All day the slow process of the restoration of the household gods went
on. For many a year thereafter all manner of losses dated from this
period. "Hain't been seen nor hearn tell on sence 'fore the infair,"
was a formula that sufficiently accounted for any deficit in domestic
accoutrement. There was no one in the Pettingill family so lost to
the appreciation of hospitality and the necessity of equalling the
entertainment given by the bride's relatives as to opine that the game
was not worth the candle. But more than once Mrs. Pettingill, with a
deep sigh, demanded, "Who would hev thunk it would hev been so much
more trouble ter kerry in things agin 'n ter kerry 'em out!" She did
not accurately gauge the force of enthusiastic anticipation as a motive
power. Nevertheless she bore up with wonderful fortitude, considering
that the triumph of the supper had been eclipsed. The inanimate members
of the household were exhibiting a sort of wooden sulks as they were
conveyed to their respective places--now becoming stiffly immovable,
despite the straining muscles of the "men folks;" then suddenly,
without the application of appreciably stronger force, bouncing forward
so unexpectedly that the danger of being overrun was imminent, and
cries of "Stiddy, thar! Ketch that eend! Holp up, thar!" resounded even
through Rhodes's dreams in the roof-room, as he drowsed peacefully
under the narcotic influences of hop tea. The loom might have seemed
to entertain a savage resentment for its supersedure, and was some two
hours journeying back to its place in the shed-room, the scene alike
of the blighted supper and its old industrial pursuits. After that the
"men folks" took a vacation, and applied themselves with some zest to
apparently incidental slumber; old Zack Pettingill nodded in his chair
on the porch; the others, chiefly volunteering neighbors, fell asleep
in the hay at the barn while ostensibly feeding the cattle, leaving the
great skeleton of the warping bars staring its reflection in the river
out of countenance as it leaned against the fence, with its skeins of
carefully sized party-colored yarn the prey of two nimble kittens, who
expressly climbed the gaunt frame to tangle them. Even Mrs. Pettingill,
sitting on an inverted basket in the yard amongst her gear, looking
a trifle forlorn, bareheaded, with her gray hair tucked in a small
knot at the nape of her neck, her spectacles poised upon her nose, her
hands on her knees, lost herself while gazing at her possessions in
the effort to decide at which end she had best begin to rehabilitate
the confusion; her eyelids presently drooped, and scant speculation
looked through those spectacles. The great shady trees waved above
her head. Bees robbed the clover at her feet, and flew, laden and
drowsily droning, away; the light shifted on the river; the sun grew
hot; the far blue mountains were like some land of dreams, so fair, so
transfigured, that they hardly seemed real and akin to these rugged,
craggy, darksome heights which loomed beside the little cottage.
Everywhere were sleeping dogs; now and then one roused himself to
recollections of the infair and the supper, and invaded the shed-room,
standing in the door and with drooping tail gazing upon the simple
domestic apparition of the loom in its accustomed place, evidently
having believed, in his optimistic simplicity, that the good things
and the splendor and the delightful bustle of the past evening were to
continue indefinitely, and infinitely disappointed to find them already
abolished, the fleeting show of a single occasion.
Shattuck would hardly have acknowledged it to himself, but he certainly
felt relieved of an irksome prospect by this succumbing of the
Pettingills to the influence of excitement and fatigue. Conversation
with his host would necessarily be somewhat hampered by the events
of the preceding evening. He could not well resent the old man's
indignation, and yet a hospitable forbearance and courtesy would be of
even more poignant intimations. He had winced when the bridegroom had
taken leave of him with a punctilious show of cordiality and a hearty
handshake, as assurance that he bore no malice for those insinuations.
For these reasons the guest was not sorry to note the solemn
preoccupation in his host's open-mouthed countenance as he passed out
from the porch to the shade of the trees, where he came presently
upon Mrs. Pettingill, sitting as motionless as a monument amongst her
distorted and dislocated "truck," as in her waking moments she would
have phrased her belongings. He lighted his cigar as he strolled down
to the river, pausing to strike the match upon the white bark of an
aspen-tree. The ferns gave out a sweet woodland odor, faint and
delicate, overpowered presently by the pungent fragrance of the mint as
his feet crushed the thick-growing herb. The crystal river murmured as
it went, and seemed to draw reflective, half-breathed sighs, as in the
pauses of a story that is told. Now and again, when the banks were high
on either side, the rocks duplicated the sound of the lapsing currents
with a more sonorous, cavernous emphasis, as if they sought to enter
into the spirit of this sentient-seeming life. The sky, looking down
from its blue placidities, only here and there smote the water to azure
emulations of its tint; for the shadows predominated, and the gravel
gave the stream that fine brown, lucent tone, impossible to imitate,
broken occasionally where some high boulder incited the impetuosity of
the current to bold leaps. Then it was crested with snow-white foam,
and shoaled away with glassy-green waves to the same restfully tinted
brown and amber swirls. The overhanging rocks were gray and splintered
and full of crevices, with moss and lichen. Where they lay in great
fractured masses under a giant oak, a spring gushed forth. He heard its
tinkling tremor, more delicately crystalline and keyed far higher than
the low continuous monotone of the river. He mechanically turned toward
the sound, and saw Letitia in her light-blue dress sitting upon the
gaunt gray rocks at the foot of the craggy masses, a brown gourd in her
hand and an empty cedar pail at her feet. Her eyes were fixed gravely
upon him, her face was fresh as the wild roses amongst the crevices of
the rocks. She looked not more wilted by the excitements and heat and
turmoil of the dancing at the infair than the flower blooming with the
break of day. He strolled toward her, and spoke at the distance:
"You're the only member of the family awake now, I believe." He smiled,
and flicked off the ash of his cigar.
The expression of her eyes changed as they still rested upon him.
"Dun'no' whether I be awake or no," she observed. "I kem down hyar
arter a pail o' water, an' 'pears like I can't git away agin. Disabled
somehows. Asleep, mebbe, though' I moughtn't look like it."
Her uncouth garb and dialect were somehow softened by the delicacy of
her proportions and the perfect profile and chiselling of her face.
Her speech was hardly more grating upon him, precisian though he was,
than the careless, untutored lapses of a child might have been; all the
senses of comparison as readily ignored them. She looked so sprite-like
as she sat in a drooping, relaxed posture by the spring in the niche
of the rocks, one hand behind her head, the other holding the gourd
against her blue dress; and the idea of an oread or a naiad suggested
to his mind was suddenly on his lips.
Her reply instantly reminded him of her limitations and her ignorance.
"Witched an' bound ter the spot!" she exclaimed, with widening eyes and
breathless tone. She lowered her voice: "Did you-uns ever _see_ one?"
Her literal interpretation embarrassed and threw him off his guard.
"Never till now," he said. He was not intentionally flirting with Zack
Pettingill's daughter; but elsewhere and to another of her sex the
speech would have impressed him as a pretty compliment. In her quality
of woman, in her possession of a heart, she was no more represented in
his mind than if she had been the flower above her.
She either did not comprehend the flattery or she ignored it. Her
mind seemed fixed upon the water-nymph and the oread. "Bound ter
the spot!" she reiterated, with a sceptical air. "Thar's a heap o'
ways o' bein' bound ter the spot. Laziness kin hinder ez totally ez
a block an' chain. Mebbe they war 'flicted that-a-way, sorter like
me." She stretched both arms upward in an attitude that might have
been grotesque in another, but with her was a charming and childish
expression of fatigue.
He sat down on the ledge of the rock, took out his watch, and looked at
it. "I wish I knew whether the doctor wouldn't come or would," he said,
the harassment of the earlier hours recurring to his mind. "I am sorry
they ever sent for him. Doesn't he seem a long time coming?"
"Fee Guthrie axed me that question fourteen hundred an' fifty times
this mornin'. I don't set my mind on doctor men whenst folks air well,
only whenst ailin'. 'Pears ter me like Mr. Rhodes's main complaint air
foolishness."
Shattuck flushed with a sort of loyal resentment for his friend's sake.
"You think he is foolish because he wanted to dance with you?" he said,
tartly.
She cast a rallying side glance down upon him. "Mr. Rhodes warn't
particular 'bout dancin' with me," she protested. "I ain't in no wise a
favor_ite_ 'mongst the boys. That's what makes me 'low I be so smart!"
She turned her head with a bird-like coquetry, more formidable for
being so natural.
"Too smart for them?" he said, placated in spite of himself by her
naïve arrogations.
She nodded the wise little head that she so boldly vaunted. "They all
ax me, 'Hey? hey?'"--she raucously thickened her voice in drawling
mimicry--"ter every word I say--every one I ever see but you-uns."
If he could compliment, she could return the courtesy. He was silent
for a moment, remembering the criticisms that he had heard last night
on her unexpected and contrariwise conversation. She was doubtless far
too clever for her compeers and her sphere--even clever enough to know
it.
"You don't think it worth while to be a favorite amongst fools. But how
is poor Mr. Rhodes a fool?"
"Foolish," she corrected him, as if she made a distinction. "'Kase he
wants ter git 'lected ter office, an' he kerns 'round sa-aft-sawderin'
folks ez laffs, 'an laffs at him, ahint his back. An' he dassent say
his soul's his own! An' he hev ter take sass off'n everybody. He talks
'bout the _kentry_, an' ennybody kin see he don't keer nuthin' 'bout
the _kentry_. I'd ruther be a wild dog down thar by the ruver-bank, an'
feed off'n the bones the wolf leaves, an' be free ter hev a mind o' my
own."
Shattuck seemed to revolve this caustic characterization of his
friend the politician. He did not care to press her further as to her
opinions. He only said, presently, once more looking at his watch, "I
think it so strange that the doctor doesn't come."
"Fee Guthrie waited a considerable time ter make sure ez Mr. Rhodes
wouldn't die, an' 'twouldn't be desirable ter hang nobody ter-day."
Her interlocutor winced a trifle, remembering his threats last night.
Her placid face, however, intimated nothing of any intention that might
animate her words; it expressed only its own unique beauty.
He was charmed by it in some sort. He could see by that mentor, his
watch, how long it had been that he had sat here listening alternately
to the river's song and her low vibrant drawl. But he fancied that
reluctance to meet the mountaineers at the house had detained him, or
eagerness to descry the first approach of the superfluous physician,
rather than the fascination of this rustic little creature, whose words
so combined bitterness and honey. He hastened to divert her attention
from the last suggestion.
"Where _is_ Guthrie now, anyhow?" he said, affecting to look around as
if expecting to see him somewhere at hand amongst the black vertical
shadows of the noon and the still golden sunshine.
"Off in the woods somewhere, I reckon," she said; "prayin', mebbe."
"Praying?" he repeated, in astonishment.
"Lawsy-massy, yes! He's a mighty survigrous han' at prayin' an'
repentin'. He repents some every day--whenst he don't furgit it."
She laughed in a languid way, once more stretching up her tired arms,
the brown gourd in one of her lifted hands, and then she relapsed into
silence, her eyes fixed upon the swift flow of the stream. He too was
silent, gazing upon the gliding waters. Naught so unobtrusively, so
sufficiently fills an interval of quiet as this watching the continual
movement of a current. They neither knew nor cared how the time went
by. Ceaselessly the swift swirling lines made out to the centre of the
stream, and further down swept once more close in to the banks as the
conformation of the unseen channel directed the volume and the force.
The spring gurgled; its sunlit branch, wherein might be seen now and
again a darting minnow, with its _svelte_ shadow beneath it, flowed
timorously down to join the river till a sudden widening and a quicker
motion showed that its pulses felt the impetus of the stronger current.
A kill-deer, flying so low as to dip its wings, ever and anon alighted
on the margin, its stilt-like legs half submerged as it ran hither and
thither, now and then bending to dig in the sand with its long slender
bill. Suddenly there was a darker shadow in the water. A young woman
had abruptly emerged from the undergrowth on the opposite bank, and was
crossing the stream on the rickety little foot-bridge, consisting of
but one log, the upper side hewn; her balance was a trifle difficult
to maintain, as she carried a child in her arms. She looked eagerly
toward the two as they sat by the spring, thus essentially differing
from "leetle Mose," who, upon perceiving them, turned the back of his
pink sun-bonnet upon them with an air of sullen rejection, unaware how
the dignity of his demonstration was impaired by the diminutiveness
of his head-gear, and, sooth to say, of the head within it. If he had
expected to thus formidably crush the two spectators, he was mistaken;
but he could not observe how it affected them, for he buried his face
upon his mother's shoulder. She seemed fatigued and travel-worn as she
came near, and her face bore traces of recent weeping in the pathetic
drooping lips, the heavily lidded eyes, and her pallor. She strove
gallantly for a smile and to speak in a casual tone, as she said,
"Howdy, Litt?" Then, although nodding to Shattuck, for introductions
are not in vogue in this region, she went on, eagerly: "Did Steve
kem ter the infair? He 'lowed he would." She paused, biting her lips
hard to keep back the tears. Letitia looked uncertainly at Shattuck,
as if expecting him to reply. The benedict, drearily superfluous to
the festivities, had hardly been noticed by her as he lurked about
the walls and sought what entertainment was possible to one under the
social disabilities of matrimony.
"Who? Stephen Yates? Oh, yes," said Shattuck. "He talked to me a long
time. You were uneasy because he didn't come home?" he asked, with
facile sympathy. At the kind tones her self-control melted, and the
tears began to flow afresh. "The infair broke up with a row, and Mr.
Rhodes was hurt," he explained, holding out his cigar with a delicate
gesture, and touching off the long ash against a verge of the rock.
"Steve Yates went for the doctor on one of Mr. Pettingill's horses. It
seems to me that it is time for him to be back, too," he added, his
mind recurring to his own interest in the matter, and once more he
looked across the river and up the section of the road which became
visible for a little way along the side of a corn-field, expecting to
see the dust rise beneath the hoof-beats of the messenger's horse or
the doctor's buggy wheels. But all was still and silent; only the air
shimmered in the heat, and from amidst the blue-green expanse of the
corn he saw a mocking-bird rise in the ecstasy of its redundant song,
its wing-feathers a dazzling white in the sun, and drop back quivering
and still singing upon the unstable perch of a waving tassel.
Adelaide's tears continued to flow, although she sought to stanch them
now and again with the curtain of her sun-bonnet, which she pressed
to her eyes. She had seated herself upon one of the rocks on the
opposite side of the spring, and the "leetle Moses," whom she held
upon her knee, one arm passed about his sufficiently burly waist,
seeing that he was not noticed, indulged his own curiosity, and from
the interior of his pink sun-bonnet bent a stare of frowning severity
first upon Letitia, and then transferred his callow speculation to
Shattuck. Perhaps it was far less Adelaide's natural embarrassment
at thus meeting in tears a stranger than her divination of the young
girl's mental attitude toward her that roused her pride and the
resources of her fortitude. She sought to put away the recollection,
hardly less poignant than the reality, of the long sad hours of the
wakeful night--spent in reviewing the quarrel, repenting her hasty
words to her husband, and anon inconsistently angered anew because
of the memory of his own bitter sayings--the keen expectancy of the
lagging morning, and the terrible morbid fear that had grown upon her
jarred and shaken nerves that he would come back no more. Far, far
was all her feeling from the girl's comprehension, and she deprecated
that, with that half-scoffing face, Letitia should look in upon her
sorrows--disproportionate and fantastic though they might be, but none
the less piercing--and seek to gauge them by the narrow measure of her
own experience and her own untried, undeveloped gamut of emotions.
"I ain't a-goin' ter git married," remarked the fancy-free scoffer from
her perch, "till I kin find a man ez I kin trust wunst in a while ter
take keer o' hisself, a-goin' an' a-comin' from a neighbor's house.
Mus' be powerful sorrowful ter set at home an' shed tears lest he
mought hev stumped his toe on the road. Mighty oncommon kind o' man
I want, I know, but"--with resolution--"I be a-goin' ter s'arch the
mountings, far an' nigh, till I find him. I'd like ter marry a man ez
could be trusted ter take keer o' hisself, an' mought even, on a pinch,
take keer o' me."
Shattuck, with a smile, glanced across at the weeping wife, who laughed
a trifle hysterically amidst her tears, and said:
"Oh, _don't_, Litt!" Then, regaining her composure, she once more
pressed the curtain of her calico sun-bonnet to her eyes. It seemed
that her dignity required some explanation. "I wouldn't hev minded it
so," she said, "ef me an' Steve hedn't hed words. He wanted me ter kem
with him ter the infair, but I war 'feared ter bring leetle Mose, fur
he mought hev cotched the measles or the whoopin'-cough."
"He's safe now," remarked Letitia. "I be the youngest o' the fambly. I
hed the measles thirteen year ago, an' I never _did_ demean myself so
fur ez ter hev the whoopin'-cough."
Somehow the tone of raillery, the sense of the freedom and the
irresponsibility of the young girl, roused a vague sort of protest in
the other, only a few years older, but upon whose heart were so many
clamorous demands, all the dearer for their exactions. She felt bound
to set herself right. Who had ever a happier married life than she and
Stephen, a more contented home? And then the supreme unanimity of their
worship of the domestic god Dagon--the extraordinary "leetle Mose!"
"I 'low I wouldn't hev been sech a fool ef 'twarn't so uncommon fur
me an' Steve ter fall out," she said, her face resuming its serene
curves, her full, luminous dark eyes fixed with a sort of recognition
on Shattuck, which his quick senses apprehended as identification from
description. "I oughtn't ter hev set up my 'pinion 'gin his, I reckon.
He war mightily tuk up with a man--I reckon 'twar you-uns--ez hed been
a-diggin' in the Injun mounds."
Shattuck nodded in response to this unique introduction.
"An'--an'"--she faltered a trifle--"ez hed a mind ter go a-diggin' up
the bones o' them Leetle Stranger People o' ourn, ter--ter sati'fy
hisse'f what sort'n nation they used to be, an' ter git thar pearls
off'n thar necks."
There was a shocked gravity and surprise even on Letitia's face.
Adelaide had looked away toward the road, affecting to watch for an
approach, in despair of being able to fitly meet Shattuck's gaze after
saying this, which seemed to affect other people as a commonplace
matter, but to her was an accusation of the deepest turpitude. The
countenance of the infant Moses, still bent upon him with a sternly
investigating stare, was the only one whose gaze had not a covert
reproach. He hardly cared to argue with their prejudice. He sought to
effect a diversion--in questionable taste he might have deemed it at
another time, however little taste might be considered to be concerned
in his conversation with the humble mountaineers. He had often heard,
and had formally accepted as worthy of credence, the popular axioms
concerning the dangers of interference between man and wife. But he
certainly did not anticipate the effect of his words when he said:
"I shall have to look out for you, I hear. You are such a friend to
the Little People that you have loaded a rifle for me. What sort of a
shot are you, now; and how far will your rifle carry?" He cocked his
cigar between his teeth, and looked at her with an air of good-natured
raillery.
Her face seemed, in the shadow of her purple sun-bonnet, to be slowly
turning to stone, so rigid and white it was. She did not reply, but as
he noted her startling change of expression he felt a sudden rush of
indignation. The mountaineers, with their unconscious ignorance, their
intolerance of all standpoints save those within their own limitations,
their arrogations of censorship, their suspicions of occult wickedness
in his motives and intentions, their overt assumption of a right to
direct the public conscience, had begun to strongly anger him. His
capacity for making allowances was all at once exhausted, and he found
the intensity of her look strangely irksome.
"Well, what's the matter?' he asked, a trifle more roughly than he ever
permitted himself to speak to a woman; for he was a man of consciously
chivalric impulses, which he had willingly permitted to agreeably
tinge his manners. He held his cigar suspended between his fingers
while he waited.
"Did--did Steve tell you-uns _that_ word?" she cried, in a tone like
despair.
"Why, yes," he returned, promptly.
There was a moment when the vivid sunshine, the cool, dank shadows of
the foliage stirring with such soft dryadic murmurs above her head, the
song of the bird from the strong, rich effulgence of the corn-field,
the chant of the river, even the cry of her child, were as null to her
as if her every faculty had been numbed in the centuries of death that
crumbled slowly the pygmy burying-ground.
"Did _he_ tell that word on me?" she cried at last, her voice rising
discordantly. "He hev gone--he hev gone fur good. He warned me ef I
teched that rifle ter fire at them that disturbed the rest o' the
Leetle People whilst waitin' fur jedgment--or said that word--that he'd
turn me out'n his door. But he 'lowed 'twar the easiest way ter go
hisself. An' he hev gone--gone fur good." And once more she lapsed into
stony immobility.
Mr. Shattuck turned his cigar and looked down at it. It was a casual
gesture, but there was a spark of irritation in his eye. He had lost
all appreciation of any element of interest in her beauty, in the
picturesque charm of the surroundings. The incongruity that he and his
semi-scientific researches in his idle summer loiterings should become
involved in a foolish quarrel between a mountaineer and his wife struck
him as grotesque, and offended his every sense of the becoming. He had
piqued himself somewhat upon his sensibilities, his ever-ready sympathy
with all sorts and conditions of people. He had fine abilities in
many æsthetic ways; he could discern the higher values, to seek to
make them his own and assimilate them. He appreciated the correct
standpoint; he felt the susceptibility to the glow of a noble emotion,
and he appraised its possession exactly as he did his knowledge of the
Italian language--a fine thing _per se_, and one to grace a gentleman.
His capacity to enter into the feelings of the mountaineers, to meet
them, despite the heights of his learning and his social position,
without effort and without affectation, had extorted the admiration
and emulation of his friend the politician, versed in all the arts of
currying favor. But he was not equal to this crisis, since it bore
heavily upon the fund of pride encompassing his own personality.
His consideration, his kindness, his whole attitude was to them as
themselves, not in any sort as one with himself. He had not a word
of pity for her; he did not see, with that fine far sight which he
sometimes called insight, her long, desolate future that challenged her
eye and turned her heart cold; he had no perception of those farthest
perspectives of altruism, a share in another's morbid terror--he so
despised her folly.
And when once more she broke silence--"He hev gone!"--"I reckon not,"
he said, coolly, still looking with a smile at the end of his cigar,
and presently returning it to his lips.
The nervous strain of the moment seemed hardly capable of extension
till that most wearing and jarring sound, a fretful child's discordant
wail, rose upon the air. Perhaps her rigid arm hurt Moses; perhaps he
detected that something was going awry with her; perhaps he merely
felt too long overlooked and neglected; but the great Dagon lifted a
stentorian and unwelcome cry, and paused only with an air of vengeance,
as if he expected all who beheld to be properly dismayed, seized his
pink sun-bonnet by the crown, and cast it from him on the ground with a
great sweep of his short arm. As he gazed around, bald-headed, to note
the effect, his sullen eye encountered Letitia's, who was for once in
her life silenced and amazed by the turn affairs had taken. She made an
effort to regain her balance.
"I ain't s'prised none ef ye want some water," she said, producing the
great brown gourd, and bending down to submerge it in the depths of the
cool, gurgling, crystal spring.
"Leetle Mose," emitting a piercing shriek of anger that she should
take the liberty of addressing him, flung himself with averted face
into his mother's arms. The tone went through Shattuck's head, so to
speak; his brows knitted involuntarily with pain; he was about to rise
to go in-doors, for the possible embarrassments and discomforts of
conversation with old Zack Pettingill were insignificant indeed to the
hardships encountered in the society of "leetle Mose," upon whom he
cast a look of aversion, forgetting that he was a specific unit of that
genus, man, for whom Shattuck felt so largely.
Feminine ears seem curiously callous to that frenzied infantile
shrillness. Letitia, all unaffected, brought the brimming gourd close
to the shrieking Mose, who turned to find it beside him. Now the way
had been long, and the sun was hot, and had burnt the great Dagon as
if he had been any common person. The deep coolness of the gourd--it
must have been very large to his eye--allured him. He involuntarily
gave a bounce and a gurgle of delight. Few people ever saw "leetle
Mose" smile, and a most beguiling demonstration it was. His elastic
pink lips parted wide; his few teeth, so hardly come by, glittered;
his very tongue, coyly dumb--though it was better tutored than it
would admit--might be seen frisking between his gums. He waited
expectantly for his mother for a moment, and as she did not move he
permitted Letitia to serve him; he reached out eagerly, holding the
gourd with both hands, lifting his pink feet as if he intended to stay
the bottom of the vessel by those members, and after several futile,
ill-directed bounces he succeeded in applying his soft lips to the
verge. He stopped, sputtering, once to look up, with laughing eyes
full of gladness and with a dripping chin, at Letitia, and then, as
he plunged his head again to the water, they could hear him laughing
and gurgling in the gourd that echoed cavernously. The specific unit
became all at once more tolerable to contemplate. Shattuck, in laughing
ridicule of him, glanced at Letitia. Her eyes did not meet his. She
was staring intently at the section of the road visible at some little
distance by the side of the corn-field. He turned to follow her gaze.
He had not before noticed the thud of hoofs; the sound was upon the
air now. From out the deep shadow about the spring naught was visible
in the sun-flooded highway but a cloud of dust, every mote red in the
dazzling radiance. The approach had been obscured by the intervening
undergrowth that grew close about the river where the road came down
to the bank. He could still hear the thud of hoofs. Did he fancy it,
he asked himself suddenly, or was there something erratic suggested
in the sound? Certainly the interval was strangely long, reckoning by
the distance, while they stood and watched the close undergrowth on
the opposite bank, and waited for the rider to emerge from the covert.
At last, as the horse appeared, the mystery was solved. He was a bay
horse, in good condition, with a long stride, and an old-fashioned
Mexican saddle with a high-peaked pommel. He came down the slope and
waded into the water in a slouching, undetermined way, now and then
turning his head to look with wondering dissatisfaction at the heavy,
swaying stirrups as his movements caused them to lunge heavily back
and forth--for they were empty, and the saddle bore no rider. He
paused to drink in the middle of the stream, but as Letitia ran toward
him, calling "Cobe! Cobe!" he desisted, looked intelligently at her,
and again at his swaying empty stirrups. He could have told much,
evidently, if he had not been dumb. Then he came readily trotting
through the water, which swept away from his swift strides in foamy
circles, and, struggling up the bank, let her catch his bridle and
stroke his head. He shook his mane and neighed with pleasure to be at
home again.
[Illustration: "THE SADDLE BORE NO RIDER."]
Adelaide was standing, her child in her arms, gazing breathlessly at
him. Letitia, still stroking the animal's head, had turned a pale face
and eyes full of vague appeal upon Shattuck.
"I don't understand," he exclaimed.
"This is the horse he rode," she said.