ON THE CHOOSING OF ENEMIES
It has been suggested by the wise that perhaps every passing event
leaves its picture on the nearest background, and may hereafter be
reproduced by the ingenuity of man. If so, and if genius led us into
this mighty gallery of the past, there is no one thing I would rather
look at than the face of a youth who stood rubbing his elbows in the
shop of old Christian, the blacksmith.
The slides of violent emotion, thrust in when unexpected, work such
havoc in a child's face,--that window to the world which half our lives
are spent in curtaining!
I wish to see the face of the lad only if the gods please. The canvas
about it is all tolerably clear,--the smoke-painted shop, and the
afternoon sun shining in to it through the window by the forge; and
through the great cracks, vertical sheets of sunlight thrust, wherein
the golden dust was dancing; the blacksmith panting on his anvil, his
bare arms bowed, and his hands pressed against his body as though to
help somehow to get the good air into his lungs, beads of perspiration
creeping from under the leather cap and tracing white furrows down his
sooty face; Jud leaning against the wall, and Ump squatting near El
Mahdi. The horse was not frightened. He jumped to avoid the flying
sledge. That was all. I cannot speak of the magnitude of his courage. I
can only say that he had the sublime indifference of a Brahmin from the
Ganges.
Presently the blacksmith had gotten the air in him, and he arose
scowling, picked up his tongs, fished the cart-iron out of the water,
thrust it into the coals and began to pump his bellows.
It was an invitation to depart and leave him to his own business. But it
was not our intention to depart with a barefooted horse, even if the
devil were the blacksmith.
"Christian," said Ump, "you're not through with this horse."
The blacksmith paid no attention. He pumped his bellows with his back
toward us.
"Christian!" repeated the hunchback, and his voice was the ugliest thing
I have ever heard. It was low and soft and went whistling through the
shop. "Do you hear me, Christian?"
The smith turned like an animal that hears a hissing by his heels, threw
the tongs on the floor, and glared at Ump. "I won't do it," he snarled.
"Easy, Christian," said the hunchback, with the same wheedling voice
that came so strangely through his crooked mouth. "Think about it, man.
The horse is barefoot. We should be much obliged to you."
I do not believe that this man was a coward. It was his boast that he
could shoe anything that could walk into his shop, and he lived up to
the boast. I give him that due, on my honour. Many a devil walked into
that shop wearing the hoof and hide of a horse and came out with iron
nailed on his feet; for example, horses like the Black Abbot that fought
and screamed when we put a saddle on him first and rolled on the earth
until he crushed the saddle-tree and the stirrups into splinters; and
horses like El Mahdi that tried to kill the blacksmith as though he were
an annoying fly. It was dangerous business, and I do not believe that
old Christian was a coward.
But what show had he? An arm's length away was the powerful Jud whose
hand had just now held the smith out over the corner of the world; and
the hunchback squatted on the floor with the striking hammer in his long
fingers, the red glint under his half-closed eyelids, and that dangerous
purring speech in his mouth. What show had he?
The man looked up at the roof, blackened with the smoke of half a
century, and then down at the floor, and the resolution died in his
face. He gathered up his scattered tools and went over to the horse,
lifted his foot, cut the nails, and removed the pieces of broken shoe.
Then he climbed on the anvil, and began to move the manufactured shoes
that were set in rows along the rafters, looking for a size that would
fit.
"Them won't do," said Ump. "You'll have to make a shoe, Christian."
The man got down without a word, seized a bar of iron and thrust it into
the coals. Jud caught the pole of his bellows, and pumped it for him.
The smith turned the iron in the coals. When it glowed he took it out,
cut off the glowing piece on the chisel in his anvil, caught it up in a
pair of tongs and thrust it back into the fire. Then he waited with his
hands hanging idly while Jud pulled the pole of the old bellows until it
creaked and groaned and the fire spouted sparks.
When the iron was growing fluffy white, the smith caught it up in his
tongs, lifted it from the fire, flung off a shower of hissing sparks and
began to hammer, drawing it out and beating it around the horn of the
anvil until presently it became a rough flat shoe.
The iron was cooling, and he put it back into the coals. When it was hot
again, he turned the calks, punched the nail holes and carried it
glowing to where the horse stood, held it an instant to the hoof, noted
the changes to be made, and thrust it back into the fire.
A moment later the hissing shoe was plunged into a tub of water by the
anvil, and then thrown steaming to the floor. Ump picked it up, passed
his finger over it and then set it against El Mahdi's foot. It was a
trifle narrow at the heel, and Ump pitched it back to the smith,
spreading his fingers to indicate the defect. Old Christian sprung the
calks on the horn of the anvil, and returned the shoe. The hunchback
thrust his hand between the calks, raised the shoe and squinted along
its surface to see if it were entirely level. Then he nodded his head.
The blacksmith went over to the wall, and began to take down a paper
box. The hunchback saw him and turned under the horse. "We can't risk a
store nail," he said. "You'll have to make 'em."
For the first time the man spoke. "No iron," he answered.
Ump arose and began to look over the shop. Presently he found an old
scythe blade and threw it to the smith. "That'll do," he said; "take the
back."
Old Christian broke the strip of iron from the scythe blade and heating
it in his forge, made the nails, hammering them into shape, and cutting
them from the rod until he had a dozen lying by the anvil. When they
were cool, he gathered them in his hand, smoothed the points, and went
over to El Mahdi.
The old man lifted the horse's foot, and set it on his knee, and Ump
arose and stood over him. Then he shod the horse as the hunchback
directed, paring the hoof and setting the nails evenly through the outer
rim, clipping the nail ends, and clinching them by doubling the cut
points. Then he smoothed the hoof with his great file and the work was
over.
We rode south along the ridge, leaving old Christian standing in his
shop door, his face sullen and his grimy arms folded. I flung him a
silver dollar, four times the price of the shoeing. It fell by the shop
sill, and he lifted his foot and sent it spinning across the road into
the bushes.
The road ran along the ridge. A crumbling rail fence laced with the
vines of the poison ivy trailed beside it. In its corners stood the
great mullein, and the dock, and the dead iron-weed. The hickories,
trembling in their yellow leaves, loomed above the fringe of sugar
saplings like some ancient crones in petticoats of scarlet. Sometimes a
partridge ran for a moment through the dead leaves, and then whizzed
away to some deeper tangle in the woods; now a grey squirrel climbed a
shell-bark with the clatter of a carpenter shingling a roof, and sat by
his door to see who rode by, or shouted his jeer, and, diving into his
house, thrust his face out at the window. Sometimes, far beyond us, a
pheasant walked across the road, strutting as straight as a harnessed
brigadier,--an outlaw of the Hills who had sworn by the feathers on his
legs that he would eat no bread of man, and kept the oath. Splendid
freeman, swaggering like a brigand across the war-paths of the
conqueror!
We were almost at the crown of the ridge when a brown flying-squirrel,
routed from his cave in a dead limb by the hammering of a hungry
woodpecker, stood for a moment blinking in the sunlight and then made a
flying leap for an oak on the opposite side of the road; but his
estimate was calculated on the moonlight basis, and he missed by a
fraction of an inch and went tumbling head over heels into the weeds.
I turned to laugh at the disconcerted acrobat, when I caught through the
leaves the glimpse of a horse approaching the blacksmith-shop from one
of the crossroads. I called to my companions and we found a break in the
woods where the view was clear. At half a mile in the transparent
afternoon we easily recognised Lem Marks. He rode down to the shop and
stopped by the door.
In a moment old Christian came out, stood by the shoulder of the horse
and rested his hand on Marks' knee. It was strange familiarity for such
an acrimonious old recluse, and even at the distance the attitude of
Woodford's henchman seemed to indicate surprise.
They talked together for some little while, then old Christian waved his
arm toward the direction we had taken and went into his shop, presently
returning with some implements in his hand. We could not make out what
they were. He handed them up to Marks, and the two seemed to discuss the
matter, for after a time Marks selected one and held it out to old
Christian. The smith took it, turned it over in his hand, nodded his
head and went back into his shop, while Marks gathered up his reins and
came after us in a slow fox trot.
We slipped over the ridge and then straightened in our saddles.
"Boys," said the hunchback, fingering the mane of the Bay Eagle, "that
was a bad job. We ought to be a little more careful in the pickin' of
enemies."
"Damn 'em," muttered Jud, "I wonder what mare's nest they're fixin'. I
ought to 'a twisted the old buck's neck."
The hunchback leaned over his saddle and ran his fingers along the neck
of the splendid mare. "Peace," he soliloquised, "is a purty thing." Then
he turned to me with a bantering, quizzical light in his eyes.
"Quiller," he said, "don't you wish you had your dollar back in your
pocket?"
"Why?" said I.
"It's like this," said he. "One time there was an' old miser, an' when
he was a-dyin' the devil come, an' set down by the bed, an' the devil
said, 'You've done a good deal of work for me, an' I reckon I ought to
give you a lift if you need it. Now, then, if there's any little thing
you want done, I'll look after it for you.' The miser said he'd like to
have an iron fence round his grave, if the devil thought he could see to
it without puttin' himself out any. The devil said it wouldn't be any
trouble, an' then he counted off on his fingers the minutes the miser
had to live, an' lit out.
"They buried the miser in a poor corner of the graveyard where there was
nothin' but sinkfield an' sand briars, an' that night the devil went
down to the blacksmith an' told him he wanted an iron fence put around
the old feller's grave, an' to git it done before midnight. The
blacksmith throwed his coat an' went to work like a whitehead, an' when
twelve o'clock come he had the iron fence done an' a settin' around the
miser's grave.
"Just as the clock struck, the devil come along, an' he said to the
blacksmith, standin' there a-sweatin' like a colt, 'Well, I see you got
her all up hunkey dorey.' 'Yes,' said the blacksmith, 'an' now I want my
pay.' 'Let's see about that,' said the devil; 'did you do that job
because you wanted to, or because you didn't want to?' The blacksmith
didn't know what to say, so he hemmed and hawed, an' finally he says,
'Maybe I done it because I wanted to, an' maybe I done it because I
didn't want to.' 'All right,' said the devil; 'if you done it because
you wanted to, I don't owe you nothin', an' if you done it because you
didn't want to, there ain't nothin' I can pay you.' An' he sunk in the
ground, with his thumb to his nose an' his fingers a-wigglin' at the
blacksmith."
I saw the application of the story. One could settle with money for
labour when the labourer was free, but when the labourer was not free,
when he had used his breath and his muscle under a master, money could
make no final settlement.
Ugly accounts to run in a world where the scheme of things is eternally
fair, and worse, maybe, if carried over for adjustment into the Court of
Final Equity! The remark of Ump came back like a line of ancient wisdom,
"Peace is a purty thing."