THE EXIT OF THE PRETENDER
I sat in the saddle of El Mahdi on the hill-top beyond the bridge, and
watched the day coming through the gateway of the world. It was a work
of huge enchantment, as when, for the pleasure of some ancient caliph,
or at the taunting of some wanton queen, a withered magus turned the
ugly world into a kingdom of the fairy, and the lolling hangers-on
started up on their elbows to see a green field spreading through the
dirty city and great trees rising above the vanished temples, and wild
roses and the sweet dew-drenched brier trailing where the camel's track
had just faded out, and autumn leaves strewn along pathways of a wood,
and hills behind it all where the sunlight flooded.
It was like the mornings that came up from the sea by the Wood
Wonderful, or those that broke smiling when the world was newly
minted,--mornings that trouble the blood of the old shipwreck sunning by
the door, and move the stay-at-home to sail out for the Cloud Islands.
Full of the joy of life was this October land.
I could almost hear the sunlight running with a shout as it plunged in
among the hickory trees and went tumbling to the thickets of the hollow.
The mist hanging over the low meadows was a golden web, stretched by
enchanted fingers across some exquisite country into which a man might
come only through his dreams.
I waited while the drove went by, counting the cattle to see that none
had been overlooked in the night. The Aberdeen-Angus still held his
place in the front, and the big muley bull marched by like a king's
governor, keeping his space of clear road at the peril of a Homeric
struggle.
I knew every one of the six hundred, and I could have hugged each great
black fellow as he trudged past.
Jud and the Cardinal went by in the middle of the long line and passed
out of sight behind a turn of the hill below. The giant rode slowly,
lolling in his saddle and swinging his big legs free of the stirrups.
Then the lagging rear of the drove trailed up, and the hunchback
followed on the Bay Eagle. He was buttoned to the chin in Roy's blue
coat and looked for all the world like some shrivelled old marshal of
the empire, a hundred days out of Paris, covering the retreat of the
imperial army.
El Mahdi stood on the high bank by the roadside, in among the dead
blackberry briers, and I sat with the rein under my legs and my hands in
my pockets.
The hunchback stopped his horse in the road below me, squared himself in
his saddle, and looked up with a great supercilious grin.
"Well," he said, "I'll be damn!"
"What's the trouble?" said I.
"Humph!" he snorted, "are them britches I see on your legs?"
"That's what they call them," said I.
"Well," said he, "when you git home, take 'em off, an' hand 'em over to
old Liza, an' ask her to bring your kilts down out of the garret. For
you're as innocent a little codger as ever sucked his hide full of
milk."
"What are you driving at?" I asked.
Ump shook out his long arms and folded them around the bosom of his blue
coat. "Jud told me," he said; "an' the pair of you ought to be put in a
cradle with a rock-a-by-baby. Woodford was done when that axe fell in
the river, an' he knowed it. He was ridin' out when he saw you an' Jud,
an' he said to himself, 'God's good to you, Rufus, my boy; here's a pair
of little babies a long way from their ma, an' it ought to count you
one.' Then he lit off an' offered to wrastle you, heads I win an' tails
you lose, for the cake in your pocket, an' then he chucked you under the
chin, an' you promised not to tell."
The hunchback set his two fingers against his teeth and whistled like a
hawk, a long, shrill, hissing whistle that startled the little
partridges on the sloping hillside and sent them scurrying under the
dead grass, and brought the drumming pheasant to his feathered legs.
Then he threw his chin into the air and squinted. "Quiller," he piped,
with the long echo still whining in his throat, "that whistle fooled you
an' it fooled Jud, but it wouldn't fool a Bob White with the shell on
its back. When the old bird hears it, she don't wait to see the long
shadow travellin' on the grass, but she hollers, 'Into the weeds, boys,
if you want to save your bacon.' An' you ought to see the little codgers
scatter. Let it be a lesson to you, Quiller, my laddiebuck; when you
hear that whistle, light out for the tall timber. When you're a fightin'
the devil, half the winnin' 's in the runnin'."
Then he opened his great cavernous mouth and began to bellow,
"Ho! ho! for the carrion crow,
But hark to the sqawk of the carrion hawk,"
gathered up his reins and set out after the drove in a hand gallop, all
doubled over in his blue coat.
I got El Mahdi into the road and we went swinging down the hill. I had a
light flashed into the deeps of Woodford, and I saw dimly how able and
how dangerous a man he was. I began to comprehend something of the long
complex formula that goes to make up a human identity, and it was a
discovery as startling as when a fellow perched on his grandfather's
shoulder sees through the key-hole a tangle of wheels all going behind
the white face of the clock.
I had been deftly handled by this Woodford, and yet I had not seemed to
be. He had striven to move me to his will with a sort of masked edging,
and, failing in that, left me with the bitterness drawn out. More than
that,--shrewd and far-sighted man,--taken hot against him, I was almost
won over to his star.
Under the hammering of the hard-headed Ump, I saw Woodford in another
light. But I carried no ill will. He had jousted hard and lost, and
youth holds no post-mortems. But the flock of night birds had not flown
out into the sun. Dislodged from one quarter, they flapped across my
heart to another ridgepole.
Woodford had been holding the blue hills with his men, and we knew what
it meant to go up against him. But down yonder in among the Lares of our
house, one worked against us with her nimble fingers. My heart went hard
against the woman.
If she drew back from our floorboard, there was the tongue in her head
to say it. No obligation bound her. True, we had given her of our love
freely. But it was a thing no man could set a price on, and no man could
pay, save as he told back the coin which he had borrowed. And failing in
that coin, it was a debt beyond him.
The door to our house stood pulled back on its hinges. Nothing barred it
but the sun. If the god Whim was piping, she could follow to the world's
end. One might as well bow out the woman when her blood is cooling.
Against the human heart the king's writs have never run.
I slapped my pocket above the letter. The current had turned and was
running landward. The evil thing cast out upon its flood was riding
back. I hoped it might sting cruelly the hand that flung it.
I rose in my stirrups and shook my youthful fists at the hills beyond
the Gauley. I could see the smile dying on her red mouth when one came
to say that her plans were ship-wrecked.
Then I thought of Ward, and something fluttered in my throat. He was
under the spell of this slim, brown-haired witch. She was in his blood,
running to his finger-tips. She was on him like the sun. Why could not
the woman see what the good God was handing down to her? It was the
treasure worth a kingdom. Did she think to find this thing at any
crossroads? Oh, she would see. She would see. This thing was found
rarely by the luckiest, so rarely that many an old wise man held that
there was no such treasure under the sun, and the quest of it was but a
fool's errand.
I was a mile behind the drove, and when I came up it had reached the
borders of Woodford's land. Jud had thrown down the high fence,
staked-and-ridered with long chestnut rails, and the stream of cattle
was pouring through and spreading out over the great pasture. I watched
the little groups of muleys strike out through the deep broom-sedge
hollows and the narrow bulrush marshes and the low gaps of the good
sodded hills, spying this new country, finding where the grass was
sweetest and where the water bubbled in the old poplar trough, and what
wind-sheltered cove would be warmest to a fellow's belly when he lay
sleeping in the sun.
Then we rode north through the Hills, over the Gauley where the oak
leaves carpeted the ford, and the little trout darted like a beam of
light, and the old fish-hawk sat on the hanging limb of the dead
beech-tree with his shoulders to his ears and his beak drooping, like
some worn-out voluptuary brooding on his sins.
On we went through the deep wooded lanes where the redbird stepped about
in his long crimson coat, jerring at the wren, who worked in the deep
thicket as though the Master Builder had gone away to kingdom come and
left her behind to finish the world.
We came to many a familiar landmark of my golden babyhood, the enchanted
grove on the Seely Hill where I had hunted fabled monsters and gone
whooping down among the cattle, the Greathouse meadow where Red Mike
pitched me out of the saddle when he grew tired of having his bit
jerked, and I sat up in my little petticoats and solemnly demanded that
Jourdan should cut his head off, a thing the old man promised on his
sacred honour when he could borrow the ax of the man in the moon; the
high gate-post by the cattle-scales where I perched bareheaded in a
calico dress and watched old Bedford make his last fight against human
government, Bedford, a bull of mysterious notions, that would kill you
if he found you walking in his field, and lick your stirrup if you came
riding on a horse.
It was now a country of rich meadow-land, and blue-grass hills rising to
long, flat ridges that the hickories skirted; but in that other time it
was a land of wonders, where in any summer morning, if a fellow set out
on his chubby legs, he might come to enchanted forests, lost rivers,
halcyon kingdoms guarded by some spell where the roving fairies hunted
the great bumblebee to the doorway of his house, and slew him on its
sill and carried off his treasure.
Through the fringe of locust bushes along the roadside we caught the
first glimpse of home, and the three horses pricked up their ears and
swung out in a longer trot. We clattered down the wide lane and tumbled
out of the saddles at the gate, leaving the Bay Eagle standing proudly
like some victorious general, and the Cardinal like a tired giant who
has done his work, and El Mahdi with his grey head high above the gate
looking away as of old to the far-off mountains as though he wondered
vaguely if the friend or the message or the enemy would never come.
We marched over the flagstone walk and into the house and up the
stairway. Old Liza flung us some warning through a window to the garden,
which we failed to catch and bellowed back a welcome. Then we gained the
door to the library, threw it open and went crowding in.
A step beyond that door we halted with a jerk. Ward was lounging in a
big chair with a pillow behind his shoulder, and over by the open window
where the sun danced along the casement was Cynthia Carper setting a
sheaf of roses in a jar.
Ward looked us down to the floor, and then he laughed until the great
chair tottered on its legs. "Cynthia," he cried, "will you drop a
courtesy to the gallant troopers?" She spun around with a fear kindling
in her eyes.
"The cattle!" she said. "Did you get them over?"
I had the situation in my fingers, and I felt myself grow taller with
it. "Yes," I said harshly. Then I put my hand into my pocket, drew out
the letter and handed it to her with a mocking bow. "I was asked to
carry this letter back to you, and say that my brother's word is good
enough for Nicholas Marsh."
She took the envelope and stood twisting it in her slim fingers, while a
light came up slowly in the land beyond her eyelids.
Ward held out his hand for the letter. And then I looked to see her
flutter like a pinned fly. She grew neither red nor white, but crossed
to his chair and put the letter in his hand.
He tore off the envelope and ran his eyes down the written page. "Your
order for the money!" he cried; "this was not mentioned in our plan.
What is this?"
"That," said the straight young woman, "is a field order of the
commanding general issued without the knowledge of the war department."
Then I saw the whole underpinning of the scheme, and my heart stumbled
and went groping about the four walls of its house. I tramped out of the
room and down the stairway to the big window at the first landing. I
stopped and leaned out over the walnut casement. El Mahdi stood as I had
left him, staring at the far-off wall of the Hills; and below me in the
garden old Liza stooped over her vines, not a day older, it seemed to
me, than when I galloped at her long apron-strings on Alhambra the Son
of the Wind.
THE END
* * * * *
NEW FICTION
THE FOREST SCHOOLMASTER
By Peter Rosegger. Authorized translation by Frances E. Skinner.
This is the first English version of the popular Austrian novelist's
work, and no better choice from his writings could have been made
through which to introduce him to the American public. It is a strange,
sweet tale, this story of an isolated forest community civilized and
regenerated by the life of one man. The translator has caught the spirit
of the work, and Rosegger's virile style loses nothing in the
translation.
LOVE AND HONOUR
By M. E. Carr.
A thrilling story that carries the reader from the closing incidents of
the French Revolution, through various campaigns of the Napoleonic wars,
to the final scene on a family estate in Germany. The action of the plot
is well sustained, and the style might be described as vivid, while the
old battle between love and honor is fought out with such freshness of
treatment as to seem new.
DWELLERS IN THE HILLS
By Melville D. Post.
Mr. Post is to be congratulated upon having found a new field for
fiction. The scene of his latest story is laid amidst the hills of West
Virginia. Many of the exciting incidents are based upon actual
experience on the cattle ranges of the South. The story is original,
full of action, and strong, with a local color almost entirely new to
the reading public.
DUPES
By Ethel Watts Mumford.
A novel more thoroughly original than "Dupes," both in character and in
plot, has not appeared for some time. The "dupes" are society people,
who, like the Athenians, "spent their time in nothing else but either to
tell or to hear some new thing." Apart from its charm as a love story,
the book makes some clever hits at certain "new things." While this is
Mrs. Mumford's first book, she is well known as a writer of short
stories.
Love Letters of a Musician
By Myrtle Reed.
"Miss Reed's book is an exquisite prose poem--words strung on
thought-threads of gold--in which a musician tells his love for one whom
he has found to be his ideal. The idea is not new, but the opinion is
ventured that nowhere has it been one-half so well carried out as in the
'Love Letters of a Musician.' The ecstacy of hope, the apathy of
despair, alternate in these enchanting letters, without one line of
cynicism to mar the beauty of their effect."--_Rochester Herald._
Later Love Letters of a Musician
By Myrtle Reed.
"It was with considerable hesitation that Myrtle Reed's second volume of
a musician's love letters was taken up, a natural inference being that
Miss Reed could scarcely hope to repeat her first success. Yet that she
has equalled, if not surpassed, the interest of her earlier letters is
soon apparent. Here will be found the same delicate fancy, the same
beautiful imagery, and the same musical phrases from well-known
composers, introducing the several chapters, and giving the key to their
various moods. Miss Reed has accomplished her purpose successfully in
both series of the letters."--_N. Y. Times Saturday Review._
The Diary of a Dreamer
By Alice Dew-Smith, author of "Soul Shapes," "A White Umbrella"
"A book to be read as a sedative by the busy and overworked. The scene
is laid in England, and is bathed in a peculiarly English atmosphere of
peace and leisure. Contains much domestic philosophy of a pleasing if
not very original sort, and, incidentally, no little good-natured social
satire."--_N. Y. Evening Post._
"This is a book of the meditative order. The writer expresses her
thoughts in a manner that is a delightful reminder of 'Reveries of a
Bachelor' of Ike Marvel.... In parts it is amusing, in the manner of
Mark Twain's 'Sketches.' The combination of humor and sensible
reflection results to the reader's delight."--_Albany Times Union._
"'The Diary of a Dreamer' is a charming treatment of the every-day
topics of life. As in 'Reveries of a Bachelor' and 'Elizabeth and her
German Garden,' we find an engaging presentation, from the feminine
point of view, of the scenes and events that make up the daily living.
The 'Diary' is one of those revelations of thought and feeling that fit
so well into the reader's individual experience."--_Detroit Free Press._
* * * * *
By Melville D. Post
THE STRANGE SCHEMES OF RANDOLPH MASON
"This book is very entertaining and original ... ingeniously constructed
... well worth reading."--_New York Herald._
"One of the best three volumes of stories produced within a year, as
will be recalled by those who are attentive to such matters, is 'The
Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason.' They are stories of adventure in the
every-day field of judicial procedure. The talent required to make
adventures of this order interesting is a rare one, how rare may be
inferred from the fact that almost the only famous example of the kind
in English letters is the trial in that obsolete novel, 'Ten Thousand a
Year.'"--_New York Sun._
THE MAN OF LAST RESORT
"The author makes a strong plea for moral responsibility in his work,
and his vivid style and undeniable earnestness must carry great weight
with all thinking readers. It is a notable book."--_Boston Times._
"Mr. Post has created for himself a new field in literature, just as
Conan Doyle by his Sherlock Holmes created for himself a new field. He
shows in this book that he is not only a lawyer but a story writer of
the very highest skill and literary style. The stories are most
thrilling and hold one's interest to the end."--_Law Students' Journal._
DWELLERS IN THE HILLS
Mr. Post is to be congratulated upon having found a new field for
fiction. The scene of his latest story is laid amidst the hills of West
Virginia. Many of the exciting incidents are based upon actual
experience on the cattle ranges of the south. The story is original,
full of action, and strong with a local color almost entirely new to the
reading public.
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
SONS OF THE MORNING
By Eden Phillpotts, author of "Children of the Mist," etc.
"Here we have not only literature, but we have character drawing, humor,
and descriptive powers that Blackmore only equalled once, and that was
in 'Lorna Doone.'... He knows the heart as well as the trees; he knows
men and women as well as he knows nature, and he holds them both in the
hollow of his hand."--_Chicago Tribune._
CHILDREN OF THE MIST
By Eden Phillpotts.
R. D. Blackmore, the author of "Lorna Doone," said of this: "Knowing
nothing of the writer or of his works, I was simply astonished at the
beauty and power of this novel. But true as it is to life and place,
full of deep interest and rare humor and vivid descriptions, there
seemed to be risk of its passing unheeded in the crowd, and rush, and
ruck of fiction.... Literature has been enriched with a wholesome,
genial, and noble tale, the reading of which is a pleasure in store for
many."
HILDA WADE
A Woman with Tenacity of Purpose. By Grant Allen, author of "Miss
Cayley's Adventures," etc.
"Mr. Allen's text, as in all his writings, is singularly picturesque and
captivating. There are no commonplaces, and, although the outcome is
perfectly evident early in the story, the reader will find his attention
chained.... It is one of the best of the summer books, and as an
artistic bit of light reading ranks high. It is a pity that such a
vivid imagination and high-bred style of discourse are no longer in
the land of the living to entertain us with further stories of
adventure."--_Boston Times._
THE SECRET OF THE CRATER
(A Mountain Moloch.) By Duffield Osborne, author of "The Spell of
Ashtaroth," etc.
"The author is a novelist with a genuine gift for narrative. He knows
how to tell a story, and he is capable of conceiving a plot as wild as
was ever imagined by Jules Verne or Rider Haggard.... The reader will
find himself amused and interested from the first page to the
last."--_N. Y. Herald._
End of Project Gutenberg's Dwellers in the Hills, by Melville Davisson Post