"Go yourself then. May-day!"
"I would, grandfather! I would not be afraid!" She put her soft little
hand on his cheek to turn his head to look into her confident eyes.
"An able and worshipful ambassador!" he said banteringly.
"Oh, grandfather, this is no time to risk quarrels among the settlers,
and bloodshed. Oh, the herders would kill him! And the Injuns all so
unfriendly--they might take the chance to get on the war-path again when
the settlers are busy killing each other--and oh, the cow-drivers will
kill Ralph Emsden!"
All this persuasion was of necessity in a distinct loud voice;
unnoticed, however, for a crisis had supervened in the play of the
children by the chimney-place settle, and the sanguinary struggles and
scalping in the storming of the fort were blood-curdling to behold to
any one with enough imagination to discern a full-armed and fierce
savage in a kernel of corn, and a stanch and patriotic Carolinian in a
pebble. But when Peninnah Penelope Anne, all attuned to this high key,
burst out weeping with commensurate resonance, all the vocations of the
household came to a standstill, and her mother appeared, surprised and
reproving, in the doorway.
"Peninnah Penelope Anne," she said with her peculiar exact deliberation
and gift of circumlocution, "it is better to go and sew your sampler
than to tease your grandfather."
"She does not tease me--I have not shed a tear! That was not the sound
of my weeping!" he declared facetiously, one arm protectingly about the
little sobbing figure.
"He does not like his grandchildren to climb about him like squirrels
and wild cattle," the lady continued. Then irrelevantly, "Long stitches
were always avoided in our family. The work you last did in your sampler
has been taken out, child, and you can sew it again and to better
advantage."
"And earn your name of Penelope," said Richard Mivane.
But he was putting on his hat and evidently had some effort in prospect,
for how could he resist,--she looked so childish and appealing as she
sat before the fire, weeping those large tears, and absently preparing
to sew her sampler anew.
While Richard Mivane, by virtue of his early culture, the scanty remains
of his property, his fine-gentleman habits and traditions, and the
anomaly of his situation, was the figure of most mark at the station,
its ruling spirit was of far alien character. This was John Ronackstone,
a stanch Indian fighter; a far-seeing frontier politician; a man of
excellent native faculties, all sharpened by active use and frequent
emergencies; skilled and experienced in devious pioneer craft; and
withal infinitely stubborn, glorying in the fact of the unchangeableness
of his opinions and his immutable abiding by his first statements. After
one glance at his square countenance, his steady noncommittal black
eyes, the upward bulldog cant of a somewhat massive nose, the firm
compression of his long thin lips, one would no more expect him to
depart from the conditions of a conclusion than that a signpost would
enter into argument and in view of the fatigue of a traveler mitigate
and recant its announcement.
Nevertheless Richard Mivane expected "some sense," as he phrased it,
from this adamantine pioneer. Such a man naturally arrogated and
obtained great weight among his fellows, and perhaps his lack of
vacillation furthered this preëminence. He was a good man in the main as
well as forceful, but an early and a very apt expression of the
demagogue. And as he tolerated amongst his mental furniture no illusions
and fostered no follies, his home life harbored no fripperies. His
domicile was a contrast to the better ordered homes of the station, but
here one might have meat and shelter, and what more should mortal ask of
a house! He often boasted that not an atom of iron entered into its
structure more than into an Indian's wigwam. Even the clapboards were
fastened on to the rafters with wooden pegs in lieu of nails, although
nails were not difficult to procure. He had that antagonism to the mere
conventions of civilization often manifested by those who have been
irked by such fetters before finally casting them off. It was a
wholesome life and a free, and if the inmates of the house did not mind
the scent of the drying deerskins hanging from the beams, which made the
nose of Richard Mivane very coy, the visitor saw no reason why they
should not please themselves. The stone-flagged hearth extended half
across the room, and sprawling upon it in frowsy disorder was a bevy of
children of all ages, as fat as pigs and as happy-go-lucky. He had
hardly seated himself, having stepped about carefully among their chubby
fingers and toes lest a crushing disaster supervene, than he regretted
his choice of a confidant. He had his own, unsuspected sensitiveness,
which was suddenly jarred when the wife in the corner, rocking the
cradle with one foot while she turned a hoe-cake baking on the hearth
with a dextrous flip of a knife, and feeling secure in his deafness,
cast a witty fling at his fastidious apparel. With that frequent yet
unexplained phenomenon of acoustics, her voice was so strung that its
vibrations reached his numb perceptions as duly as if intended for his
ears. He made no sign, in his pride and politeness, both indigenous. But
he said to himself, "I don't laugh at her gown,--it is what she likes
and what she is accustomed to wear. And why can't she let me dress in
peace as I was early trained to do? God knows I feel myself better than
nobody."
And he was sensible of his age, his infirmity, his isolation, and his
jauntiness was eclipsed.
Thus he entered the race with a handicap, and John Ronackstone would
hear none of his reasons with grace. He could not and he would not
consent to the nomination of an ambassador in the stead of Emsden, who
had volunteered for the service, which was the more appropriate since it
was he who had shot the wolf and brought the stampede and its attendant
difficulties upon the herders of the Keowee River, and this threat of
retaliation upon the Blue Lick Stationers. If there were danger at hand,
let a volunteer encounter it! In vain Mivane argued that there was
danger to no one else. John Ronackstone, who found an added liberty of
disputation in the emphasis imposed by the necessity of roaring out his
immutable opinions in an exceeding loud voice, retorted that so far as
he was informed the "cow-drivers" on the Keowee were not certain who it
was that had committed this atrocity, unless perhaps their messenger
during his sojourn at Blue Lick Station had learned the name from "X."
But this uncertainty, Mivane argued, was the very point of difficulty.
It was the maddest folly to dispatch to angry men, smarting under a
grievous injury, messages of taunt and defiance by the one person who in
their opinion, perhaps, had carelessly or willfully wrought this wrong.
His life would pay the forfeit of the folly of his fellow-stationers.
Mivane noted suddenly that the woman rocking the cradle was laughing
with an ostentatious affectation of covert slyness, and a responsive
twinkle gleamed in the eyes of John Ronackstone. As he caught the grave
and surprised glance of his visitor he made a point of dropping the air
of a comment aside, which he, as well as she, had insistently brought to
notice, and Mivane was aware that here was something which sought an
opportunity of being revealed as if by necessity.
"Well, sir," Ronackstone began in a tone of a quasi-apology, "we were
just saying--that is, I sez to X, who was in here a while ago,--I sez,
'I'll tell you what is goin' to happen,'--I sez, 'old Gentleman
Rick,'--excuse the freedom, sir,--'he'll be wantin' to send somebody
else in Ralph Emsden's place.' X, he see the p'int, just as you see it.
He sez, 'Somebody that won't be missed--somebody not genteel enough to
play loo with him after supper,' sez X. 'Or too religious,' sez I. 'Or
can't sing a good song or tell a rousing tale,' sez X. 'Or listen an'
laugh in the right places at the gentleman's old cracks about the great
world,' sez I. 'He'll never let Ralph Emsden go,' sez X. 'Jus' some poor
body will do,' sez I. 'Jus' man enough to be scalped by the Injuns if
the red sticks take after him,' sez X. 'Or have his throat cut if the
cow-drivers feel rough yet,' sez I. 'Jus' such a one ez me,' sez X. 'Or
me,' sez I."
"Sir," said old Mivane, rising, and the impressive dignity of his port
was such that the cradle stopped rocking as if a spell were upon it, and
every child paused in its play, sprawling where it lay, "I am obliged to
you for your polite expression of opinion of me, which I have never done
aught to justify. I have nothing more to urge upon the question of the
details which brought me hither, but of one thing be certain,--if Emsden
does not go upon this mission _I_ shall be the ambassador. I apprehend
no danger whatever to myself, and I wish you a very good day."
And he stepped forth with his wonted jaunty alacrity, leaving the man
and his wife staring at each other with as much surprise as if the roof
had fallen in.
A greater surprise awaited Mivane without. The rain was falling anew. In
vast transparent tissues it swept with the gusty wind over the nearest
mountains of the Great Smoky Range, whose farther reaches were lost in
fog. The slanting lines, vaguely discerned in the downpour, almost
obliterated the presence of the encompassing forests about the stockade.
He noted how wildly the great trees were yet swaying, and he realized,
for he could not have heard the blast, that a sudden severe wind-storm
had passed over the settlement while he was within doors. The
blockhouse, the tallest of the buildings, loomed up darkly amidst the
gathering gray vapor, and through the great gates of the stockade, which
opened on the blank cloud, were coming at the moment several men bearing
a rude litter, evidently hastily constructed. On this was stretched the
insensible form of Ralph Emsden, who had been stricken down in the woods
with a dislocated shoulder and a broken arm by the falling of a branch
of a great tree uprooted by the violence of the gusts. He had almost
miraculously escaped being crushed, and was not fatally hurt, but
examination disclosed that he was absolutely and hopelessly disabled for
the time being, and Richard Mivane realized that he himself was the duly
accredited ambassador to the herders on the Keowee River.
He went home in a pettish fume. No sooner was he within and the door
fast shut, that none might behold save only those of his own household,
who were accustomed to the aberrations of his temper and who regarded
them with blended awe and respect, than he reft his cocked hat from his
head and flung it upon the floor. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang up so
precipitately at the dread sight that she overturned her stool and drew
a stitch awry in her sampler, longer than the women of her family were
accustomed to take. The children gazed spellbound. The weavers at the
loom were petrified; even the creak of the treadle and the noisy
thumping of the batten--those perennial sounds of a pioneer home--sunk
into silence. The two negroes at the end of the vista beyond the
shed-room, with the ox-yoke and plough-gear which they were mending
between them, opened wide mouths and became immovable save for the
whites of astonished rolling eyes. Then, and this exceeded all
precedent, Richard Mivane clutched his valued peruke and, with an inward
plaintive deprecation of the extremity of this act of desperation, he
cast it upon the hat, and looked around, bald, despairing, furious, and
piteous.
It was, however, past the fortitude of woman to behold without protest
this desecration of decoration. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang forward,
snatched the glossy locks from the puncheons, and with a tender hand
righted the structure, while the powder flew about in light puffs at her
touch, readjusting a curl here and a cleverly wrought wave there. The
valet's pious aspiration from the doorway, "Bress de Lord!" betokened
the acuteness of the danger over-past.
"Why, grandfather!" the girl admonished Mivane; "your beautiful
peruke!--sure, sir, the loveliest curls in the world! And sets you like
your own hair,--only that nobody _could really_ have such very genteel
curls to grow--Oh--oh--grandfather!"
She did not offer to return it, but stood with it poised on one hand,
well out of harm's way, while she surveyed Mivane reproachfully yet with
expectant sympathy.
Perhaps he himself was glad that he could wreak no further damage which
he would later regret, and contented himself with furiously pounding his
cane upon the puncheon floor, a sturdy structure and well calculated to
bear the brunt of such expressions of pettish rage.
"Dolt, ass, fool, that I am!" he cried. "That I should so far forget
myself as to offer to go as an ambassador to the herders on the Keowee!"
And once more he banged the floor after a fashion that discounted the
thumping of the batten, and the room resounded with the thwacks.
An old dog, a favorite of yore, lying asleep on the hearth, only opened
his eyes and wrinkled his brows to make sure, it would seem, who had the
stick; then closing his lids peacefully snoozed away again, presently
snoring in the fullness of his sense of security. But a late
acquisition, a gaunt deerhound, after an earnest observation of his
comrade's attitude, as if referring the crisis to his longer experience,
scrutinized severally the faces of the members of the family, and,
wincing at each resounding whack, finally gathered himself together
apprehensively, as doubtful whose turn might come next, and discreetly
slunk out unobserved by the back door.
Peninnah Penelope Anne rushed to the rescue.
"And why should you not be an ambassador, sir?" she demanded.
"Why--why--because, girl, I am deafer than the devil's dam! I cannot
fetch and carry messages of import. I could only give occasion for
ridicule and scorn in even offering to assume such an office."
Peninnah Penelope Anne had flushed with the keen sensitiveness of her
pride. She instantly appreciated the irking of the dilemma into which he
had thrust himself forgetting his infirmity, and she could have smitten
with hearty enmity and a heavy stick any lips which had dared to smile.
She responded, however, with something of her mother's indirection.
"Under your favor, sir, you don't know how deaf the devil's dam may
be--and it is not your wont to speak in that strain. I'm sure it reminds
me of that man they call 'X,'--a sort of churl person,--who talks of the
devil and blue blazes and brimstone and hell as if--as if he were a
native."
This was a turning of the sword of the pious "X" upon himself with a
vengeance, for he was prone in his spiritual disquisitions to detail
much of the discomfort of the future state that awaited his careless
friends.
The allusion so far pleased old Mivane, who resented a suspected
relegation of himself to a warm station in the schemes of "X," that,
although his head was still bald and shining like a billiard ball, he
suffered himself to drop into his chair, his stick resting motionless on
the long-suffering puncheon floor.
"If I could only hear for a day I'd forgive twenty soundless years!" he
declared piteously, for he so deprecated the enforced withdrawal from
the enterprise that he had heedlessly undertaken, and felt so keenly the
reflections upon his sentiments and sincerity surreptitiously canvassed
between Ronackstone and "X," and then cavalierly rehearsed in his
presence.
"You are only deaf to certain whanging voices in queer keys," his
granddaughter declared.
"And how do I know in what sort of key the herders on the Keowee talk?
They may 'moo' like the cow, or 'mew' like the cat! I should be in
danger of losing half that was said. And that is what these varlets here
in the station know right well. It must seem but a mere bit of bombast
on my part. It could never be seriously countenanced--unless I had an
interpreter. Stop me! but if you were a grandson instead of a
granddaughter, I would not mind taking you with me to interpret for me,
though, Gadzooks, I'd be like a heathen red Injun with a linguister!"
"And why am I not as good as any grandson?" demanded Peninnah Penelope
Anne, with a spirited flash of her bright hazel eyes and great temerity
of speculation; for be it remembered the days of the theories of woman's
equality with man had not yet dawned. "Sure, sir, I can speak when I am
spoken to. I understand the English language; and"--her voice rising
into a liquid crescendo of delight--"I can wear my gray sergedusoy sack
made over my carnation taffeta bodice and cashmere petticoat, all
pranked out with bows of black velvet, most genteel, and my hat of
quilled primrose sarcenet, grandfather. I'd take them in a bundle, for
if we should have rain I would rather be in my old red hood and blue
serge riding-coat on the way, grandfather."
And thus it was settled before she had fairly readjusted the peruke on
his head as he sat in his great chair and she clambered on its arm.
She had not heard of the disaster that had befallen Ralph Emsden, and
she turned rather pale and wistful when the news was communicated to
her. Then realizing how opportune was the accident, how slight was its
ultimate danger in comparison with the jeopardy of the mission from
which he was rescued, she fairly gloated upon the chance which had
conferred it upon her grandfather, and made her an instrument in its
execution.
It was a queerly assorted embassy that rode out of the gates of the
stockade, the ambassador and his linguister. Richard Mivane was mounted
upon a strong, sprightly horse, with Peninnah Penelope Anne behind him
upon a pillion. Following them at a little distance came his
body-servant, Cæsar, more fitted by temperament than either to enjoy
the change, the spirit of adventure, and reveling in a sense of
importance which was scarcely diminished by the fact that it was
vicarious. He rode a sturdy nag and had charge of a led horse, that bore
a pack-saddle with a store of changes of raiment, of edible provisions,
and tents to fend off the chances of inclement weather. They were to
travel under the protection of a trader's pack-train, from a
reëstablished trading-house in the Overhill Towns of the Cherokees on
the Tennessee River; and so accurately did they time their departure and
the stages of their journey that they met this caravan just at the hour
and place designated, and risked naught from the unsettled state of the
country or an encounter with some ignorant or inimical savage, prone to
wreak upon inoffensive units vengeance for wrongs, real or fancied,
wrought by a nation.
The trader, being a man habituated by frequent sojourns in Charlestown
to metropolitan customs and a worldly trend of thought, instantly
recognized the quality of Mivane and his granddaughter, despite the old
red hood and blue serge riding-coat and their residence here so far from
all the graces that appertain to civilization; though, to be sure,
Richard Mivane, in his trim "Joseph," his head cowled in an appropriate
"trotcozy," and his jaunty self-possession quite restored by the cutting
of the Gordian knot of his dilemma, demonstrating his capacity to duly
perform all his undertakings, bore himself in a manner calculated to
enhance even the high estimation of his fellow-traveler. After the
custom of a gentleman, however, he was most augustly free from
unwarrantable self-assertion, but he could not have failed to be
flattered by the phrase of the trader, could he have heard it, in
delivering over his charge to the herders on the Keowee River.
"Gadzooks, neighbors, but I shouldn't be a whit surprised if that old
party is a duke in disguise!"
But the cow-drivers heard him not! They hardly heeded the coming and the
going of the pack-train and their gossips the packmen! They cared naught
for the news the caravan brought of the country-side far above, nor the
commissions they were wont to give for the various settlements and the
metropolis far below! For so featly came riding in to the humble prosaic
precincts of the cow-pens and into their hearts the vernal beauty of
Spring herself, the living Bloom of charm and love, all arrayed in
delicate gray sergedusoy opening upon carnation taffeta, and crowned
with sheer quillings of primrose sarcenet, with a cheek that repeated
these roseate tints and a glint of golden brown tresses curling softly
against a nape of pearl, that the ranchmen were bewitched and dazed, and
knew no more of good common-sense. Their equilibrium thus shaken, some
busied themselves in what might be called "housewifely cares," that the
dainty visitant might be acceptably lodged and fed, and afterward they
cursed their industry and hospitality that thus left her conversation
and charming aspect to the shirks and drones, who languished about her,
and affected to seek her comfort and minister to her entertainment. For
the cow-drivers, like the other pioneer settlers of that region and day,
represented various states of society and degrees of refinement, and to
those to whom she was not as a blissful reminiscence of long ago, she
appeared as a revelation, new and straight from heaven, a fancy, a
dream! It seemed meet to them that she arrived in the illusory sunset of
a sweet spring day, like some lovely forecast of the visions of the
night.
With their artless bucolic ideals of entertainment they invited her out
to show her the new calves. One of these little creatures, being
exquisitely white and eminently pleasing to look upon, was straightway
named, with her gracious permission, "Peninnah Penelope Anne," and she
was assured that because of this name its owner, a slim, sentimental,
red-haired youth, would never part from it. And it may be presumed that
he was sincere, and that at the time of this fervent asseveration he had
not realized the incongruity of living his life out in the constant heed
of the well-being and companionship of a large white cow of the name of
"Peninnah Penelope Anne." A more interesting denizen of the pen was a
fawn, a waif found there one morning, having prudently adopted as a
mother a large red cow, and a heavy brindled calf as a foster-brother.
The instant Peninnah admired this incongruous estray, bleating its queer
alien note in resonant duet with the calf in the plea for supper, a cord
was slipped about its neck and it was presented in due form. In order
that she might not be harassed by its tendance, a gigantic Scotch
herder, six feet six inches high and twenty-five years of age, showed
how far involuntary inanity can coexist with presumptive sanity as he
led it about, the creature holding back heavily at every step and now
and again tangling itself, its cord, and its disconcerted bleats about
its conductor's long and stalwart legs. Another of the herders,--all of
whom were hunters and explorers as well,--whose mind was of a
topographical cast, introduced her to much fine and high company in the
various mountain peaks, gathered in solemn symposium dark and purple in
the faintly tinted and opaline twilight. He repeated their Cherokee
names and gave an English translation, and called her attention to marks
of difference in their configuration which rendered them distinguishable
at a distance; and when she lent some heed to this and noted on the
horizon contours of the mountains about her home, faint and far in an
elusive amethystine apotheosis against the red and flaming west, and
called out her glad recognition in a voice as sweet as a thrush, his
comrades waxed jealous, and contravened his statements and argued and
wrangled upon landmarks to which they had never before given a second
thought in all their mountaineering experience, so keenly they competed
for her favor. It was her little day of triumph, and right royally she
reigned in it and was wont to tell of it for forty years thereafter!