THE PASSING OF AN ILLUSION
El Mahdi wanted to run, and I let him go. The swing of the horse and the
rush of fresh, cool air was good. Nothing in all the world could have
helped me so well. The tears were mastered, but I had a sense of
tremendous loss. I had jousted with the first windmill, riding up out of
youth's golden country, and I had lost one of the splendid illusions of
that enchanted land. I was cruelly hurt. How cruelly, any man will know
when he recalls his first jamming against the granite door-posts of the
world.
Of love and all its mysterious business, I knew nothing. But of good
faith and fair dealing I had a child's conception, the terrible justness
of which is but dimly understood. The new point of view was ugly and
painful. From the time when I toddled about in little dresses and Ward
carried me on his shoulder in among the cattle or hoisted me up on the
broad horn of his saddle, I had looked upon him as a big, considerate
Providence. I did not understand how there could be anything that he
could not do, nor anything in the world worth having at all that he
could not get, if he tried. So when he told me of Cynthia, I considered
that she belonged to us, and passed on to the next matter claiming my
youthful attention. It never occurred to me that Cynthia could be other
than happy to pass under the suzerainty of my big brother. True, I never
thought very much about it, since it was so plainly a glorious
privilege. Still, why had she made her promise, if she could not keep
her shoulder to it like a man? We did not like it when Ward told us. We
did not think much of women, Ump and Jud and I, except old Liza, who was
another of those splendid Providences. Now it was clear that we were
right.
It all went swimmingly when Ward was by, but no sooner was he stretched
out with a dislocated shoulder from that mysterious blunder of the Black
Abbot, than here was Cynthia trailing over the country with Hawk Rufe.
I stopped at the old Alestock mill where Ben's Run goes trickling into
the Stone Coal, climbed down from El Mahdi and washed my face in the
water, and then passed the rein under my arm and sat down in the road to
await the arrival of my companions. The echo of the horses' feet was
already coming, carried downward across the pasture land, and soon the
head of the Cardinal arose above the little hill behind me, and then the
Bay Eagle, and in a moment more Ump and Jud were sitting with me in the
road.
We usually dismounted and sat on the earth when we had grave matters to
consider. It was an unconscious custom like that which takes the wise
man into the mountains and the lover under the moon. I think the Arab
Sheik long and long ago learned this custom as we had learned
it,--perhaps from a dim conception of some aid to be had from the great
earth when one's heart is very deeply troubled.
I knew well enough that my companions had not passed Woodford without
running the gauntlet of some interrogation, and I waited to hear what
they had to say. I think it was Jud who spoke first, and his face was
full of shadows. "I wouldn't never a believed it of Miss Cynthia," he
began, "I wouldn't never a believed it."
"Don't talk about her," I broke in angrily. "What did Hawk Rufe say?"
Jud studied for a moment as though he were slowly arranging the proper
sequence of some distant memory. Then he went on. "He wanted to know
where I got that big red horse, an' if Mr. Ward's men ever walked any,
an' he--" The man's open mouth closed on the broken sentence, and Ump
answered for him, sitting under the Bay Eagle with his arm around her
slim front leg. "An' he wanted to know what we did with little Quiller
when he cried."
I thought I should die of the intolerable shame. I had cried--blubbered
away as though I were a red-cheeked little girl in a clean calico
petticoat.
After the dead line which Ump had crossed for him with the brutal
frankness that went along with his dwarfed body, Jud continued with his
report. "He asked me where we was goin', an' I told him we was goin'
home. He asked me if we had had any word from Mr. Ward to-day, an' I
told him we hadn't had any. Then he said we had better take the Hacker's
Creek road because the Gauley was up from the mountain rains, an'
runnin' logs, an' if we got in there in the night we would git you
killed."
"An'," interrupted Ump, turning round under the Bay Eagle, "an' then
Miss Cynthia looked up sharp at him like a catbird, an' she laughed, an'
she said how that advice wasn't needed, because little boys always went
home by the safest road."
The taunt sank in as oil sinks into a cloth. I may have blushed and
stammered, and I may have blubbered like a milksop, but it was not
because I was afraid. I would show Woodford and I would show this fickle
Miss Gadabout that I did not need any advice about roads. If my life had
been then in jeopardy, I would not have taken it burdened with a
finger's weight of obligation to Rufus Woodford or Cynthia Carper. It
might have gone out over the sill of the world, for good and all.
I arose and put the bridle rein over El Mahdi's head while I stood, my
right hand reaching up on his high withers. Jud and Ump got into their
saddles and turned down toward the ford of the Stone Coal on the
Hacker's Creek road, which Woodford had suggested. But under the coat my
heart was stewing, and I would not have gone that way if the devil and
his imps had been riding the other. I climbed into the saddle and
shouted down to them. They turned back at the water of the ford. "Where
are you going?" I called.
"Home. Where else?" replied the dwarfed Ump.
"It's a nice roundabout way you're taking," I said. "The Overfield road
is three miles shorter."
"But the Gauley's boomin'," answered Jud; "Woodford said not to go that
way."
"It's the first time," I shouted, "that any of our people ever took
directions from Hawk Rufe. As for me, I'm going by the Gauley." And I
turned El Mahdi into the wooded road on the left of the turnpike.
For a moment the two hesitated, discussing something which I could not
hear. Then they rode up out of the Stone Coal and came clattering after
me.
It is wonderful how swiftly the night comes in among the boles of the
great oak trees. The dark seems to rise upward from the earth. The
sounds of men and beasts carry over long distance, drifting in among the
trees, and the loneliness of the vast, empty earth comes back to
us,--what is forgotten in the rush of the sunshine,--the constant loom
of the mystery. One understands then why the early men feared the plains
when it was dark, and huddled themselves together in the hills. Who
could say what ugly, dwarfish things, what evil fairies, what dangerous
dead men might climb up over the rim of the world? A man was not afraid
of the grey wolf, or even the huge beast that trumpeted in the morass by
the great water when the light was at his back, but when the world was
darkened old men had seen strange shapes running by the wolf's muzzle,
or groping with the big mastodon in the marsh land, and against these a
stone axe was a little weapon.
Of all animals, man alone has this fear of the dark. Neither the horse
nor the steer is afraid of shadows, and from these, as he travels
through the night, a man may feed the springs of his courage. I have
been scared when I was little, stricken with panic when night caught me
on the hills, and have gone down among the cattle and stood by their
great shoulders until I felt the fear run off me like water, and have
straightway marched out as brave as any trooper of an empress. And from
those earliest days when I rode, with the stirrups crossed on my
brother's saddle, after some kind old straying ox, I was always
satisfied to go where the horse would go. He could see better than I,
and he could hear better, and if he tramped peacefully, the land was
certainly clear of any evil thing.
We crossed the long wooded hill clattering like a troop of the queen's
cavalry, and turned down toward the great level bow which the road makes
before it crosses the Gauley. There was a dim light rising beyond the
flat lands where the crooked elves toiled with their backs against the
golden moon. But they were under the world yet, with only the yellow
haze shining through the door. This was the acre of ghosts. Tale after
tale I had heard, sitting on the knee of the old grey negro Clabe, about
the horrors of this haunted "bend" in the Gauley. There, when I was a
child, had lived old Bodkin in a stone house, now a ruin, by the
river,--a crooked, mean old devil with a great hump, and eyes like a
toad. He came to own the land through some suspicious will about which
there clung the atmosphere of crime, as men said. When I saw him first,
I was riding behind my brother, and he stopped us and tried to induce
Ward to buy his land. He was mounted on a red roan horse, and looked
like an old knotty spider.
I can still remember how frightened I was, and how I hid my face against
my brother's coat and hugged him until my arms ached. When Ward inquired
why he wished to sell, he laughed in a sort of cackle, and replied that
he was going to marry a wife and go to the moon.
Now, tradition told that he had married many a wife, but that they died
quickly in the poisoned chamber of this spider. Ward looked the
bridegroom over from his twisted feet to his hump, and there must have
been some merry shadow in his face, for Bodkin leaned over the horn of
his saddle and stretched out his hand, a putty-coloured hand, with long,
bony fingers. "Do you see that?" he croaked. "If I ever get that hand on
a woman, she's mine."
Then I began to cry, and Ward wished the old man a happy voyage to the
cloud island, and we rode on.
He did marry a wife, and one morning, but little afterwards, two of my
brother's drivers found her hanging to the limb of a dead apple tree
with a bridle rein knotted to her neck, and her bare feet touching the
tops of the timothy grass. When they came to look for Bodkin, he had
disappeared with his red roan horse. Ward explained that he had ridden
through the gap of the mountains into the South, but I thought, with the
negroes, that someone ought to have seen him if he had gone that way;
besides, I had heard him say that he was going to the moon. Later, old
Bart and Levi Dillworth, returning from some frolic, had seen Bodkin
riding his horse in a terrible gallop, with the dead woman across the
horn of his saddle, on his way to the moon.
It was true that both Bart and Levi were long in the bow arm, and men
who loved truth less than they loved laurels. Still the tale had
splendid conditions precedent, and old Clabe arose to its support with
many an eloquent wag of his head.
I was running through this very ghost story when El Mahdi stopped in the
road and pricked up his ears. At the same moment Jud and Ump pulled up
beside me. Perhaps their minds were in the same channel. We listened for
full a minute. Far down in the marsh land I could hear the frogs
chanting their mighty chorus to the stars, and the little screech-owl
whining from some tree-top far up against the hill. I was about to ride
on when Jud caught at the rein and put up his hand. Then I heard the
sound that the horse was listening to, but at the great distance it was
only a sound, a faint, wavering, indefinite echo, coming up from the
far-away bend of the Gauley. The rim of the moon was rising now out of
the under world, and I watched the road trailing away into a deep shadow
by the river. As I watched, I saw something rise out of this gloom and
sweep down the dim road. It passed for a moment through a belt of
moonlight, and I saw that it was a horse ridden by a shadow.
Then we clearly heard long, heavy galloping. Jud dropped my rein and
wrenched the Cardinal around on his haunches. He was not afraid of the
living, but he was afraid of the dead. As the horse reared, Ump caught
the bit under his jaw and, throwing the Bay Eagle against him, wedged
the horse and Jud in between El Mahdi and himself. Ump was neither
afraid of the living nor the dead. He called to me, and I seized the
Cardinal's bit on my side, gripping the iron shank with my fingers
through the rein rings.
Panic was on the giant Jud, and he lifted the horse into the air,
dragging Ump and myself half out of our saddles. Men in their hopeless
egotism have far underestimated the good sense of the horse. The
Cardinal was in no wise frightened. At once, it seemed to me, he
recognised the irresponsibility of his rider. In some moment of the
struggle the bit slipped forward, and the horse clamped his powerful
jaws on it and set the great muscles in his neck to help us hold.
The horses rocked and plunged, but we held them together. The Bay Eagle,
quick-witted as any woman, crowded the Cardinal close, throwing her
weight against his shoulders, and El Mahdi, indifferent, but stubborn as
an ox, held his ground as though he were bolted to the road.
I heard Ump cursing, now Jud for his cowardice, now the ghost for its
infernal riding. "Damn you, fool! Stay an' see it. Stay an' see it." And
then, "Damn Bodkin an' his dead wife! If he rides this way, he stops
here or he goes under to hell."
As for me, I was afraid. Only the swing and jamming of the struggle held
me. The gallop of the advancing horse was now loud, clear, hammering
like an anvil. It passed for a moment out of sight in a hollow of the
road below. In the next instant it would be on us. The giant Jud made
one last mighty effort. The Cardinal went straight into the air. I clung
to the bit, dragged up out of the saddle. I felt my foot against the
pommel, my knee against the steel shoulder of the great horse, my face
under the Cardinal's wide red throat.
I heard the reins snap on both sides of the bit--pulled in two. And then
the loud, harsh laugh of the man Ump.
"Hell! It's Jourdan an' Red Mike."