Twilight was slipping down on the Big Smoky. Definiteness was
annihilated, and distance a suggestion. Mountain forms lay darkening
along the horizon, still flushed with the sunset. Eskaqua Cove had
abysmal suggestions, and the ravines were vague glooms. Fire-flies were
a-flicker in the woods. There might be a star, outpost of the night.
Dorinda, hunting for the vagrant 'crumply cow,' paused sometimes when
the wandering path led to the mountain's brink, and looked down those
gigantic slopes and unmeasured depths. She carried her milk-piggin, and
her head was uncovered. Now and then she called with long, vague vowels,
'Soo--cow! Soo!' There was no response save the echoes, and the vibrant
iteration of the katydid. Once she heard an alien sound, and she paused
to listen. From the projecting spur where she stood, looking across the
Cove, she could see, above the forests on the slopes, the bare, uprising
dome, towering in stupendous proportions against the sky. The sound came
again and yet again, and she recognised the voice of the man who was
wont to go and pray in the desert places on the 'bald' of the mountain,
and whom she had likened to the prophets of old. There was something
indescribably wild and weird in those appealing, tempestuous tones, now
rising as in frenzy, and now falling as with exhaustion--beseeching,
adjuring, reproaching.
'He hev fairly beset the throne o' grace!' she said, with a sort of pity
for this insistent piety. A shivering, filmy mist was slipping down over
the great dome. It glittered in the last rays of the sunlight, already
vanished from the world below, like an illuminated silver gauze. She was
reminded of the veil of the temple, and she had a sense of intrusion.
'Prayer, though, air free for all,' she remarked, as self-justification,
since she had paused to hear.
She did not linger. His voice died in the distance, and the solemnity of
the impression was gradually obliterated. As she went she presently
began to sing, sometimes interpolating, without a sense of interruption,
her mellow call of 'Soo--cow! Soo!' until it took the resemblance of a
refrain, with an abrupt crescendo. The wild roses were flowering along
the paths, and the pink and white azaleas--what perfumed ways, what
lavish grace and beauty! The blooms of the laurel in the darkling places
were like a spangling of stars. Dew was falling--it dashed into her
face from the boughs that interlaced across the unfrequented path--and
still the light lingered, loath to leave. She heard the stir of some
wild things in the hollow of a great tree, and then a faint, low growl.
She fancied she saw a pair of bright eyes looking apprehensively at her.
'We-uns hev got a baby at our house, too, an' we don't want yourn,
ma'am; much obleeged, all the same,' she said, with a laugh. But she
looked back with a sort of pity for that alert maternal fear, and she
never mentioned to the youngest brother, a persistent trapper, the
little family of raccoons in the woods.
She had forgotten the voice raised in importunate supplication on the
'bald,' until, pursuing the path, she was led into the road, hard by a
little bridge, or more properly culvert, which had rotted long ago; the
vines came up through the cavities in the timbers, and a blackberry
bush, with a wren's nest, flourished in their midst. The road was fain
to wade through the stream; but the channel was dry now--a narrow belt
of yellow sand lying in a long curving vista in the midst of the dense
woods. A yoke of oxen, drawing a rude slide, paused to rest in the
middle of the channel, and beside them was a man, of medium height,
slender but sinewy, dressed in brown jeans, his trousers thrust into the
legs of his boots, a rifle on his shoulder, and a broad-brimmed old wool
hat surmounting his dark hair, that hung down to the collar of his coat.
Her singing had prepared him for her advent, but he barely raised his
eyes. That quick glance was incongruous with his dullard aspect; it held
a spark of fire, inspiration, frenzy--who can say?
He spoke suddenly, in a meek, drawling way, and with the air of
submitting the proposition:
'I hev gin the beastises a toler'ble hard day's work, an' I'm
a-favourin' 'em goin' home.'
A long pause ensued. The oxen hung down their weary heads, with the
symbol of slavery upon them. The smell of ferns and damp mould was on
the air. Rotting logs lay here and there, where the failing water had
stranded them. The grape-vine, draping the giant oaks, swayed gently,
and suggested an observation to break the silence.
'How air the moral vineyard a-thrivin'?' she asked solemnly.