Leonard Rhodes arose from the bed to which his wounds had consigned
him when he was at last permitted to dispense with the vigilant care
and alert fears of the "yerb doctor." The methods of Phil Craig's
practice consisted largely in frustrating disastrous possibilities.
"Ye can't git up; ye _mought_ fever," he replied to every appeal.
"Ye mustn't think 'bout nuthin'; ye _mought_ fever!" And after the
extreme limits which had been assigned to Rhodes's durance were
reached, the doctor revoked his promises of liberation, and required
of him one day more, quiet and recumbent, for full measure. Rhodes
might hardly have submitted had he not been willing that the community
should think his hurt more serious than it really was. He himself
appreciated that the wound was as trivial as it might be. But there
was something disastrous to the pretensions of a candidate in the
disproportionate importance that had been attached to it--the insult,
for its paltry sake, that his friend had offered to Mr. Pettingill,
his host, and a man who habitually voted with the opposite faction;
and in a minor degree the slur cast upon the science of Phil Craig,
who cared, however, not at all, looking upon Rhodes merely as an
object of flesh and blood that might, under certain contingencies,
perversely undertake to fever. Most of all, Rhodes deprecated the
tragic conclusion of the midnight errand in his interest on which
Steve Yates had been despatched. Although the community had generally
accepted the conclusion that Yates had seized the opportunity for
some unknown reason--a quarrel with his wife was frequently assigned
as the cause--to flee the country, there were those who shook their
heads darkly over the mystery, with misgivings and grim suggestions and
hopes that "the body" would be found some day. And from these rumors
Leonard Rhodes feared the defeat of all his cherished schemes. It was
a personal popularity which he sought to conserve. Party feeling ran
very high, and in point of strength the two opposing factions were
closely matched. It was only by virtue of his own superior quality of
comradeship, his geniality, the fact that he was untried and had the
fascination of novelty, and was held to possess certain elements of
character challenging admiration--being esteemed brave, gay, full of
generous high spirits--that he had expected to overbear the balance,
swinging at an impartial poise, and tip it ever so slightly in his
favor. How far this prospect had been wrecked, how indissolubly his
name was coupled with ridicule or reprobation, he had hardly dared to
consider as he lay at length watching the light and shadow play in the
full-leaved sycamore-tree close by the roof-room window, the flash of
sunshine on the white wings of the nesting pigeons by the chimney, the
wolf-skins swaying from the rafters, sometimes seeming, when the sun
was low and the wind flickered, to reassume the symmetries of life,
and to lurk there, with shining eyes and expectant motion, ready to
spring. He could hear the river chant tirelessly its sweet low monody
in its sylvan shadows; he knew the hour by the voice of the herds,
and felt scant need of his watch ticking under his pillow; but most
of all the flight of time was indicated by the sibilant wheeze of
Mrs. Pettingill, often audibly conferring below stairs concerning the
patient's dinner with the anxious, conscientious, cautious Craig, who
seemed to consider all the disorders of the body to arise from the bad
habit of eating to nourish it. His professional interdiction was upon
almost every dish in Mrs. Pettingill's répertoire; but his back would
be hardly turned before her heavy lumbering step was on the stair, and
her countenance, red from bending over the coals, would appear above
the door in the floor, and she would emerge carrying in her hand her
appetizing blue bowl, or one of her large willow-pattern plates that
knew more antiquated delicacies than often grace much finer ware.
Corrugated consciousness of dereliction would be on her face, but a
resolute determination to persevere in sinning.
"Ef Phil Craig hev got the heart ter starve ye, I _ain't_," she would
wheeze. "An' ef ye air so contrairy-minded ez ter die o' this hyar
leetle squab pie an' roastin' ears--roasted in thar husks--an' a
small taste o' cheese and this transparent puddin', I'll jes' swear
I _didn't_ kill ye, an' ye hed _nuthin'_ from my han' but _cold
spring-water_."
And having thus adjusted her deceit to the possible pursuit of the
laws of the land, she would administer her dainties, often descending
heavily to her lair below-stairs for a fresh supply.
Thus it was that with all the hues of health, all his usual vigor
of step and manner, Rhodes appeared once more before the gaze of the
constituents whom he fain would capture.
"Hello! Ye've been 'possumin', Len," was the surprised cry that greeted
him wherever he came. And although he might good-naturedly parry it,
and respond to praise the "yerb doctor's" skill, still the fact that he
had been scarcely hurt at all went the rounds of the gossips and caused
much speculation.
"'Twar a powerful onlucky hit fur Steve Yates," one of the mountaineers
observed at the blacksmith's shop one day, where a group stood about
the door. "Ef' twarn't fur that, he'd hev been hyar yit, I reckon."
"Why did that thar Shattuck hev ter sen' Steve a-skedaddlin' off in the
midnight fur another doctor-man when Phil Craig war thar, handy ter
physic Rhodes with everything ez grows? That 'pears powerful cur'ous
ter me," said the blacksmith, "every time I git ter studyin' 'bout'n
it."
"Mark my words," said an elderly wight, the smith's father, who spent
much time gossiping in his son's shop--he had a grizzled head of hair,
on which his hat was tilted backward; a clean-shaven face, full of
the script of years; and a manner not less weighty and impressive
because his opinions were in some sort impeded by a toothless
utterance, so did the evidences of age and experience lend value to his
prelections--"whenst ye find out _whar_ Steve Yates went, an' _what_ he
went thar fur, ye'll know why Shattuck sent him. They air tergether in
that business. Mark my words!"
The suspicion exploded like a bomb-shell amongst the coterie, doing
great execution. It was so patent a possibility that Shattuck should
have used his friend's temporary unconsciousness and his own affected
solicitude as a blind to despatch Steve Yates upon some mysterious
errand of their own, from which he was never intended to return, that
it amazed all the cronies that so obvious an idea had never occurred
to them before. Far more natural than that Shattuck should experience
so preposterous a fear for so slight a hurt. "Why," said the old man,
"Rhodes looks ez survigrous ez that thar oak-tree!" pointing to a
kingly and stalwart specimen, full-leaved and flush of sap, in all its
ample verdure, as it stood overlooking the barn-like place. Far more
natural than that Shattuck should distrust the science of Philip Craig,
famous as a "yerb doctor," and prefer Dr. Ganey, the man of nauseous
tinctures and extracts, and pills and powders, who was reputed,
moreover, to have poisoned people by his "store drugs," and was known
to have set a man's leg, fractured by a fall, so that although he
walked he could not run nor leap, and had had the good use of it never
since--to send for him, with Phil Craig at hand!
There were busy times after this at the blacksmith's shop, although
not much forging was done, so completely did the mystery absorb
both the frequenters of the place and its working force. They made
a thousand guesses far from the truth, none of which seemed, even
to the projectors, sufficiently plausible to adopt, until one day a
conjecture, with all the coercive force of probability, came to their
minds upon the receipt of strange news, which seemed to account at
once for Steve Yates's absence and Shattuck's motive in employing him
on this wild-goose chase.
On the previous day Shattuck had been singularly ill at ease. He was
not a man vigilant for cause of offence, and when his friendship and
trustfulness had been enlisted he was even obtuse to any change in
the moral temperature of his associates. It had affected his nerves
vaguely, before the fact was even elusively present to his perceptions,
that Rhodes had begun to regard him differently, and that the new
estimate colored his friend's manner. As this gradually grew upon
his convictions, he received it with a sense of injury. He had in
naught justified it. His presence here was not of his own motion.
He remembered how Rhodes had besought his companionship upon this
electioneering tour; how he had painted the beauties of the country,
the quaint character of its inhabitants; how he had promised the
opening of a mound on his own land to feed his friend's archæological
fad, and a monopoly of all the curios that should be found therein,
floridly offering them as lures, protesting himself, too, as under
infinite prospective obligations, and urging his own interest. "I
have to have a friend along, and Lord knows I don't want any of those
Colbury galoots, with one word for me and ten for themselves."
And when Shattuck had acceded, and the peculiarity of his manner had
proved attractive to the mountaineers, and encomiums from the simple
people followed him here and there, Rhodes had been impressed with the
idea that his friend was an immense acquisition and a positive help
in the canvass, in which small matters of personal popularity would
have to count against party principles. Few men in this world could
be more engagingly genial and affectionate than was Leonard Rhodes
at this stage of his onslaught upon the predilections of Kildeer
County. Shattuck, who gave as slight attention as might be to these
circumstances and their influence upon his friend's manner, had only
felt that his heart warmed in turn. Although vaguely aware for some
time that a change had supervened, he experienced a shock when a surly
preoccupation, an intentional espousing of an opposite opinion, which
evidently had no root in conviction, a dull monosyllable in reply, that
was hardly reply at all, acquainted him definitely with Rhodes's state
of mind and his indifference to its discovery--nay, that he rather
courted a quarrel.
The culmination came shortly after the midday dinner; they still sat in
the dining-room and smoked their pipes over a small smouldering fire,
for, despite the brilliance of a July day, the air was chilly. They had
gone back from Pettingill's cabin to Rhodes's own house, some seven
miles distant down the valley, and were re-established there. It had
been unoccupied for many a year; the transient tenant merely rented the
lands of the farm; the house and the furniture remained much as his
grandfather had left them. It was a double frame house, with curiously
low ceilings; and although it had been for fifty years amazingly fine
for the district, it was not quite equal to Colbury ideals, and its
owner often pondered upon getting rid of it when he should have a
sufficient offer for its purchase. He had lately utilized it as a point
of departure for his hill-country canvass of the two counties, being
more convenient than periodic returns to Colbury, and he had in the
kitchen a scornful colored couple--strictly townsfolk--languishing in
exile, amazed at the lack of culture of the mountaineers, and by the
fact that there was so large an extent of waste country in the world.
"Ef Len Rhodes hatter be made gov'nor o' the State, he ain't gwine ter
do it by foolin' dis chile agin up ter dis hyar mizzable, destitute
wilderness ter cook fur him, sure!" Aunt Chancy had remarked to the
equally disaffected and lugubrious Uncle Isham, who had come to cut
wood and feed the horses.
Rhodes made no inquiry as to how they contrived to get through the
lonely time during his absences, nor was he moved by their reproachful
dark faces in the interludes of his returns. They were fond of society,
and ornaments of select colored circles in their normal sphere, and
their imaginings had never pictured aught so bereft of interest as this
uninhabited space in the "flat woods" so near to the great ranges.
The house itself touched Shattuck's predilections. To him a peony,
highly colored, on a black ground, in a mahogany frame, made a picture
full of quaint character. The tall four-post bedsteads, with paper
canopy emblazoned with a wreath of morning-glories, which suggested
matutinal and industrial ideas rather than slothful lingerings beneath
their fading blooms; the three or four carpeted steps at the foot
of the bed, a sort of movable stair to enable one to mount into its
comforts; the long serpentine sand-bag, which lay at the door to keep
out the draughts; the stretch of mountains, blue far away, darkly
bronze near at hand, that was visible from the tiny panes of every
window--all combined to so suggest the past, to so disunite it from the
present, that imagination needed little else to set these dim rooms
astir again with former occupants, and to give him many an idle hour of
pensive fantasies over his pipe.
He had glanced out of the door as he strolled about the dining-room,
which opened on the porch at the side of the house; a mass of
grape-vines twined over its dank and rotting roof; the heavy clusters
of fruit had ripened here and there to a rich purple, with a silver
bloom upon it, and again showed only translucent amber globules
trenching upon a roseate hue. Amongst them all a tangle of white
microphylla roses, their branches clambering high, was splendidly in
blossom, and through the vista he saw the distant blue peaks of the
Great Smoky Mountains, with the elusively glimmering mists upon them.
"Len," he said, suddenly, "you are a fool if you cut away that lot
of grapes and roses. Let the porch rot. You can get a hundred such
porches, but you won't come up with a tangle like that again in a
lifetime."
Rhodes sat at ease, his chair tilted backward; his legs were extended
at full length. His pipe was in his mouth, and his hat stuck on the
back of his head; his richly brown hair was disordered on his forehead;
his face was flushed, partly from the heat of the fire, partly from
the smouldering irritation which Shattuck did not as yet divine; his
nose, usually an inconspicuous feature, white and firm-fleshed, looked
swollen and red, as if he had been drinking; his ungraceful posture
drew his waistcoat into creases, and his old claret-colored coat, with
a velvet collar, seemed high-shouldered and ungainly as he stayed his
shoulder-blades against the back of the chair.
"Well, _I'll_ undertake to do as _I_ choose with my own," he broke
forth, suddenly. "I'll put the axe to the root of the whole business if
I want to."
Shattuck looked at him in amaze. "Why, of course, and welcome. What do
you mean?" His tone was surprised and wounded, but pacific.
Rhodes, with a certain relief in liberating the pent-up tides of his
vexation, went on with a visible increase of vehemence. "I mean that I
have had about as much of your interference in my affairs as I have got
a mind to put up with." He spoke between his set teeth, and with a toss
of his hair, which was prone to fall upon his face.
Shattuck stood motionless, scarcely believing he had heard aright. A
flush had mounted through his thin skin. He had a dismayed and hurt
expression that was almost appealing. It was not that he found Rhodes's
displeasure itself so overwhelming. That meant little to him. He was
only aghast that Rhodes should make him feel it while a guest in the
house. All the exigencies of hospitality hampered its recipient, and he
hardly knew how to assert himself, how to lift his voice in defence.
"Will you tell me how I have interfered with you?" he asked, an almost
imperceptible tremor in his tone. His eyes were fixed upon Rhodes,
who did not meet them in turn, but kept his gaze upon the fire, still
slowly smouldering.
"How? Well, I like that!" He cast his eyes up to the high mantel-piece,
and laughed a little, showing his teeth--white and strong, but
overcrowded and unevenly placed.
With all his odd bits of learning, Shattuck knew little of human
nature. He had mastered more of the science of craniology than of those
fine aerial transient guests that the skull may house--retroactive
motives and full-winged schemes, and, strongest of all, that moral
harlequin, coming and going, none knows whence or whither, the impulse.
A mad bull is hardly in a state of mind or on a plane of culture to
appreciate an accurately balanced syllogism, but Shattuck must needs
offer logic to Rhodes:
"No stranger here could have influence enough with these people to
interfere in your affairs. I am a stranger here. I could not interfere
even if I would. How could I? Why should I?"
"That's what gets me!" cried his host, coarsely. "_Why_ you should
have undertaken to send seventeen miles for a doctor to physic a small
scratch on the head, and _how_ you could insinuate to an old man, whose
guest I was--had forced myself on him, in fact, as well as you--that he
might be strung up if I should die in his house for no fault of his--it
all passes my comprehension."
Shattuck's flush grew deeper. His eyes, whose reproachful look the
other never met, had a hot, hunted, harried look.
"I wouldn't have had it happen," cried Rhodes, clasping his hands
behind his tousled head, the change in his attitude adding to the
dislocation of his aspect and the precariousness of his posture, his
chair still balanced on its hind-legs, his own legs still stretched out
at full length--"I wouldn't have had Steve Yates sent on that lonely
road at midnight on my errand, if I had known it, for a million--a
_quadrillion_ of dollars."
"Money seems really no object," Shattuck retorted, somewhat in his
host's own vein. His eyes were alert now. The dull, hurt look had
vanished. He was moved to defend himself against a reproach, unjust,
indeed, but which his own troubled heart and tormented conscience and
sensitive consciousness had often urged in their reasonless impunity.
He was in naught to blame that any evil had befallen Yates--this
he knew full well--and still he regretted, and still he reproached
himself. And because of this he had become expert at his logical
self-defence, and he sprang to its weapons as if for his life.
"A lonely road!" he sneered. "A late hour! As if I, a stranger in the
country, did not travel it alone, and at midnight too, to escape the
heat of a daytime journey, as everybody does who has occasion to come
or go at this season. I took excellent care of myself upon it. I met
nothing but a rabbit or two and a few stray cattle. It never occurred
to me that Yates was not as safe on that road as in his own house. And
I _did not_ ask him to go. He volunteered. I _did_ make too great a
commotion over your being hurt, and I admit it. I was a fool for that;
and I was mistaken--considerably--both in the nature of the wound and
the man that got it. I gave myself too much solicitude altogether, far
more than the subject warranted."
His eyes had succeeded in meeting Rhodes's at last, but they saw
little of what was before them. The candidate had lowered his arms to
a normal posture; the fore-legs of his chair had dropped to the floor;
he sat erect, looking intently and deprecatingly at his angry friend,
so hard to rouse, so thoroughly roused at last. Rhodes was of that
temperament best controlled by the exhibition of a counterpart emotion.
Shattuck's anger quelled his own. He was eager to interrupt, wincing
under the low-toned words, husky with passion. He was of versatile
capacities; he could be a balance-weight were there no one else to keep
the poise. His anger was only indulged under the license of impunity.
It had evaporated as if it had never fired his blood. He received
the demonstration with a palpable surprise--as though he had done
naught to provoke it--when his friend, turning toward the door, said,
ceremoniously:
"And now, Mr. Rhodes, if you will add to your kind hospitality, for
which I am indebted, the favor of ordering my horse, I will trouble you
with my 'interference' no more."
Even Shattuck felt that he had gone too far, that he had needlessly
quarrelled on a small provocation, when the other called out, naturally:
"Why, Shattuck, I _am_ surprised! You ought to be ashamed to get mad
so easy, when you know how I'm bothered and tormented out of my life.
And with so much at stake! And you won't let me growl a little bit here
with you at home, when I can afford to growl nowhere else, confound it!
You ought to be ashamed!"
Shattuck hesitated. He cast a worried, agitated glance out of the
window into the large freedom of the sunshine and the wind and the
flying shadows of the fleecy summer clouds. There came a day when he
remembered the moment, when he regretted that he had not ridden off
into the buoyant midst of these lightsome elements. But at the time
it seemed impracticable. There was something ludicrous, even more,
unbecoming a gentleman, in leaving a friend's house in a pet, with
the host's reproaches sounding in his ears, to be matched only by the
bitterness of the guest's sneering retorts. There was, it is true,
that implacable pride within him to which forgiveness is an unimagined
possibility, and every fibre of it was poignantly astir. He did not
conceive it possible that he could ever overlook Rhodes's lapse into
the blunt speech of angry sincerity, unjustified by whatever his host
might have come to feel. But he must have the semblance of comity and
courtesy. In fact, he could hardly bestride his horse and ride away
from the man's door without this friendliness, spurious though it might
be, in his farewell. His face gave such token of his train of thought
that Rhodes, although seeing him hearken to the suggestion of amity,
did not swing back to the half-veiled surliness, too often the effect
of an accepted effort at reconciliation.
"Lordy mercy! I'll let the weeds grow sky-high if you want to see the
place go to rack and ruin," he said, as he bent forward to scoop up a
coal in his pipe after the rural fashion he affected. "I didn't think
you'd treat me so mean--the only friend I've got left; a broken reed,
sure!" with a glance of reproach. "You might afford to let me maunder,
and blame you or anybody else, I should think, for the confounded
affair. As I'm likely to lose my election by it, I might have the poor
privilege of a scape-goat."
"I won't play your scape-goat, I thank you very much," said Shattuck,
his eyes eager with his wish to go, still hovering about the closed
door.
"So I perceive," said Rhodes, shortly. Then, with a change of tone
and an appealing glance of his dark-brown eyes: "But, for God's sake,
Shattuck, don't run away and leave me the minute I flounder into a
lot of bothers! For the Lord's mercy, try to put up with me a little,
and let me grumble once in a while, for I do swear to you this whole
thing has put me nearly beside myself. You know it is a canvass of
personalities, and there's no telling the use this will be to Devens
and his friends. If I can't carry these mountain districts _I'm done_,
for the party issues will beat me like hell in Colbury and round about."
He took out of the breast pocket of the old claret-colored coat the
envelope of a letter, which was scrawled over with figures pertaining
to the relative population of the mountain districts, with an
approximative calculation of the votes which he and his opponent might
respectively receive. The smoke from his pipe curled between the paper
and his eyes, but not even its sinuous vagaries served to alter the
obdurate result, nor had his disaffected anxious gaze any effect,
however slight, although he scanned these estimates forty times a day.
"I wish to God I knew where that confounded fellow Yates was!" he
exclaimed. "They'll all have it that he died on account of _my_
selfishness, being forced into Lord knows what dangers in my service."
Then, with the politician's instinct for a popular pose--although
at his own fireside, and with a man whom he did not care nor seek to
deceive--he continued: "And for his sake, Shattuck, I'm more troubled
than for my own. Why, I give you my word of honor, 1 hardly knew how to
speak to his wife--I nearly said his widow--when I went to the house
yesterday. And I couldn't look at that child of his. It's a calamity
to them--a tremendous calamity--and I am concerned in it; and the Lord
above knows I had no more to do with it than if I had been as dead as
Hector!"
Shattuck had seated himself, his elbow over the back of the chair, his
chin in his hand. He frowned heavily as he looked absently out of the
tiny window-panes at the blue mountains, with so unseeing and troubled
a gaze that Rhodes began to perceive that he had not only his own
anxieties to restrain, but those of his friend as well. He sighed to
assume the double load. He had a definite appreciation, however, that
his position would hardly be bettered by his friend's desertion of him
now, when he could not control the reasons therefore which Shattuck
might give in his anger, and his opponent devise with so illimitable a
license as speculation. He came to wish that he had let him go, but at
that moment he exerted all his reserve force of geniality to heal the
wound and frustrate his guest's departure.
"Oh, come on!" he cried out, suddenly, springing up actively,
stretching both arms above his head, shaking out first one leg and then
the other, that the trousers might slip down over his long boots, and
seeking to rid himself of that stupor which waits on drowsing before
a fire out of season--"come on! We are fairly baked before this fire.
What ails that old nigger to build a big enough fire this weather to
barbecue himself--and I wish he would! I'll order both the horses, and
we will get out into the air, and get the cobwebs out of our brains.
We'll ride up to Fee Guthrie's on the mountain, and I'll do a little
electioneering, and show I bear no malice to him. And you'll see if
he won't let you go digging around on his land in the cove for your
pygmies. I declare I haven't treated you right, old fellow;" he clapped
his hand jocularly on his guest's shoulder as they stood facing each
other, and his manner of friendliness was not impaired, although he
did not fail to see that Shattuck winced almost imperceptibly at his
touch. "You haven't got a thing in the world but that old jug out of my
mound"--and he glanced with a careless eye at a strangely decorated jar
on the high mantel-piece--"and not a bone of a pygmy yet. Maybe Aunt
Chancy could fool you with a beef bone or two--ha! ha! ha!--hearing you
set such store on bones, hey?"
His discretion and his intuition were at fault. There is naught of
which the man of science, albeit the veriest amateur, is so intolerant
as ignorant ridicule. His fleering laugh jarred Shattuck's nerves,
made sensitive by the ordeal of the morning, and his utter lack of
appreciation of the meaning of that bit of pottery was as pitiable as
if he lacked a sense--that of sight, for instance, and jeered at the
idea of light. The human significance of it; the lost history of lands
and peoples and civilization, of which it was a dim, vague intimation;
the flight of time that it so fully expressed; the idea of death, of
oblivion, of which it was so apt an exponent! Shattuck could not look
at it without the thought of the hands that had carried it; the lips
that had touched it; the strange, strange faces that had bent above
it, reflected within its walls when full of water; the words, spoken
in an unknown, forgotten language, of ambition or love or homely
household usage, to which it had echoed--for a vibrant quality it had,
porcelain-like. These immortal-seeming essences were all gone; yet here
was the dumb insensate bit of clay left for him to turn in his foreign
hands and ponder over with his foreign fancies--the idea wrung every
fibre of feeling within him! And Rhodes's laugh was the vulgarity of
the vandal.
The state of vacuity that does not feel and cannot know is made
cognizable sometimes to the thinking and the feeling soul by a
dreary sense of solitude, for which the consciousness of the finer
susceptibility does not compensate. It was not that Shattuck
resented the fact that his friend's limitations precluded his
sharing these enthusiasms, as that that burden of isolation, that
painful consciousness of a lack of congeniality, that yearning for
fellowship, so poignant to the gregarious human animal, came upon him
for the moment; a realization of being alone, out of the reach of his
companion, beset him, and he found it bitter, albeit he recognized that
his higher standpoint created the inaccessibility.
Rhodes, once more in the saddle, was infinitely conversable. He had
on the face which he took about with him on his canvass--his best
expression, gay, gentle, kind; his conversation was full of country
jokes, which he delivered with a rural drawl, and he was about as
rustic a specimen as an educated man can well personate. He never
dropped the character for a moment, although he hardly cared to impress
his friend with its value. Its lapses from his usual habit of speech
revolted Shattuck in some sort, albeit the contorted language of the
ignorant mountaineers never grated upon his somewhat nice philological
prejudices. One was the voice of affectation--an aping of boorishness
and rusticity and yeoman simplicity, which Shattuck called by the not
inapt name of "poor-mindedness;" the other was the natural speech and
manners of those deprived of opportunities of culture, and was entitled
to respect as being the best they could do.
"Bless your soul, Rhodes," he said at last, with a touch of satire,
"you needn't put so many negatives in a sentence with the kind object
of pleasing me; I'm not a registered voter in either of your counties.
And I love you so that I'd vote for you, if I could, just as willingly
for three or four negatives in a single negation as for eight. Save 'em
up, my dear boy. I remember the fate of the man who couldn't say 'No,'
but I must say I _don't_ think it impends for you at present."
"Hello! I didn't know you were such a school-master. I'll have to mind
my p's and q's, hey?" said Rhodes, with a good-natured intonation,
although he had flushed darkly at the taunt.
So instilled into his blood was the instinct of policy, however, that
he abated naught of his determination to conciliate his friend if
possible beyond this merely outward truce. And now was illustrated
how subservient is the science of propitiation to the object upon
which it is exerted, for Leonard Rhodes had been held to possess
the subtle art to an extreme degree, and so proficient had he become
therein that he was wont to find its unctuous exercise a pleasure.
He could but himself admire the dexterity with which he brought the
conversation to prehistoric America, especially prehistoric Tennessee.
He had paused when they had reached one of the high ridges about the
base of the great mountains far above, and he called to Shattuck to
observe that, looking back toward his place, they could distinctly see
the mound, and that, looking forward down the multitudinous defiles
amongst the ranges, the pygmy burying-ground might be located by
the proximity of the cataract, a mere cascade in the distance, an
emerald gleam and a glittering, white, plume-like waving. Thence the
transition was easy to the many antiquities found within the state.
To his surprise, Shattuck seemed incomprehensibly to hold back and to
grow reticent. Rhodes had material to work upon far different from the
simple unsuspecting country folk. He had not thought that divination
could so keep pace with most secret and supple intention, and that his
object was perfectly plain and unglossed to the man whom it sought to
mislead. Shattuck was almost openly impatient of the topic on which he
was wont to love to talk, and which he often could not be prevailed
upon to relinquish. He would not seriously discuss it now. When Rhodes
demanded of him a theory concerning the ancient aboriginal races,
based upon evidences of their advanced civilization, he replied with
uncharacteristic flippancy that he was never acquainted with any of
them, and that he could make a pretty pot of money if he had been. And
when Rhodes, with that heavy assuming ignorance which is so ready to
trench upon unknown, untried ground of laborious research, deeming all
things slight and of small difficulty that are strange to its meagre
acquisitions, attempted to argue certain hypotheses upon which he had
heard him descant, Shattuck left the disquisition to his host, not even
affecting to set him right when Rhodes himself could feel that he was
floundering. The candidate was wanting in any fine capacity to read
character or conduct in its more delicate script, and Shattuck's state
of mind was as undecipherable hieroglyphics. Thus at cross-purposes
they at last reached Guthrie's home, high up on the mountain.