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Dwellers in the Hills
By Melville Davisson Post
Author of "Randolph Mason", "The Man of Last Resort," etc.
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1901
Copyright, 1901
By MELVILLE DAVISSON POST
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
TO
MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
I.--THE OCTOBER LAND
II.--THE PETTICOAT AND THE PRETENDER
III.--THE PASSING OF AN ILLUSION
IV.--CONCERNING HAWK RUFE
V.--THE WAGGON-MAKER
VI.--THE MAID AND THE INTRUDERS
VII.--THE MASTER BUILDERS
VIII.--SOME REMARKS OF SAINT PAUL
IX.--CHRISTIAN THE BLACKSMITH
X.--ON THE CHOOSING OF ENEMIES
XI.--THE WARDENS OF THE RIVER
XII.--THE USES OF THE MOON
XIII.--THE SIX HUNDRED
XIV.--RELATING TO THE FIRST LIARS
XV.--WHEN PROVIDENCE IS PAGAN
XVI.--THROUGH THE BIG WATER
XVII.--ALONG THE HICKORY RIDGES
XVIII.--BY THE LIGHT OF A LANTERN
XIX.--THE ORBIT OF THE DWARFS
XX.--ON THE ART OF GOING TO RUIN
XXI.--THE EXIT OF THE PRETENDER
DWELLERS IN THE HILLS
CHAPTER I
THE OCTOBER LAND
I sat on the ground with my youthful legs tucked under me, and the
bridle rein of El Mahdi over my arm, while I hammered a copper rivet
into my broken stirrup strap. A little farther down the ridge Jud was
idly swinging his great driving whip in long, snaky coils, flicking now
a dry branch, and now a red autumn leaf from the clay road. The slim
buckskin lash would dart out hissing, writhe an instant on the hammered
road-bed, and snap back with a sharp, clear report.
The great sorrel was oblivious of this pastime of his master. The lash
whistled narrowly by his red ears, but it never touched them. In the
evening sunlight the Cardinal was a horse of bronze.
Opposite me in the shadow of the tall hickory timber the man Ump,
doubled like a finger, was feeling tenderly over the coffin joints and
the steel blue hoofs of the Bay Eagle, blowing away the dust from the
clinch of each shoe-nail and pressing the flat calks with his thumb. No
mother ever explored with more loving care the mouth of her child for
evidence of a coming tooth. Ump was on his never-ending quest for the
loose shoe-nail. It was the serious business of his life.
I think he loved this trim, nervous mare better than any other thing in
the world. When he rode, perched like a monkey, with his thin legs held
close to her sides, and his short, humped back doubled over, and his
head with its long hair bobbing about as though his neck were
loose-coupled somehow, he was eternally caressing her mighty withers, or
feeling for the play of each iron tendon under her satin skin. And when
we stopped, he glided down to finger her shoe-nails.
Then he talked to the mare sometimes, as he was doing now. "There is a
little ridge in the hoof, girl, but it won't crack; I know it won't
crack." And, "This nail is too high. It is my fault. I was gabbin' when
old Hornick drove it."
On his feet, he looked like a clothes-pin with the face of the strangest
old child. He might have been one left from the race of Dwarfs who,
tradition said, lived in the Hills before we came.
His mare was the mother of El Mahdi. I remember how Ump cried when the
colt was born, and how he sat out in the rain, a miserable drenched rat,
because his dear Bay Eagle was in the mysterious troubles of maternity,
and because she must be very unhappy at being on the north side of the
hill among the black hawthorn bushes, for that was a bad sign--the worst
sign in the world--showing the devil would have his day with the colt
now and then.
I used, when I was little, to hear talk once in a while of some very
wonderful person whom men called a "genius," and of what it was to be a
genius. The word puzzled me a good deal, because I could not understand
what was meant when it was explained to me. I used to ponder over it,
and hope that some day I might see one, which would be quite as
wonderful, I had no doubt, as seeing the man out of the moon. Then, when
El Mahdi came into his horse estate and our lives began to run together,
I would lie awake at night trying to study out what sort of horse it was
that deliberately walked off the high banks along the road, or pitched
me out into the deep blue-grass, or over into the sedge bushes, when it
occurred to him that life was monotonous, tumbling me upside down like a
girl, although I could stick in my brother's big saddle when the Black
Abbot was having a bad day,--and everybody knew the Black Abbot was the
worst horse in the Hills.
Wondering about it, the suggestion came that perhaps El Mahdi was a
"genius." Then I pressed the elders for further data on the word, and
studied the horse in the light of what they told me. He fitted snug to
the formula. He neither feared God, nor regarded man, so far as I could
tell. He knew how to do things without learning, and he had no
conscience. The explanation had arrived. El Mahdi was a genius. After
that we got on better; he yielded a sort of constructive obedience, and
I lorded it over him, swaggering like a king's governor. But deep down
in my youthful bosom, I knew that this obedience was only pretended, and
that he obeyed merely because he was indifferent.
He stood by while I hammered the stirrup, with his iron grey head held
high in the air, looking away over the hickory ridge across the blue
hills, to the dim wavering face of the mountains. He was almost
seventeen hands high, with deep shoulders, and flat legs trim at the
pastern as a woman's ankle, and a coat dark grey, giving one the idea of
good blue steel. He was entirely, I may say he was abominably,
indifferent, except when it came into his broad head to wipe out my
swaggering arrogance, or when he stood as now, staring at the far-off
smoky wall of the Hills, as though he hoped to find there, some day
farther on, a wonderful message awaiting him, or some friend whom he had
lost when he swam Lethe, or some ancient enemy.
I finished with the stirrup, buckled it back into its leather and
climbed into the saddle. It was one of the bitter things that my young
legs were not long enough to permit me to drive my foot deep into the
wide, wooden stirrup and swing into the saddle as Jud did with the
Cardinal, or as my brother did when the Black Abbot was in a hurry and
he was not. I explained it away, however, by pointing out, like a boy,
not that my legs were short, but that El Mahdi, the False Prophet, was a
very high horse.
Jud had not dismounted, and Ump was on the Bay Eagle like a squirrel, by
the time I had fairly got into the saddle. Then we started again in a
long, swinging trot, El Mahdi leading, the Cardinal next, and behind him
the Bay Eagle. The road trailed along the high ridge beside the tall
shell-bark hickories, now the granary of the grey squirrel, and the
sumach bushes where the catbirds quarrelled, and the dry old poplars
away in the blue sky, where the woodpecker and the great Indian hen
hammered like carpenters.
The sun was slipping through his door, and from far below us came a
trail of blue smoke and a smell of wood ashes where some driver's wife
had started a fire, prepared her skillet, and moved out her scrubbed
table,--signs that the supper was on its way, streaked bacon, potatoes,
sliced and yellow, and the blackest coffee in the world. Now and then on
the hillside, in some little clearing, the fodder stood in loose,
bulging shocks bound with green withes, while some old man or half-grown
lad plied his husking-peg in the corn spread out before him, working
with the swiftness and the dexterity of a machine, ripping the husk with
one stroke of the wooden peg bound to his middle finger, and snapping
the ear at its socket, and tossing it into the air, where it gleamed
like a piece of gold.
Below was the great, blue cattle land, rising in higher and higher hills
to the foot of the mountains. The road swept around the nose of the
ridge and plunged into the woods, winding in and out as it crawled down
into the grass hills. The flat curve at the summit of the ridge was
bare, and, looking down, one could see each twist of the road where it
crept out on the bone of the hill to make its turn back into the woods.
As I passed over the brow of the ridge, I heard Jud call, and, turning
my head, saw that both he and Ump were on the ground, looking down at
the road below. Jud stood with his broad shoulders bent forward, and Ump
squatted, peering down under the palm of his hand. I rode back just in
time to catch the flash of wheels sweeping into the wood from one of the
bare turns of the road. Yet even in that swift glimpse, I thought I knew
who was below, and so I did not ask, but waited until they should come
into the open space again farther down. I sat with the bridle rein loose
on El Mahdi's neck and my hands resting idly on the horn of the saddle.
I think I must have been smiling, for when Ump looked up at me, his
wizened face was so serious that I burst out into a loud laugh.
"Well," I said, "it's Cynthia, isn't it? At half a mile she oughtn't to
be so very terrible." And I opened my mouth to laugh again. But that
laugh never came into the world. Just then a big horse with a man's
saddle on him and the reins tied to the horn trotted out into the open,
and behind him Cynthia's bay cob and her high, trim cart, and beside
Cynthia on the seat was a man.
I saw the red spokes of the wheel, the silver on the harness, the flash
of the grey feather in Cynthia's hat, and even the bit of ribbon
half-way out the long whip-staff. Then they vanished again, while up the
wind came a peal of laughter and the rumble of wheels, and the faint
hammering of horses in the iron road. On the instant, my heart gave a
great thump, and grew very bitter, and my face hardened and clouded.
"Who was it, Jud?" I said. And my jaws felt stiff. "It was surely Miss
Cynthia," he began, "an' it was surely a Woodford cattle-horse." Then he
stopped with his mouth open, and began to rub his chin. I turned to Ump.
"What Woodford?" I asked.
The hunchback twisted his shaggy head around in his collar like a man
who wishes to have a little more air in his throat. Then he said: "He
was a big, brown horse with a bald face, an' he struck out with his
knees when he trotted. Them's the Woodford horses. The saddle was black
with long skirts, an' it had only one girth. Them's the Woodford
saddles. An' the stirrups was iron, an' there are only one Woodford who
rides with his feet in iron."
I looked at Jud, searching his face for some trace of doubt on which to
hang a little hoping, but it was all bronze and very greatly troubled.
Then he saw what I wanted, and began to stammer. "May be the horse was
tender, an' that was the reason." But Ump piped in, scattering the
little cloud, "That horse ain't lame. He trots square as a dog."
Jud looked away and swung up in his saddle. "May be," he stammered, "may
be the horse throwed him, an' that was the reason." Again Ump, the
destroyer of little hopes, answered from the back of the Bay Eagle, "No
horse ever throwed Hawk Rufe."
I sucked in the air over my bit lips when Ump named him. Rufe Woodford
with Cynthia! I thought for an instant that I should choke. Then I
kicked my heels against El Mahdi and swung him around down-hill. He
galloped from the jump, and behind him thundered the Cardinal, and the
Bay Eagle, with her silk nostrils stretched, jumping long and low like a
great cat.