabited forests, were its supernal splendors unnoted. It
sunk as wistful, as tremulous, a reflection in a lonely pool in the
dense mountain wilds as any simple star, a familiar of these haunts,
that had looked down to mark its responsive image year after year,
for countless ages, whenever the season brought it, in its place in
the glittering mail of the Archer, or among the jewels of the Northern
Crown, once more to the spot it had known and its tryst with its fair
semblance in the water.
The great silver flake which the comet struck out upon the serene
surface lay glinting there among the lesser stellar reflections, when
a man, kneeling in a gully of the steep bank sloping to the "salt
lick," leaned forward suddenly to gaze at it; then, with a gasp,
turned his eyes upward to that flaming blade drawn athwart the
peaceful sky. He did not utter a sound. The habit of silence essential
to the deer-hunter kept its mechanical hold upon his nerves. Only the
hand with which he grasped the half-exposed roots of a great
sycamore-tree, denuded in some partial caving of the bank long ago,
relaxed and trembled slightly.
He was a man of scant and narrow experience, his world the
impenetrable mountain wilderness, and, though seemingly the pupil of
nature, versed in the ways of beast and bird, the signs of the clouds,
the seasons of bourgeoning and burr, it was but of casual external
aspects. He knew naught of its wondrous history, its subtler
significance, its strange record--the flood-tides registered on that
cliff beyond the laurel; the reptilian trail in the ledge beneath the
butt of his rifle, the imprint still fast in the solid rock, albeit
the species extinct; the great bones of ancient unknown beasts sunk in
the depressions of this saline quagmire, which herds of them had once
frequented for the salt, as did of late the buffalo, and now the
timorous deer, wont to come, like shadows wavering in the wind, to
lick the briny earth. The strange, glinting blade overhead had no
claim on his recognition as the "comet of Aristotle," or the
"evil-disposed comet" personified by the Italians as Sir Great-Lance,
_il Signor Astone_, or Halley's comet, or Donati's. Self is the centre
of the solar system with many souls, and around this point do all its
incidents revolve. For _him_ that wondrous white fire was kindled in
the skies, for _him_, in special relation to his small life, to the
wish nearest his hot human heart, to the clumsy scheme dear to his
slow, crude brain. He thought it a warning then: and later he thought
this still.
Some vague stir--the wind perhaps, or perhaps a light-footed
dryad--flitted past and was gone. The surface of the "lick" rippled
with her footprints, and was smooth again. All the encompassing masses
of trees and undergrowth about the place were densely black and
opaque, giving the sense of absolute solidity and weight, except upon
the verges, which were somehow shaded off into a cloudy brown against
the translucent dove-tinted tissues in which the night seemed
enveloped and obscured save for the white gleaming of the stars. This
was the clear color that the brackish water wore as it reflected the
night. It reflected suddenly a face--a face with a long velvety
muzzle, a pair of spreading antlers, and dark eyes, gentle, timorous,
liquidly bright. The water stirred with a sibilant lapping sound as
the buck's tongue licked at the margin. Once he held up his head to
listen, with his hoof lifted, then he bent again to the ripples. There
was slight relation between him, the native of these woods, and that
wayward waif of the skies; but among the unnumbered influences and
incidents of its course it served to save that humble sylvan life for
a space. The hunter neither saw nor heard.
It was only when the deer with a sudden snort and a precipitate bound
fled crashing through the laurel that Walter Hoxon became aware of his
presence, and of the stealthy approach that had alarmed him. The
approach was stealthy no longer. A quick, nervous tread, a rustling of
the boughs, and as the hunter rose to his feet his elder brother
emerged from the undergrowth, taller than he as they stood together on
the margin of the lick, more active, sinewy, alert.
"Whyn't ye take a shot at him, Wat?" cried Justus Hoxon tumultuously.
"I'll be bound ye war nappin'," he added in keen rebuke.