He was not sorry that farther conversation was precluded by the
necessity of riding in single file, for the road, rocky and narrow,
hardly more than a bridle-path, indeed, was beset by precipices, now
on one side, now on the other, and again sheer down on both, their way
lying along the crest of a high comb-like ridge, above abysses veiled
by the heavy growth of pines, the plumy tops waving far below. Rhodes
and Shattuck found it needful to give careful heed to their steps, for
their horses, bred in the "flat woods," trod this narrow ridge with a
gingerly gait as if the ground were hot, with pricked-up ears, and with
now and again a convulsive snort of surprise and disparagement. But
the sure-footed mountain mare, well inured to the craggy heights, went
deftly and carelessly along at a sharp trot, occasionally snatching a
casual mouthful from the bushes that precariously clung to the wayside,
while the colt, with the nimblest disregard of lurking dangers,
caracoled and curveted, now in advance and now behind the party,
showing its flying, unshod heels in almost impossible attitudes against
the sky, inconsistent with the laws of gravity and of standing upon
the earth at all. Here could be seen the great contours of the range,
invisible from the cove, or but dimly suggested by variant shades. The
massive slopes rose on every hand; from deep intervenient ravines came
now and then silver gleams of mountain torrents among the crags and
the pines. Often and often the tremors and tinklings of hidden streams
struck clearly on the ear, mingled with the sigh of the rustling
foliage, and their breath gave to the fragrant air freshness. A great
peak near at hand loomed up high against the sky; as the horsemen made
a sudden turn the massive shoulder of the mountain intervened and the
dome disappeared. The cove seemed nearer and nearer whenever a glimpse
of it was vouchsafed from amidst the dark-green forest that presently
towered about them, for the road now ran through the woods upon a broad
slope, with ever and anon a cliff beetling over their way. The dense
foliage of the laurel jungles was bronzed by the sunlight, growing ever
more tawny as the afternoon waned. Purple shadows were lurking in the
midst of the valley. Farthest mountains, blue once, were violet now
and faintly flushed. And when at last the horsemen emerged from the
densities of the woods into the clifty gorge, and rode still in single
file upon the swaying, hollow-sounding bridge, they found a deep red
cloud reflected in the river, and all the harbingers of twilight abroad
in the cove. The smoke from the Yates cabin, seeming nearer than the
fact might warrant, since the undulations of the land, which plodding
feet must measure, were not a part of the line of sight, curled up
with a brisk convolution and a volume that heralded the evening meal.
All adown the lane the cows were coming home, and the mellow clanking
of their bells accented the quietude. Some night-blooming flower
was awake in the woods with a sweet, wild, indefinite odor. Here and
there on the purple slope, reputed to be the pygmy burying-ground, a
fire-fly flickered, swift, elusive, evanescent. And on a great blooming
laurel-bush the mocking-bird sang, heedless of the darkness to come,
heedless of the day gone by, possessed by its fervor of music that made
gloom light and all life a joyance, like some enthusiast soul in the
ecstasy of a gift, unmindful of the world and of all the paltry outward
aspects.
"This hyar big laurel-bush air a good landmark," Ephraim said, turning
in his saddle, his hand on his mare's back, that he might better
reverse his posture as he spoke to the two men that followed. "About
the only one thar be, too. We had better begin thar, I reckon. Fur
ef ye find nuthin,' ye'd know whar ye started ef ever ye kem ter dig
ag'in. The t'other trees air all too much alike." And he turned his
face again toward the mare's head, and surveyed anew the space before
him.
Singularly clear it was and free from underbrush; the steepness of the
slope and the great draught of the gorge made it a fair field for the
fierce autumn fires that annually swept over it. Only the gigantic oak
and poplar and chestnut-trees were spared, standing full-leaved and
in a heavy phalanx upon the declivity. Beneath their boughs mystery
lurked unsolved. A sentiment of awe, of doubt, of reluctance took
possession even of Rhodes's prosaic mind as he reined up in the deep
shadow. He drew out his watch, albeit he had resolved that he would not
remonstrate.
"Will you have time, Shattuck?" he said. "Hadn't you better wait until
to-morrow?"
"I war a-thinkin' ez much myself," said Ephraim, turning a hopeful face
toward Shattuck, who had drawn rein, and sat motionless upon his horse,
looking about him with a quick dilated eye, as if he hardly heard.
The strange place! The thronging shadows! How many times had they
mustered here! With what pathetic sense was the silence replete! What
tears had been shed for those who lay here hushed, and themselves
would weep no more, as once they had wept in that universal heritage
of sorrow! What hearts had bled that these hearts, dust now, should
cease to beat! Time--there is no time, when man through all the vain
centuries can feel so close to man, can think his thoughts and measure
the throb in pulses long ago stilled. Ah! the confusion of tongues
wrought no divergence here! The conclusiveness of the grave, however
named; the yearning sense of loss; the insistent expectation, nay,
the imperative demand of the soul that this terrible pause, this
nullity, should not be the final period of that fair promise called
life--all hung about the forgotten pygmy burying-ground with infinite
mystery, with unassuaged pathos. Only science, of all the developments
of the human mind, might fitly take account of the mere functional
disabilities which it represented--might speculate and exert its fine
rational inferential imagination, and construct a status from assumed
facts, and promulgate dicta so founded, to be received and accepted
for a time, and then demolished by a still more fine-spun theory in
what is called the march of progress. These forces were astir in
Shattuck as he flung himself from the saddle. His brow was slightly
corrugated, his eyes were alight, his pulses beat at fever-heat; not
that he entertained so far-fetched a theory as that these poor mortal
relics were aught but the infant remains of the American Indian, or,
perhaps, of earlier aboriginal people, but the talk of strange myths,
and that inexplicable Tennessee tradition of pygmy dwellers, colored
even his mind, which he sedulously sought to hold blank for the correct
impression, and made his hand tremble as he laid hold of the pickaxe,
extended down to him by Ephraim Guthrie, as if he were indeed on the
verge of some superlatively strange discovery discounting all human
experience, and befitting the realm of a fairy tale.
"Hyar they air, pick an' spade, ef ye be a-goin' ter dig yerse'f,"
remarked Ephraim. He did not realize any difference in social status
that might have relegated the manual labor to him, nor even the
fact that it was better suited to his massive and burly frame. He
had intended to perform it, in his character of host, to shield his
guest from the discomfort of the slight exertion. He relinquished
the implements with reluctance, remembering this resolution; but
superstition, now that he was upon the spot, prevailed, and overbore
even the instinct of hospitality native in the mountaineer's heart. The
two implements clashed together, the sound loud and metallic in the
stillness; he looked a little wistfully after his guest as Shattuck
bore them away out into the more open spot where the laurel bush
grew almost to the proportions of a tree, unimpeded by others of its
kindred. He had no wish, this simple Ephraim, to peer in at the strange
sepulchre--the six-slab stone coffin he had often heard of in the
terrible fireside stories; he cared naught for curiously woven shrouds,
and feathered mantles, and carcanets of pearl beads, and jars of quaint
pottery; nor for questions of race and time and civilization these may
betoken and solve. Rhodes still sat in the saddle, as motionless as
an equestrian statue, sharply outlined against the crimson sky, and
beneath an oak bough as dark, as heavy, and as massive as if it were
wrought of bronze. The light was clearer in the open space where the
branches could not fling their gloom, and as Shattuck ran swiftly down
through the long grass he could still see a flower here and there smile
up at him--the tawny red of the jewel-weed, and the close-tufted ball
of the "mountain snow." The range loomed far above. A star was on its
crest, faintly scintillating. The door and window of the Yates cabin,
farther down the cove, were illumined from the fire-lit hearth, a
dimly fluctuating radiance, sidereal too in the midst of the gathering
shadows. The falls still showed their gleaming green and white, and the
mists, exhaled from the depressions between the purple slopes, wore a
gentle dove-like gray. A tender hour of reveries, and blurring tints,
and restful recollections of the day done, but still far from the
morrow. The two men under the tree did not speak; the horses did not
stir; only the vague rustling of the saddle betokened the regular rise
and fall of respiration; even the frisky colt stood motionless, and
gazed at the flashing river with a full and meditative eye. Shattuck
had paused before the laurel on the side toward the water; neither of
the other men, albeit country-bred, might have noticed that here the
grass and weeds were a trifle bent--under the recent rain, perchance;
a trifle withered--by the sun, it might have been. Nor did he; he chose
the spot, remembering Yates's words that here the ground sounded hollow.
But no man who had ever wielded a pickaxe could have failed to
discern, as he lifted it high, and the sharp point sank into the
ground, that it was merely a replaced turf that yielded so readily to
the blow--replaced with its mat of roots severed--and not the tough
earth bound by a thousand veinous fibres to the full-pulsed herbage.
He was unaccustomed to the earth save geologically or geographically
considered, and to herbage except in its botanical aspects. He only
lifted the pickaxe high above his head once more, and once more the
point struck down into the loosened mould--struck down with a sharp
metallic clangor, as of steel upon stone. It rang far through the quiet
cove. A low, hollow, vibratory, vault-like resonance followed--mute,
indeed, to all ears save his own, but what significance that murmur
held for him! He lifted his head to look at the two men who had
turned toward him upon the sudden smiting of the rock, and were
gazing at him. The next moment--a moment confused forever after in
his recollection--something invisible passed him in the air, singing
shrilly, a high-keyed tone; a sharp report, and all the echoes of
mountain and crag were clamoring. He hardly realized its meaning. He
turned dully in the direction whence the sound seemed to come, and so
trivial a thing as the movement saved his life. Close by his head again
a rifle ball whizzed; it kept the line unswervingly, entered the skull
of the staring, amazed colt upon the slope, pierced his brain, and
the creature dropped dead without a struggle on the long grass. The
sight served to convince the stupefied, reluctant faculties of Shattuck
that some enemy in the dusk was firing at him. He could not, in the
bewilderment of the moment, distinguish the words that Rhodes shouted
to him. It was rather in obedience to his gesture, as he rode a little
way out from the gloom, leading by the bridle his friend's plunging
and frightened horse, that Shattuck dropped pickaxe and spade, and ran
toward him across the dusky, tangled grasses. He caught the reins as
they were flung to him; but it was no easy matter to mount the rearing
and snorting animal. The other two men were fairly in retreat before
Shattuck, running by the horse's side, and hanging with all his weight
upon the bridle, contrived to get his foot into the stirrup. Rhodes,
riding down the smooth slopes of the pygmy burying-ground, across
unnumbered graves, the heavy shadow of the forest trees shielding the
party, and making further attack futile, heard at last the hoof-beats
of his friend's horse at a regular gallop pressing hard behind him,
and turned to see Shattuck once more safe in the saddle. He put spurs
to his own steed without more ado. The dank evening air fanned his
face; he could hear its silken rustle as it was stirred into seeming
activity by his own quick rush through it. This vague simulation of a
sound, the horses' muffled hoof-beats barely distinguishable in the
thick grass, the drowsy chant of the cicada, the dull monotone of the
river--all hardly impinged upon the sense of primordial stillness that
pervaded the eventide; it might have seemed that that keen, menacing
note of the rifle, the sharp shibboleth of doom, was but some jarring
incongruity of a morbid fancy.
The trees began to give way; the more open, level spaces of the cove
were at hand; the darkness gradually diminished. Rhodes again clapped
spurs to his horse, since here they were to leave the protecting shade.
Foremost of the three, he was already in the lane when he became aware
that he was not followed; his companions had fallen away. His first
impulse, as he glanced over his shoulder into the vacant gloom, was
to pursue his own way, and make good his escape. Then he reined up so
suddenly that the horse, still trembling and wild and frightened, fell
back upon his haunches. Rhodes sat motionless for a moment, gazing over
his shoulder.
Night possessed the pygmy burying-ground, and the great phalanx of
oak and chestnut-trees was lost in an indistinguishable gloom; but
here, where no shadow hindered, he could see the contours of the wide
landscape, from which color had faded, and, above its dusky, blurring
expanse, the dark sky embossed with a myriad of stars. The fences on
either hand of the grass-grown way were dimly visible to his alert
senses. Along their parallel lines naught was to be seen, save once a
flash betokening the striking of a spark betwixt flint and iron; and in
that moment he thought he heard the thud of hoofs. He ground a curse
between his teeth as he wheeled his horse. Shattuck, it seemed, had
seen fit not to follow his host's lead, and doubtless the dull Ephraim
was not yet aware, as he cantered along in the rear, that Rhodes did
not still guide the little party. The candidate was a brave man, and
in any sufficient quarrel could have stood his ground with equanimity.
To be the target, however, for a mysterious enmity that lurked in
ambush and in the nightfall promised heavy draughts upon the resources
of his courage. The prosaic and utilitarian phase of his mind took
account of his candidacy in this connection. No man is so heavily
handicapped in a race as he who bears the imputation of unpopularity.
The public expectation of success is as a loadstone to the event. He
sustained a positive loss in the mere fact that he or his friend had
been fired upon. And whither was Shattuck bound now, and what to do?
With a determination to hold him in check and to thwart his purpose,
Rhodes galloped in the direction whence the faint hoof-beats sounded,
albeit the darkness held unknown terrors, the thought of which shook
his nerves, and although silence as profound as this had but now been
rent by that tense report of the rifle. It was only for a few moments
that the successive cross-stakes of the zigzag rail-fences, seeming
disconnected from the rest, and high as the horse's head, flew by
him on either side in relief against the lighter tones of the fields
they enclosed. The river suddenly shows between its banks, gleaming
darkly with the night sky, all the splendors of the stars shattered
in the ripples, and is gone as he dashes on. He hears the booming
of the cataract; and from the pygmy burying-ground, where late the
mocking-bird sang, the sudden ill-omened shrilling of an owl. He sees
above the western mountains a dull red after-glow of the sunset, and
below its darkling pine-grown slopes the little Yates cabin, its
windows shining squares of yellow light. The radiance issued forth so
far as to reveal Shattuck alighting from his horse at the bars, and the
clumsier figure of Ephraim Guthrie still mounted, and looking over his
shoulder, as he perceived for the first time that Rhodes was not in the
lead.
An aptitude in emergency is a natural trait, not cultivated, and Rhodes
possessed it to a useful degree. He flung himself from his horse, and
followed on his friend's heels with such despatch that albeit he did
not hear the words with which Shattuck greeted the party within, he was
on the threshold before a rejoinder was elicited. No friendly greeting
had it been, to judge from the dismayed, deprecatory faces grouped
about the fire. Adelaide had risen with a slow look of doubt, a sort
of stunned surprise. Letitia, who had been out milking the cows, stood
in the back doorway, the brimming piggin on her head, one hand lifted
to stay it, the wind rustling the straight skirt of her dress, the
twilight and the fire-light mingled on her face. Her blue eyes were
alight with a sort of wonder, that held nevertheless an intimation
of comprehension, which was at variance with the stolid amazement in
Baker Anderson's countenance, as, just arrived and still breathless,
he sat squarely in his chair, one hand on either knee, his jaw fallen,
gaping thunder-struck at the intruder. The centre of the family group,
Moses, was seated upon the floor in the fire-light, and turned himself
dexterously about to survey over his small shoulder the new-comers;
he was silent in seeming recognition of the fact that their gaze
overlooked him, and had no reference to his existence; his soft face
only expressed a sort of infantile apprehensiveness and suspension
of opinion. A tallow dip sputtered on the high mantel-piece; there
was pine amongst the fuel, and the resin flared white in the flames.
Very distinct the scene was, although, as the lights fluctuated, the
fire flickered in the breeze, which swayed it like a canvas: the brown
walls; the purplish black squares where the night looked in through the
windows, with here a feathery bough, and here a star, and here the dim
contours of a dark summit against the sky; the red-bedecked warping
bars; the table not yet set forth with the supper crockery, save
only a great brown pitcher and a yellow bowl; the sheen of tin-ware
on a shelf; even Shattuck's shadow, as sarcastically nonchalant as
the substance which it mimicked, as it waved its hand in mockery of
courtesy, while he reiterated his bitterly merry congratulations.
The white light showed the very flare of fury in his eyes that oddly
dallied with the smile on his face.
"You are a courageous rifleman, Mrs. Yates," he was saying, glancing
up at the rifle on the wall, glittering upon the rack of deer antlers.
"You have set three men off at full run this evening. Few ladies could
say as much, I am sure. If you would only mend your aim a little!"
With a blunt accusation she could doubtless have coped; but she could
only stare at him in silent amazement as he made these elusive feints.
The other two men, lumbering and massive shadows in the background,
stared too in surprise at him, and silently waited developments.
He had his hat in his hand as he leaned on the tall back of a chair,
and he looked steadily at her with an air of graceful and good-natured
raillery, all at variance with the fire in his eyes.
"Mend your aim, only a trifle, Mrs. Yates, and next time perhaps your
target won't be so unmannerly as to run off from so accomplished a
marksman," and once more he laughed with a genial inflection, then
caught his breath with a sort of gasp as his face grew scarlet.
Rhodes laid a hand upon his shoulder. "Why, Shattuck," he exclaimed,
with a resonant amazement that made the roof of the little cabin ring
like a sounding-board, "what are you thinking of? Mrs. Yates to fire a
rifle at us?"
"At me, if you please!" cried Shattuck. Then addressing Adelaide:
"Didn't you say you would--or perhaps my treacherous memory misleads
me--in case I ventured to open the pygmy graves? Your husband told me
this."
"Yes; but I never--" she faltered; then she paused.
Letitia had placed the piggin on the shelf, and crossed the room with a
quick, light, definite step. The clumsy rifle was off the rack and in
her slight, incongruous grasp in another moment. She held it up before
the men; there was the powder stain of a recent discharge about its
lock. And then her eyes, like blue flames, burned upon the shrinking,
overwhelmed mistress of the house, thus seemingly convicted on her own
hearth-stone.
Adelaide never knew how she found the breath to gasp forth the words;
the instinct of self-defence alone framed them. "I fired the rifle
off at a hawk ez war arter the chickens, early, early this arternoon
whilst ye war away," she replied to the woman who had said nothing,
instead of to the man who had spoken so plainly.
Rhodes's eye was suddenly steady. His face had grown graver, indeed,
but it had cleared. It wore a look now adjusted to inspection, and
thoroughly in character--the pallid hue, the relaxing ligaments, and
flabby flesh it showed only a moment ago were all resolved into the
firm, controlled countenance of a man who has his nerves, his fears,
his prospects, well in hand.
"Mrs. Yates," he said, with sober circumspection, "this is a very
serious matter, to threaten to shoot Mr. Shattuck. I hope your husband
told you so."
Poor Adelaide! With that sense of responsibility for woe which is in
some sort assuaged by a completeness of confession, she broke out,
with all the abasement of self-blame: "Oh, he did! he did! That's why
we quar'led; that's why he lef' me. I know 'twar wrong, now. I reckon
I never meant it then. But I wanted the Leetle People lef' be in thar
graves, like they hev always been."
Rhodes's comprehension was at best but ill adapted to the reception of
any subtle meanings. To his mind those words expressed a recantation of
her former denial. His face hardened, but at the same time there was
a look of genuine relief upon it, which Shattuck--still leaning upon
the back of the chair, and airily flirting his hat in his hand as he
glanced from one to the other--could not altogether interpret.
"It was indeed very wrong," Rhodes said, severely. "And might have been
far worse. If your aim had been better, you might have killed Mr.
Shattuck instead of Guthrie's colt."
She turned her eyes, full of a sort of confused terror, and her pallid
face toward Ephraim, who stood near the doorway, a massive, stolid
presentation of the rustic. He met her look with a glance of deep
reproach.
"Fee hev been in mighty hard luck ter-day," he remarked. "Somebody hev
been a-shootin' of his cattle--the leetle red steer, an' that thar
small crumply cow named Beauty Bess." His tone was as if he recalled
acquaintances to Mrs. Yates's mind, and had something of an elegiac
cadence. "An' now hyar's that leetle colt ez he sot sech store by--spry
leetle critter, with a powerful springy gait. Fee looked ter him ter
show speed one o' these days."
Her wild eyes dilated. "Why, Eph," she cried, in a convincing, coercive
voice, "I--I never shot the pore leetle critter!"
"He warn't _pore_! He war fat, fur true," asseverated Ephraim, with a
farmer's pride in the state of his stock.
Rhodes burst into a sudden rollicking laugh, and Shattuck wondered at
the evident change in his moral atmosphere. The candidate had found
the explanation of his friend's unpopularity far more easily to be
endured than the idea that he himself sustained a secret enmity. The
circumstance of the rifle-shot would be felicitously accounted for by
this woman's threats against Shattuck's projected investigation, her
husband's quarrel with her for this reason and his subsequent desertion
of her. The political status of the canvass might remain intact,
suffering naught from her inimical feeling against Shattuck, who had
made her husband his partisan.
"But I wouldn't shoot a colt. I wouldn't be so mean," she declared, her
eyes full of tears.
"You had rather shoot merely a man," Shattuck suggested, lightly.
"We ought to have you bound over to keep the peace, Mrs. Yates." Rhodes
resumed his note of severity.
"For I have the permission of the owner of the land to open the graves
and to search for curiosities and relics, and I shall do so, relying on
the protection of the law," Shattuck added.
"You'd better do like ye done the t'other night," Letitia put in,
unexpectedly; "kem whenst all be asleep."
Shattuck turned a look of questioning amazement upon her.
"Oh, I hearn ye!" she said, impatient of the denial in his face--"I
hearn yer pickaxe a-striking inter the ground agin the rock coffins o'
the Leetle People."
Once more Rhodes looked ill at ease. A strange ghoulish guest this
seemed even to his standpoint of superior education--to haunt the
vicinage of those pygmy graves in the light of the midnight moon.
But Shattuck's face had a distinct touch of anxiety upon it. "Why, who
could that have been?" he exclaimed, with so genuine a note of surprise
that Rhodes's suspicion was disarmed.
"Never mind, never mind," he said, with his coarse jocularity;
"there'll be a few pygmies left for you, I'll be bound! Come along, we
must be getting home."
Shattuck shook off the hand which his friend placed upon his shoulder;
but Rhodes turned with unimpaired cheerfulness to the others.
"Now look-a-here, Mrs. Yates, this must stop, short off, right _here_.
I'd like to think I'd leave as good a friend behind me as the pygmies
have in you; but you can't befriend with impunity people who have
been dead so long that they are too funny to keep their coffins to
themselves. You look out! You don't want an action for assault with
intent to kill brought against you, I reckon. I think I may promise
that Mr. Shattuck will do nothing about this offence--if it is not
repeated. At least, I would go that far myself," he concluded, with an
air of prompting his friend's generosity.
But Shattuck said nothing. His whole interest in the present moment
had given way to that suggestion of a strange sound in the midnight
and what it might signify. He still hung on the back of the chair, his
hat in his listless hands, but his face was turned toward the purplish
black square of the window, and his meditative eyes dwelt upon the
inscrutable darkness that encompassed the pygmy burying-ground.
Adelaide had seen, in a sort of numb despair, her denial of the deed
swallowed up in her admission of the threat. In her confused sense
of the fact, and her loss of courage before the inexorability of the
conviction, as it were, out of her own mouth, she could only reiterate:
"I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" And her stunned immobility of aspect
seemed sullen, and her tone was interpreted as dogged.
"Oh, well, all right," said Rhodes, lightly. He could be casual enough
now, since it could be made plain to all the country-side that it was
no affair of his, but a quarrel between Shattuck and the fugitive Yates
and the deserted wife. "Come, come, Shattuck," again clapping his heavy
hand on his friend's shoulder, "we must be a-jogging."
Ephraim, too, had the voice of accusation in his farewell. "I ain't
s'prised none," he said, looking over his shoulder, with a lowering
melancholy gleam in his eyes under the broad brim of his hat, as he
turned toward the door--"I ain't s'prised none ef Fee makes ye pay fur
that thar leetle colt, an' takes it 'fore the court." He paused upon
the threshold after a heavy lumbering step or two. "I reckon he won't
make ye pay _much_, though; an' Fee ain't one nohow ter set store on
courts," he added, relenting.
She stood there, arraigned on her own hearth-stone, silent, pale, her
face seeming as rigid as if it were some changeless symmetry of marble,
in the interval while they mounted their horses and rode way. The sound
of the hoofs came, then ceased as a marshy dip intervened, and rose on
the air once more from the farther side, and dulled in the distance to
silence. The throbbing of the cataract asserted itself anew. From every
weed growing rank about the fence corners, from amongst the vines over
the porch, vibrated the voice of the myriad nocturnal insects, chiming
and chiming interminably. Only the irresponsive darkness without met
her eye as she still mechanically gazed through the doorway where the
visitors had disappeared.
Letitia had sunk down in the great spacious high-backed chair on which
Shattuck had leaned. It was a half-reclining posture, to whose languors
her slenderness and drooping grace lent a sort of individuality, and
she looked like a child half recumbent in the corner, both hands
clasping one of its arms. Her curling hair, a tress or two falling on
her forehead, the rest drawn back and tied at the nape of the neck,
whence the ends all escaped, seemed longer as her head drooped. Her
eyes for the moment were upon the fire. When she suddenly lifted them,
they shone like sapphires, with crystalline splendor, and Adelaide, in
amazement, saw that they were full of tears--saw them thus that night
for the first and last time in all her life.
"How could ye have done it?" she exclaimed. "Ye wicked heart! Ye cruel,
evil soul!"
"Litt," cried Adelaide, aghast, "ye ain't believin' what them men said
ter me? Ye 'ain't turned agin me too?"
She looked down piteously at the girl; then as she stooped to lift the
baby, her hands trembled, and she fumbled so that Moses made some shift
to raise his own indolent bulk and snuggle into her arms.
"_B'lieve them men?_" echoed Letitia, her eyes ablaze. "I'd b'lieve
_his_ word agin the Bible. I ain't keerin' 'bout t'others." She seemed,
with a toss of her head, as if she annihilated them.
Adelaide could not account for her own words afterward. It was so
strange a transition from her own absorbing; tumultuous, insistent
troubles to intrude into the subtle, incipient, unrealized thoughts and
feelings of another.
"Litt," she said, as calmly as if nothing of moment had happened--she
had seated herself, with the child's face close to her cheek--"ye
oughtn't ter talk that-a-way. That man don't keer nuthin' 'bout
you-uns."
Letitia slowly turned her face. There was in its expression many a
phase of bitter introspection, wonder underlying them all, and a sort
of helpless despair as a finality, dumb and infinitely pathetic.
Somehow, ignorant as the other was, little as she could have described
or differentiated it, she became sharply aware of the wound she had
dealt, the poignant rankling of the heart that received it. She sought,
in a panic of regret and self-reproach, to nullify it.
"Ye don't keer, though," she clumsily tried to laugh it off. "Ye be
always a-tellin' ez how ye be no favorite 'mongst the men folks, an'
'pear ter think it's a sorter feather in yer cap ter be too ch'ice an'
smart fur the gineral run."
To her surprise, the girl showed no resentment. It seemed that that
calamitous possibility had dwarfed every other consideration.
"I ain't keerin' fur sech ez them," she said, slowly, with a tremor in
her low voice, as if she made the distinction clear to her own mind.
The sudden, heavy footfalls of Baker Anderson sounded upon the
puncheons. He had repaired to the wood-pile for pine knots, and he
seemed, in heaping them upon the fire, to seek to make amends for a
dereliction of duty, plain to his own sense if not to others.
"I didn't know what in thunder I oughter hev said or done, Mis' Yates,"
he remarked, as he knelt on one knee on the hearth, his square, boyish
face showing its grave sympathy as the white light streamed up the
chimney. "I didn't know but what whilst them men war a-sassin' round so
'twould be the right way ter pertect the fambly ter take down my rifle
ter 'em."
Letitia's face was aflame. "Thar's been too much o' takin' down rifles
a'ready. Leave that ter Adelaide."
Baker, still in his humble posture, turned his eyes toward her, a
clumsy sneer upon his blunt features. "Ef ye 'low Mis' Yates done sech
ez that, I wonder ye air willin' ter bide with her. Whyn't ye go home?"
Once more her eyes, with their jewelled effect, so crystalline a blue
they were, shone upon him, fiery and fierce. "I'll bide with that
thar rifle. I'll watch it by day, an' I'll guard it by night. 'Twon't
send a ball agin soon ter scorch his head. I saw his hair all whar
'twar singed. An'"--she turned suddenly upon Adelaide, who was quaking
beneath the storm her ill-considered words had raised--"ef ye tell me
he don't think nuthin' of me, I tell you-uns I could think o' him a
thousand years without a 'thanky.'"
She sat erect in her chair, flushed and defiant. She suddenly drooped
back into her former, half-recumbent posture, and again burst into
tears.
Adelaide, her nerves all strained and jarring, feeling at fault to
have elicited this outburst in the presence of Baker Anderson, who was
something of a gossip, and with the false accusations and reproaches,
the danger and the trouble of her own position still pressing heavily
on her, could but fall a-weeping too.
"I 'ain't got but one friend in the worl'," she said, clasping her
child. "An' hyar he is."
"Yes, an' he'll be yer frien' ez long ez he needs ye, an' no longer,"
said the tactless Baker, who had no talent for woe, and who hardly
entered into the emotions of either woman, except to grasp the division
of their friendship.
He thought them dreary company that evening, and that they were much
given to silent tears, which were troublesome, cowardly things for
which Baker Anderson had never found any use.