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SOUTHERN LIGHTS AND SHADOWS
Harper's Novelettes
By Various
Edited By William Dean Howells And Henry Mills Alden
1907
Table of Contents
Grace MacGowan Cooke
THE CAPTURE OF ANDY PROUDFOOT
Abby Meguire Roach
THE LEVEL OF FORTUNE
Alice MacGowan
PAP OVERHOLT
Mrs. B.F. Mayhew
IN THE PINY WOODS
William L. Sheppard
MY FIFTH IN MAMMY
Sarah Barnwell Elliott
AN INCIDENT
M.E.M. Davis
A SNIPE HUNT
J.J. Eakins
THE COURTSHIP OF COLONEL BILL
Maurice Thompson
THE BALANCE OF POWER
INTRODUCTION
The most noticeable characteristic of the extraordinary literary
development of the South since the Civil War is that it is almost entirely
in the direction of realism. A people who, up to that time, had been so
romantic that they wished to naturalize among themselves the ideals and
usages of the Walter Scott ages of chivalry, suddenly dropped all that, and
in their search for literary material could apparently find nothing so good
as the facts of their native life. The more “commonplace” these facts the
better they seemed to like them. Evidently they believed that there was a
poetry under the rude outside of their mountaineers, their slattern country
wives, their shy rustic men and maids, their grotesque humorists, their
wild religionists, even their black freedmen, which was worth more than the
poetastery of the romantic fiction of their fathers. In this strong faith,
which need not have been a conscious creed, the writers of the New South
have given the world sketches and studies and portraits of the persons and
conditions of their peculiar civilization which the Russians themselves
have not excelled in honesty, and hardly in simplicity. To be sure, this
development was on the lines of those early humorists who antedated the
romantic fictionists, and who were often in their humor so rank, so wild,
so savage, so cruel, but the modern realism has refined both upon their
matter and their manner. Some of the most artistic work in the American
short-story, that is to say the best short-story in the world, has been
done in the South, so that one may be reasonably sure of an artistic
pleasure in taking up a Southern story. One finds in the Southern stories
careful and conscientious character, rich local color, and effective
grouping, and at the same time one finds genuine pathos, true humor, noble
feeling, generous sympathy. The range of this work is so great as to
include even pictures of the more conventional life, but mainly the writers
keep to the life which is not conventional, the life of the fields, the
woods, the cabin, the village, the little country town. It would be easier
to undervalue than to overvalue them, as we believe the reader of the
admirable pieces here collected will agree.
W.D.H.
The Capture of Andy Proudfoot
By GRACE MACGOWAN COOKE
A dry branch snapped under Kerry's foot with the report of a toy pistol. He
swore perfunctorily, and gazed greedily at the cave-opening just ahead. He
was a bungling woodsman at best; and now, stalking that greatest of all big
game, man, the blood drummed in his ears and his heart seemed to slip a cog
or two with every beat. He stood tense, yet trembling, for the space in
which a man might count ten; surely if there were any one inside the
cave--if the one whose presence he suspected were there--such a noise would
have brought him forth. But a great banner of trumpet-creeper, which hid
the opening till one was almost upon it, waved its torches unstirred except
by the wind; the sand in the doorway was unpressed by any foot.
Kerry began to go forward by inches. He was weary as only a town-bred man,
used to the leisurely patrolling of pavements, could be after struggling
obliquely up and across the pathless flank of Big Turkey Track Mountain,
and then climbing to this eyrie upon Old Yellow Bald--Old Yellow, the peak
that reared its “Bald” of golden grass far above the ranges of The Big and
Little Turkey Tracks.
“Lord, how hungry I am!” he breathed. “I bet the feller's got grub in
there.” He had been out two days. He was light-headed from lack of food; at
the thought of it nervous caution gave way to mere brute instinct, and he
plunged recklessly into the cave. Inside, the sudden darkness blinded him
for a moment. Then there began to be visible in one corner a bed of bracken
and sweet-fern; in another an orderly arrangement of tin cans upon a shelf,
and the ashes of a fire, where sat a Dutch oven. The sight of this last
whetted Kerry's hunger; he almost ran to the shelf, and groaned as he found
the first can filled with gunpowder, the next with shot, and the third
containing some odds and ends of string and nails.
He had knelt to inspect a rude box, when a little sound caused him to turn.
In the doorway was a figure which raised the hair upon his head, with a
chilly sensation at its roots--a tall man, with a great mane of black locks
blowing unchecked about his shoulders. He stood turned away from Kerry,
having halted in the doorway as though to take a last advantage of the
outer daylight upon some object of interest to him before entering. He was
examining one of his own hands, and a little shivering moan escaped him. A
rifle rested in the hollow of his arm; Kerry could see the outline of a big
navy-pistol in his belt; and as the man shifted, another came to view;
while the Irishman's practised eye did not miss the handle of a long knife
in its sheath. It went swiftly through his mind that those who sent him on
this errand should have warned him of the size of the quarry. Suddenly,
almost without his own volition, he found himself saying: “I ask your
pardon. I was dead beat an' fair famished, an' I crawled in here to--”
The tall figure in the doorway turned like a thing on a pivot; he did not
start, nor spin round, as a slighter or more nervous person might have
done; and a strange chill fell upon Kerry's heat when the man, whom he
recognized as that one he had come to seek, faced him. The big, dark eyes
looked the intruder up and down; what their owner thought of him, what he
decided concerning him, could no more be guessed than the events of next
year. In a full, grave voice, but one exceedingly gentle, the owner of the
cave repaired the lack of greeting.
“Howdy, stranger?” he said. “I never seen you as I come up, 'count o'
havin' snagged my hand on this here gun.”
He came toward Kerry with the bleeding member outstretched. Now was the
Irishman's time--by all his former resolutions, by the need he had for that
money reward--to deftly handcuff the outlaw. What he did was to draw the
other toward the daylight, examine the hand, which was torn and lacerated
on the gun-hammer, and with sundry exclamations of sympathy proceed to bind
it up with strips torn from his own handkerchief.
“Snagged!” he echoed, as he noted how the great muscle of the thumb was
torn across. “I don't see how you ever done that on a gun-hammer. I've
nursed a good bit--I was in Cuby last year, an' I was detailed for juty in
the hospital more'n half my time,” he went on, eagerly. “This here hand,
it's bad, 'cause it's torn. Ef you had a cut o' that size, now, you
wouldn't be payin' no 'tention to it. The looks o' this here reminds me o'
the tear one o' them there Mauser bullets makes--Gawd! but they rip the men
up shockin'!” He rambled on with uneasy volubility as he attended to the
wound. “You let me clean it, now. It'll hurt some, but it'll save ye
trouble after while. You set down on the bed. Where kin I git some water?”
“Thar's a spring round the turn in the cave thar--they's a go'd in it.”
But Kerry took one of the tin cans, emptied and rubbed it nervously,
talking all the while--talking as though to prevent the other from
speaking, and with something more than the ordinary garrulity of the nurse.
“I got lost to-day,” he volunteered, as he cleansed the wound skilfully and
drew its ragged lips together. “Gosh! but you tore that thumb up! You won't
hardly be able to do nothin' with that hand fer a spell. Yessir! I got
lost--that's what I did. One tree looks pretty much like another to me; and
one old rock it's jest the same as the next one. I reckon I've walked
twenty mile sence sunup.”
He paused in sudden panic; but the other did not ask him whence he had
walked nor whither he was walking. Instead, he ventured, in his serious
tones, as the silence grew oppressive: “You're mighty handy 'bout this sort
o' thing. I reckon I'll have a tough time here alone till that hand heals.”
“Oh, I'll stay with you a while,” Kerry put in, hastily. “I ain't a-goin'
on, a-leavin' a man in sech a fix, when I ain't got nothin' in particular
to do an' nowheres in particular to go,” he concluded, rather lamely.
His host's eyes dwelt on him. “Well, now, that'd be mighty kind in you,
stranger,” he began, gently; and added, with the mountaineer's deathless
hospitality, “You're shorely welcome.”
In Kerry's pocket a pair of steel handcuffs clicked against each other. Any
moment of the time that he was dressing the outlaw's hand, identifying at
short range a dozen marks enumerated in the description furnished him, he
could have snapped them upon those great wrists and made his host his
prisoner. Yet, an hour later, when the big man had told him of a string of
fish tied down in the branch, of a little cellarlike contrivance by the
spring which contained honeycomb and some cold corn-pone, the two men sat
at supper like brothers.
“Ye don't smoke?” inquired Kerry, commiseratingly, as his host twisted off
a great portion of home-cured tobacco. “Lord! ye'll never know what the
weed is till ye burn it. A chaw'll do when you're in the trenches an'
afraid to show the other fellers where to shoot, so that ye dare not smoke.
Ah-h-h! I've had it taste like nectar to me then; but tobacco's never
tobacco till it's burnt,” and the Irishman smiled fondly upon his stumpy
black pipe.
They sat and talked over the fire (for a fire is good company in the
mountains, even of a midsummer evening) with that freedom and abandon which
the isolation, the hour, and the circumstances begot. Kerry had told his
name, his birthplace, the habits and temperament of his parents, his
present hopes and aspirations--barring one; he had even sketched an outline
of Katy--Katy, who was waiting for him to save enough to buy that little
farm in the West; and his host, listening in the unbroken silence of deep
sympathy, had not yet offered even so much as his name.
Then the bed was divided, a bundle of fern and pine boughs being disposed
in the opposite corner of the cave for the newcomer's accommodation. Later,
after good-nights had been exchanged and Kerry fancied that his host was
asleep, he himself stirred, sat up, and being in uneasy need of information
as to whether the cave door should not be stopped in some manner, opened
with a hesitating, “Say!”
“You might jest call me Andy,” the deep voice answered, before the
mountain-man negatived the proposition of adding a front door to the
habitation.
Kerry slept again. Mountain air and weariness are drugs potent against a
bad conscience, and it was broad daylight outside the cave when he wakened.
He was a little surprised to find his host still sleeping, yet his
experience told him that the wound was of a nature to induce fever,
followed by considerable exhaustion. As the Irishman lifted his coat from
where he had had it folded into a bundle beneath his head, the handcuffs in
the pocket clicked, and he frowned. He stole across to look at the man who
had called himself Andy, lying now at ease upon his bed of leaves, one
great arm underneath his head, the injured hand nursed upon his broad
breast. Those big eyes which had so appalled Kerry upon a first view
yesterday were closed. The onlooker noted with a sort of wonder how
sumptuous were the fringes of their curtains, long and purple--black, like
the thick, arched brows above. To speak truly, Kerry, although he was a
respectable member of the police force, had the artistic temperament. The
harmony of outline, the justness of proportion in both the face and figure
of the man before him, filled the Irishman with delight; and the splendid
virile bulk of the mountain-man appealed irresistibly to the other's
masculinity. The little threads of silver in the tempestuous black curls
seemed to Kerry but to set off their beauty.
“Gosh! but you're a good-looker!” he muttered. And putting his estimate of
the man's charm into such form as was possible to him, he added, under his
breath, “I'd hate to have seen a feller as you tryin' to court my Katy.”
This was the first of many strange days; golden September days they were,
cool and full of the ripened beauty of the departing summer. Kerry's host
taught him to snare woodcock and pheasants--shoot them the Irishman could
not, since the excitement of the thing made him fire wild.
“Now ain't that the very divil!” he would cry, after he had let his third
bird get away unharmed. “Ef I was shootin' at a man, I'd be as stiddy as a
clock. Gad! I'd be cool as an ice-wagon. But when that little old brown
chicken scoots a-scutterin' up out o' the grass like a hummin'-top, it
rattles me.” His teacher apparently took no note of the significance
contained in this statement; yet Kerry's very ears were red as it slipped
out, and he felt uneasily for the handcuffs, which no longer clinked in his
pocket, but now lay carefully hidden under his fern bed.
There had been a noon-mark in the doorway of the cave, thrown by the shadow
of a boulder beside it, even before the Irishman's big nickel watch came
with its bustling, authoritative tick to bring the question of time into
the mountains. But the two men kept uncertain hours: sometimes they talked
more than half the night, the close-cropped, sandy poll and the unshorn
crest of Jove-like curls nodding at each other across the fire, then slept
far into the succeeding day; sometimes they were up before dawn and off
after squirrels--with which poor Kerry had no better luck than with the
birds. Every day the Irishman dressed his host's hand; and every day he
tasted more fully the charm of this big, strong, gentle, peaceful nature
clad in its majestic garment of flesh.
“If he'd 'a' been an ugly, common-looking brute, I'd 'a' nabbed him in a
minute,” he told himself, weakly. And every day the handcuffs under the
dried fern-leaves lay heavier upon his soul.
On the 20th of September, which Kerry had set for his last day in the cave,
he was moved to begin again at the beginning and tell the big mountaineer
all his affairs.
“Ye see, it's like this,” he wound up: “Katy--the best gurrl an' the
purtiest I ever set me two eyes on--she's got a father that'll strike her
when the drink's with him. He works her like a dog, hires her out and takes
every cent she earns. Her mother--God rest her soul!--has been dead these
two years. And now the old man is a-marryin' an' takin' home a woman not
fit for my Katy to be with. I says when I heard of it, says I: `Katy, I'll
take ye out o' that hole. I'll do the trick, an' I'll git the reward, an'
it's married we'll be inside of a month, an' we'll go West.' That's what
brought me up here into the mountains--me that was born, as ye might say,
on the stair-steps of a tenement-house, an' fetched up the same.”
Absorbed in the interest of his own affairs, the Irishman did not notice
what revelations he had made. Whether or not this knowledge was new to his
host the uncertain light of the dying fire upon that grave, impassive face
did not disclose.
“An' now,” Kerry went on, “I've been thinkin' about Katy a heap in the last
few days. I'm goin' home to her to-morry--home to Philadelphy--goin' with
empty hands. An' I'm a-goin' to say to her, 'Katy, would ye rather take me
jest as I am, out of a job'--fer that's what I'll be when I go
back,--'would ye rather take me so an' wait fer the little farm?' I guess
she'll do it; I guess she'll take me. I've got that love fer her that makes
me think she'll take me. Did ye ever love a woman like that?”--turning
suddenly to the silent figure on the other side of the fire. “Did ye ever
love one so that ye felt like ye could jest trust her, same as you could
trust yourself? It's a--it--well, it's a mighty comfortable thing.”
The mountaineer stretched out his injured hand, and examined it for so long
a time without speaking that it seemed as though he would not answer at
all. The wound was healing admirably now; he had made shift to shoot, with
Kerry's shoulder for a rest, and their larder was stocked with game once
more. When he at last raised his head and looked across the fire, his black
eyes were such wells of misery as made the other catch his breath.
Upon the silence fell his big, serious voice, as solemn and sonorous as a
church-bell: “You ast me did I ever love an' trust a woman like that. I
did--an' she failed me. I ain't gwine to call you fool fer sich; you're a
town feller, Dan, with smart town ways; mebby your gal would stick to you,
even ef you was in trouble; but me--”
Kerry made an inarticulate murmur of sympathy.
The voice went on. “You say you're goin' home to her with jest your two
bare hands?” it inquired. “But why fer? You've found your man. What makes
you go back that-a-way?”
Kerry's mouth was open, his jaw fallen; he stared through the smoke at his
host as though he saw him now for the first time. Kerry belongs to a people
who love or hate obviously and openly; that the outlaw should have known
him from the first for a police officer, a creature of prey upon his track,
and should have treated him as a friend, as a brother, appalled and
repelled him.
“See here, Dan,” the big man went on, leaning forward; “I knowed what your
arrant was the fust minute I clapped eyes on you. You didn't know whether I
could shoot with my left hand as well as my right--I didn't choose you
should know. I watched fer ye to be tryin' to put handcuffs on me any
minute--after you found my right hand was he'pless.”
“Lord A'mighty! You could lay me on my back with your left hand, Andy,”
Kerry breathed.
The big man nodded. “They was plenty of times when I was asleep--or you
thort I was. Why didn't ye do it? Where is they? Fetch 'em out.”
Unwilling, red with shame, penetrated with a grief and ache he scarce
comprehended, Kerry dragged the handcuffs from their hiding-place. The
other took them, and thereafter swung them thoughtfully in his strong brown
fingers as he talked.
“You was goin' away without makin' use o' these?” he asked, gently.
Kerry, crimson of face and moist of eye, gulped, frowned, and nodded.
“Well, now,” the mountain-man pursued, “I been thinkin' this thing over
sence you was a-speakin'. That there gal o' yourn she's in a tight box.
You're the whitest man I ever run up ag'inst. You've done me better than my
own brothers. My own brothers,” he repeated, a look of pain and bitterness
knitting those wonderfully pencilled brows above the big eyes. “Fer my
part, I'm sick o' livin' this-a-way. When you're gone, an' I'm here agin by
my lonesome, I'm as apt as not to put the muzzle o' my gun in my mouth an'
blow the top o' my head off--that's how I feel most o' the time. I tell you
what you do, Dan: you jest put these here on me an' take me down to
Garyville--er plumb on to Asheville--an' draw your money. That'll square up
things fer you an' that pore little gal. What say ye?”
Into Kerry's sanguine face there surged a yet deeper red; his shoulders
heaved; the tears sprang to his eyes; and before his host could guess the
root of his emotion the Irishman was sobbing, furiously, noisily, turned
away, his head upon his arm. The humiliation of it ate into his soul; and
the tooth was sharpened by his own misdeeds. How many times had he looked
at the great, kindly creature across the fire there and calculated the
chances of getting him to Garyville?
Andy's face twisted as though he had bitten a green persimmon. “Aw! Don't
_cry!_” he remonstrated, with the mountaineer's quick contempt for
expressed emotion. “My Lord! Dan, don't--”
“I'll cry if I damn please!” Kerry snorted. “You old fool! Me a-draggin'
you down to Garyville! Me, that's loved you like a brother! An' never had
no thought--an' never had no thought--Oh, hell!” he broke off, at the
bitter irony of the lie; then the sobs broke forth afresh. To deny that he
had come to arrest the outlaw was so pitifully futile.
“So ye won't git the money that-a-way?” Andy's big voice ruminated, and a
strange note of relief sounded in it; a curious gleam leaped into the
sombre eyes. But he added, softly: “Sleep on it, bud; I'll let ye change
your mind in the mornin'.”
“You shut your head!” screeched Kerry, fiercely, with a hiccough of
wrenching misery. “You talk to me any more like that, an' I'll lambaste
ye--er try to--big as ye are! Oh, damnation!”
The last night in the cave was one of gusty, moving breezes and brilliant
moonlight, yet both its tenants slept profoundly, after their strange
outburst of emotion. The first gray of dawn found them stirring, and Kerry
making ready for his return journey. Together, as heretofore, they prepared
their meal, then sat down in silence to eat it. Suddenly the mountain-man
raised his eyes, to whose grave beauty the Irishman's temperament responded
like that of a woman, and said, quietly,
“I'm a-goin' to tell ye somethin', an' then I'm a-goin' to show ye
somethin'.”
Kerry's throat ached. In these two weeks he had conceived a love for his
big, silent, gentle companion which rivalled even his devotion to Katy. The
thought of leaving him helpless and alone, a common prey of reward-hunters,
the remembrance of what Andy had said concerning his own despair beneath
the terrible pressure of the mountain solitude, were almost more than Kerry
could bear.
“Fust and foremost, Dan,” the other began, when the meal was finished, “I'm
goin' to tell ye how come I done what I done. Likely you've hearn tales,
an' likely they was mostly lies. You see, it was this-a-way: Me an' my wife
owned land j'inin'. The Turkey Track Minin' Company they found coal on it,
an' was wishful to buy. Her an' me wasn't wed then, but we was about to be,
an' we j'ined in fer to sell the land an' go West.” His brooding eyes were
on the fire; his voice--which had halted before the words “my wife,” then
taken them with a quick gulp--broke a little every time he said “she” or
“her.” Kerry's heart jumped when he heard the mention of that little
Western farm--why, it might have been in the very locality he and Katy
looked longingly toward.
“That feller they sent down here fer to buy the ground--Dickert was his
name; you've hearn it, I reckon?”
Kerry recognized the murdered man's name. He nodded, without a word, his
little blue eyes helplessly fastened on Andy's eyes.
“Yes, Dickert 'twas. He was took with Euola from the time he put eyes on
her--which ain't sayin' more of him than of any man 'at see her. But a town
feller's hangin' round a mounting-gal hain't no credit to her. Euola she
was promised to me. But ef she hadn't 'a' been, she wouldn't 'a' took no
passin' o' bows an' complyments from that Dickert. I thort the nighest way
out on't was to tell the gentleman that her an' me was to be wed, an' that
we'd make the deeds as man an' wife, an' I done so.”
Kerry looked at his host and wondered that any man should hope to tamper
with the affections of her who loved him.
“Wed we was,” the mountain-man went on; and an imperceptible pause followed
the words. “We rid down to Garyville to be wed, an' we went from the
jestice's office to the office of this here Dickert. He had a cuss with him
that was no better'n him; an' when it come to the time in the signin' that
our names was put down, an' my wife was to be 'examined privately and
apart'--ez is right an' lawful--ez to whether I'd made her sign or not,
this other cuss steps with her into the hall, an' Dickert turns an' says to
me, 'You git a thousand dollars each fer your land--you an' that woman,' he
says.
“I never liked the way he spoke--besides what he said; an' I says to him,
'The bargain was made fer five thousand dollars apiece,' says I, 'an' why
do we git less?'
“'Beca'se,' says he, a-swellin' up an' lookin' at me red an'
devilish,--'beca'se you take my leavin's--you fool! I bought the land of
you fer a thousand dollars each--an' there's my deed to it, that you jest
signed--I reckon you can read it. Ef I sell the land to the company--it's
none o' your business what I git fer it.'
“Well, I can't read--not greatly. I don't know how I knowed--but I did
know--that he was gittin' from the company the five thousand dollars apiece
that we was to have had. I seen his eye cut round to the hall door, an' I
thort he had that money on him (beca'se he was their agent an' they'd
trusted him so far) fer to pay me and Euola in cash. With that he grabbed
up the deed an' stuffed it into his pocket. Lord! Lord! I could 'a' shook
it out o' him--an' the money too--hit's what I would 'a' done if the fool
had 'a' kep' his mouth shut. But I reckon hit was God's punishment on him
'at he had to go on sayin', 'Yes, you tuck my leavin's in the money, an'
you've tuck my leavin's agin to-day.' Euola was jest comin' into the room
when he said that, an' he looked at her. I hit him.” He gazed down the
length of his arm thoughtfully. “I ort to be careful when I hit out, bein'
stronger than most. But I was mad, an' I hit harder than I thort. I reached
over an' grabbed open the table drawer jest fer luck--an' thar was the
money. I tuck it. The other cuss he was down on the floor, sorter
whimperin' an' workin' over this feller Dickert; an' he begun to yell that
I'd killed 'im. With that Euola she gives me one look--white ez paper she
was--an' she says, 'Run, Andy honey. I'll git to ye when I kin.'” The
mountain-man was silent so long that Kerry thought he was done. But he
suddenly said:
“She ketched my sleeve, jest ez I made to start, an' said: 'I'll come,
Andy. Mind, Andy, _I'll come to ye, ef I live_.'” Then there was the
silence of sympathy between the two men.
So that was the history of the crime--a very different history from the
one Kerry had heard.
“Hit's right tetchy business--er has been--a-tryin' to take Andy
Proudfoot,” the outlaw continued; “but, Dan, I'd got mighty tired, time you
come. An' Euola--”
Kerry rose abruptly, the memory hot within him of Proudfoot's offer of the
night before. The mountaineer got slowly to his feet.
“They's somethin' I wanted to show ye, too, ye remember,” he said. They
walked together down the bluff, to where another little cavern, low and
shallow, hid itself behind huckleberry-bushes. “I kep' the money here,”
Proudfoot said, kneeling in the cramped entrance and delving among the
rocks. He drew out a roll of bills and fingered them thoughtfully.
“The reward, now, hit was fifteen hundred dollars--with what the State an'
company both give, warn't it? Dan, I was mighty proud ye wouldn't have
it--I wanted to give it to ye this-a-way. I don't know as I've got any
rights on Euola's money. I reckon I mought ax you fer to take it to her, ef
so be you could find her. My half--you kin have it, an' welcome.”
Fear was in Kerry's heart. “An' what'll you be doin'?” he inquired,
huskily.
“Me?” asked Andy, listlessly. “Euola she's done gone plumb back on me,” he
explained. “I hain't heard one word from her sence the trouble, an' I've
got that far I hain't a-keerin' what becomes of me. I like you, Dan; I'd
ruther you had the money--”
“Oh, my Gawd! Don't, Andy,” choked the Irishman. “Let me think, man,” as
the other's surprised gaze dwelt on him. Up to this time all Kerry's
faculties had been engrossed in what was told him, or that which went on
before his eyes. Now memory suddenly roused in him. The woman he had seen
back at Asheville, the woman who called herself Mandy Greefe, but whom the
police there suspected of being Andy Proudfoot's wife, whom they had twice
endeavored, unsuccessfully, to follow in long, secret excursions into the
mountains. What was the story? What had they said? That she was seeking
Proudfoot, or was in communication with him; that was it! They had warned
Kerry that the woman was mild-looking (he had seen her patient, wistful
face the last thing as he left Asheville), but that she might do him a
mischief if she suspected he was on the trail of her husband. “My Lord! Oh,
my Lord! W'y, old man,--w'y, Andy boy!” he cried, joyously, patting the
shoulder of the big man, who still knelt with the roll of money in his
hands,--“Andy, she's waitin' fer you--she's true as steel! She's ready to
go with you. Yes, an' Dan Kerry's the boy to git ye out o' this under the
very noses o' that police an' detective gang at Asheville. 'Tis you an' me
that'll go together, Andy.”
Proudfoot still knelt. His nostrils flickered; his eyes glowed. “Have a
care what you're a-sayin',” he began, in a low, shaking voice. “Euola!
Euola! You've saw me pretty mild; but don't you be mistook by that, like
that feller Dickert was mistook. Don't you lie to me an' try to fool me
'bout her. One o' them fellers I shot had me half-way to Garyville, tellin'
me she was thar--sick--an' sont him fer me.”
Kerry laughed aloud. “Me foolin' you!” he jeered. “'Tis a child I've been
in your hands, ye black, big, still, solemn rascal! Here's money a-plenty,
an' you that knows these mountains--the fur side--an' me that knows the
ropes. You'll lend me a stake f'r the West. We'll go together--all four of
us. Oh Lord!” and again tears were on the sanguine cheeks.
The Level of Fortune
BY ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH
She was the ambition of the younger girls and the envy of the less
fortunate. Bessie Hall had _everything_, they said.
Her prettiness, indeed, was chiefly in slender plumpness and bloom. But it
served her purpose as no classic mould would have done. She did not
overestimate it. But she was probably better satisfied with it than with
most of those conditions of her life that people were always telling her
were ideal. They spoke of her as the only child in a way that implied
congratulations on the undivided inheritance--and that reminded her how she
had always wanted a sister. They talked of her idyllic life on a blue-grass
stock-farm--when she was wheedling from her father a winter in Washington.
They envied her often when they had the very thing she wanted--or, at
least, she didn't have it. They enlarged on her popularity, and she
answered, “Oh yes, nice boys, most of them, but--”
She had always said, “_When_ I marry,” not “_if_,” and had said it much as
she said, “When I grow up.” And, yes, she believed in fate: that everybody
who belonged to you would find you out; but--it was only hospitable to
meet them half-way! So her admirers found her in the beginning hopefully
interested, and in the end rather mournfully unconvinced. Her regret seemed
so genuinely on her own account as well as theirs that they usually carried
off a very kind feeling for her. She was equally open to enlistment in any
other proposed diversion. For Bessie lived in a constant state of great
expectation that something really nice would really happen to-morrow. There
was always something wrong to-day.
“It's not fair!” she complained to Guy Osbourne, when he came to tell her
good-by, all in the gray. “I'm positively discriminated against. If _I_
have an engagement, it's sure to rain! And now just when I'm beginning to
be a grown young lady, with a prospect _at last_ of a thoroughly good time,
a war has to break out!”
Her petulance was pretty. Guy laughed. “How disobliging!” he sympathized.
“And how modest!” he added--which the reader may disentangle; Bessie did
not. “_At last!_” he mocked her.
For Bessie Hall, whose community already moved in an orbit around her, and
whose parents had, according to a familiar phrase, an even more
circumscribed course around her little finger--for Bessie Hall to rail at
fate was deliciously absurd, delightfully feminine!
When Bessie was most unreasonable one only wanted to kiss her. Guy's
privileges in that line had passed with the days when he used to pick up
bodily his lithe little playfellow to cross a creek or rain-puddled road.
But to-day seemed pleasantly momentous; it called for the unusual. “I say,
Bibi, when a knight went off to fight, you know, his lady used to give him
a stirrup-cup at good-by. Don't you think it would be really sweet of
you--”
She held off, only to be provoking. She would have thought no more of
kissing Guy than a brother--or she thought she wouldn't. To be sure, she
hadn't for years; there was no occasion; and then, of course, one didn't.
She laughed and shook her head, and retreated laughing. And he promptly
captured her.... She freed herself, suddenly serious. And Guy stood
sobered--sobered not at going to the war, but at leaving her.
“There now, run along.”
“Well, good-by.” But he lingered. There was nothing more to say, but he
lingered. “Well, good-by. Be good, Bibi.”
“It looks as if that was all I'd have a chance to be.” The drawl of the
light voice with its rising inflection was so engaging, no one called it
nasal. “And it's so much more difficult and important to be charming!”
He was sobered at leaving her, but he never thought of not going with the
rest. He went, and all the rest. And Bessie found herself, just when nature
had crowned her with womanhood, a princess without a kingdom. To be sure,
living on the border gave her double opportunities, and for contrasting
romances. There were episodes that comforted her with the reflection that
she was not getting wholly out of practice in the arts. And there was real
adventure in flying and secret visits from Guy and the rest--Guy, who was
never again just the same with her; but, for that matter, neither was she
just the same with him. But, on the whole, as she pouted to him afterward,
she wouldn't call that four years' war exactly entertaining!
The Halls personally did not suffer so deeply as their neighbors except
from property loss. All they could afford, and more, they gave to the
South, and the Northern invader took what was left. When there was nothing
left, he hacked the rosewood furniture and made targets of the family
portraits, in the mere wantonness of loot that, as a recriminative
compliment, cannot be laid to the charge of any one period or section. Most
of the farm negroes crossed the river. Funds ran low.
There had been ease and luxury in the family always, and just when Bessie
reached the time to profit by them she remarked that they failed.
Even if the Halls were not in mourning, no one lives through such a time
without feeling the common humanity. But Bessie, though she lingered on the
brink of love as of all the other deeps of life--curious, adventurous, at
once willing and reluctant--was still, in the end, quite steady.
When the war was over, the Halls were poor, on a competence of land run to
waste, with no labor to work it, and no market to sell it. And Mr. Hall,
like so many of his generation, was too hampered by habit and crushed by
reminiscence to meet the new day.
It was the contrast in Guy's spirit that won Bessie. His was indeed the
immemorial spirit of youth--whether it be of the young world, or the young
male, or the young South--to accept the issue of trial by combat and give
loyalty to one proved equally worthy of sword or hand.
“We're whipped,” he told her, “and that settles it. Now there's other work
for us than brooding over it. All the same, the South has a future, Bibi,
and that means a future for you and me.”
“Not in the manufacture of poetry, I'm afraid,” she laughed. “You dropped a
stitch.”
She did not seem to take his prowess, either past or to come, very
seriously; and her eyebrows and her inflection went up at the assumption of
the “we” in his plans. But--she listened.
His definiteness was itself effective. She herself did not know what she
wanted. Something was wrong; or rather, everything was. She was finding
life a great bore. But what would be right, she couldn't say, except that
it must be different.
Guy looked sure and seasoned as he poured out his plans; and together with
the maturing tan and breadth from his rough life, there was an
unconquerable boyishness in the lift of his head and the light of his eyes.
“This enthusiasm is truly beautiful!” she teased.
It was, in truth, infectious.
Why! it was love she had wanted. The four years had been so empty--without
Guy.
She went into it alert, receptive, optimistic. But it nettled her that
everybody should be so congratulatory, and nobody surprised. It wasn't what
_she_ would call ideal for two impoverished young aristocrats to start life
on nothing but affection and self-confidence.
It did seem as if the choicest fruit always came to _her_ specked.
“Never mind,” Guy encouraged her. “Just give me ten years. It will be a
little hard on you at first, Bibi dear, I know, but it would be harder at
your father's now. And it won't be long!”
There was only one comment of whose intention Bessie was uncertain: “So Guy
is to continue carrying you over the bad places, Bessie?”
Hm! She had been thinking it rather a fine thing for _her_ to do. And that
appealed to her.
“And think what an amusing anecdote it will make after a while, Guy,--how,
with all your worldly goods tied up in a red bandanna, and your wife on
your arm instead of her father's doorstep, you set out to make your
fortune, and to live meanwhile in the City of Un-Brotherly Love!”
But Bessie had the standards of an open-handed people to whom economy was
not a virtue. There had always been on her mother's table for every meal
“salt-risin' light bread” and corn pone or griddle-cakes, half a dozen
kinds of preserves, the staples in proportion. Her mother would have been
humiliated had there been any noticeable diminution in the supply when the
meal was over; and she and the cook would have had a council of war had a
guest failed to eat and praise any single dish.
Bessie had not realized how inglorious their meagreness would be, until
Mrs. Grey, at the daughter's table, grew unctuously reminiscent about the
mother's.
“Dear me!” Guy tried afterward to comfort the red eyelids and tremulous
lips, “do you want a table so full it takes your appetite at sight?”
“I'm afraid I can't joke about disgrace!” Bessie quivered.
“But, Bibi dear, Mrs. Grey is simply behind the times. The _rationale_ of
those enormous meals was not munificence, but that a horde of
house-servants had to be fed at a second table.”
Certainly Guy and his good spirits were excellent company. And Bessie came
of a race of women used to gay girlhoods and to settling down thereafter,
as a matter of course, into the best of house-mothers.
But there was a difference between the domestic arts she had been taught as
necessary to the future lady of a large household and the domestic
industries she had to practise. Supervising and doing were not the same.
For her mother, sewing and cooking had been accomplishments; for her they
were work. She had to do things a lady didn't do.
However, she was as fastidious about what she did for herself as about what
was done for her. She was quick and efficient. People said Bessie Osbourne
had the dearest home in town, was the best housekeeper, the most nicely
dressed on nothing. You might know Bessie Hall would have the best of
everything!
And when Bessie began to wonder if that was true, she had entered the last
circle of disappointment.
The fact was that, after the first novelty, things seemed pretty much the
same as before. Bessie Osbourne was not so different from Bessie Hall. She
might have appreciated that as significant; but doubtless she had never
heard the edifying jingle of the unfortunate youth who “wandered over all
the earth” without ever finding “the land where he would like to stay,” and
all because he was injudicious enough to take “his disposition with him
everywhere he went.” It was as if she had been going in a circle from right
to left, and, after a blare of drums and trumpets and a stirring
“About--face!” she had found herself going in the same circle from left to
right. It all came to the same thing, and that was nothing. Guy was
apparently working hard; but, after all, in real life it seemed one did not
plant the adepts' magic seed that sprouted, grew, bloomed, while you looked
on for a moment. For herself, baking and stitching took all her time,
without taking nearly all her interest, or seeming to matter much when all
was said and done. If she neglected things, they went undone, or some one
else did them; in any case Guy never complained. If she did what came up,
each day was filled with meeting each day's demands. All their lives went
into the means and preparation for living. Other people--Or was it really
any different with them? Nine-tenths of the people nine-tenths of the time
seemed to accomplish only a chance to exist. She had heard women complain
that such was the woman's lot in order that men might progress. But it
struck her very few men worked beyond the provision of present necessities,
either. Was it all a myth, then--happiness, experience, romance? Was this
all there was to life and love? What was the sense, the end? Her
dissatisfaction reproached the Cosmos, grew to that _Weltschmerz_ which is
merely low spirits and reduced vitality, not “an infirmity of growth.”
She constantly expected perfection, and all that fell below it was its
opposite extreme, and worthless. She began to suspect herself of being an
exceptional and lofty nature deprived of her dues.
Guy was a little disappointed at her prudent objection to children until
their success was established. Prudence was mere waste of time to his
courage and assurance. And he believed, though without going into the
psychology of the situation, that Bessie would be happier with a child or
two.
“Oh, how can we do any more?” she answered, in her pretty, spoiled way.
“We're trying to cut a two-yard garment out of a one-yard piece now.” At
least, she was; and so Guy was.
Well, it wasn't a great matter yet. It is not in the early years of
marriage that that lack is most felt. And Bessie was not very strong; she
never seemed really well any more. She developed a succession of small
ailments, lassitudes, nerves. She dragged on the hand of life, and
complained. The local physician drugged her with a commendable spirit of
optimism and scientific experiment. But the drawl of the light voice with
its rising inflection became distinctly a whine.
She got a way of surprising Guy and upsetting his calculations with
unannounced extravagances. “What's the good of all this drudgery? We're
making no headway, getting nowhere; we might as well have what good we can
as we go along.”
There was a negro woman in the kitchen now, and in the sitting-room one of
the new sewing-machines. And Guy, who, so far, had been only excavating for
the cellar of his future business house, was beginning to feel that good
foundation walls were about to start.
But, even when peevish, Bessie had a way of turning up her eyes at him that
reduced him to helplessness and adoration. And she was delicate! “I know,”
he sympathized with her loyally, “it's like trying to work and be jolly
with a jumping tooth; or rather, in your case, with a constant buzzing in
your head.”
The jumping tooth was his own simile. The headaches that had begun while he
was soldiering were increasing. He had intermittent periods of numbness in
the lower half of his body. It was annoying to a busy man. He could offer
no explanation, nor could the doctors. “Overwork,” they suggested, and
advised the cure that is of no school--“rest.” That was “impossible.”
Besides, it was all nonsense. He put it aside, went on, kept it from
Bessie.
The end came, as it always does, even after the longest expectation, with a
rush. He was suffering with one of his acute headaches one night, when
Bessie fell asleep beside him. She woke suddenly, with no judgment of time,
with a start of terror, a sense of oppression, or--death?
“Guy!” she screamed.
The strangeness of his answering voice only repeated the stab of fear. She
was on her feet, had made a light....
He was not suffering any more. He was perfectly conscious and rational. But
from the waist down he could not move nor feel.
The doctors came and talked a great deal and said little; they reminded
them that not much was known of this sort of thing; they would be glad to
do what they could....
“You don't mean to say this is permanent? Paralyzed? I? Oh, absurd!” Awful
things happened to other people, of course--scandal, death--but to one's
self--“Oh, it doesn't sound true! It can't be true. Paralyzed? _I_?”
And Bessie wondered why this had been sent on _her_.
The explanation was hit on long afterward, when in one of his campaign
stories Guy mentioned a fall from his horse, with his spine against a rock,
that had laid him unconscious for twenty-two hours.
And so the war, which had been responsible for their starting together with
only a past and a future, was responsible for their having shortly only a
past. Guy was not allowed his ten years.
Though he had now less actual pain, the shock seemed to jar the foundations
of his life, and the sharp change in the habits of an active and vigorous
body seemed to wreck his whole system. For months and months and months he
seemed only a bundle of exposed nerves--that is, where he had any movement
or sensation at all.
Now a past, however escutcheoned and fame-enrolled, is even more starvation
diet than a future of affection and self-confidence. No help was to be had
from either of their homes; it was the day of self-help for all.
Bessie wondered why this had been sent on _her_, but she took a couple of
boarders at once, she sold sponge-cake and beaten biscuit, she got up
classes in bread-making. And Guy stopped her busy passing to draw her hand
to his lips, or watched her with dumb eyes.
Several of her friends, after trying her sewing-machine, then still
something of a novelty, ordered duplicates. Guy suggested as a joke that
she charge the makers a commission.
“The idea of trading on friendship?” Bessie laughed.
“Oh, I don't know,” Guy reflected, more seriously. “How about these
boarders, then? That's trading on hospitality.”
It was one of those minute flashes of illumination that, multiplied and
collected, become the glow of a new light, the signal of a revolution. The
country was full of them in those days. The old codes were melting in the
heat of change. Standards were fluid. Personally, it ended in Bessie's
selling machines, first in her town, then in neighboring ones.
In the restlessness that youth thinks is aspiration for the ideal,
particularly for the ideal love, is a large element of craving for place
and interest. After her marriage, at least, Bessie might have had enough of
both; but the obvious purpose was too limited to appeal to her. Now two
appetites and the four seasons supplied motive enough for industry. There
was nothing magnificent in this manifest destiny, but it had the advantage
of being imperative and constant. It was no small tax on her acquired
delicacy, but it gave less time for hunting symptoms. It did not answer the
_Whence, Whither, and Why;_ it pointedly changed the subject. Her work
began to carry her out of herself.
“Bibi dear, what a sorry end to all my promises!”
She had been thinking just that herself with a sense of injury and
imposition; and she was used all her life to having people see everything
as she saw it, from her side only. But Guy had just turned over to his few
creditors the hole in the ground into which so far most of his work had
gone. “Bibi dear, what a sorry end to all my plans!” was what she expected
him to say. And what he did say and what he didn't, met surprised in her
mind and surveyed each other.
“Oh, Guy!” she deprecated, suddenly ashamed. For the first time it occurred
to her to wonder why this had been sent on _him_. With a rush of remorseful
sympathy and appreciation, she slipped down beside his chair. “My poor old
boy!”
He clung to her like a drowning man--Guy, who, after the first single cry
at the blow, had been so self-contained (or self-repressed?) through it
all!
She remembered that she had omitted a good many things lately.
“You're tired to-day,” he said.
“Yes, I am.” She caught at it hurriedly with apologetic self-defence. “I'm
pretty constantly tired lately. And this morning Mrs. Grey was so trying.
She doesn't understand her machine, and she doesn't understand business,
and she was _too_ silly and stupid. I don't wonder you men laugh at us and
don't want us in _your_ affairs!”
“It's all hard on you, Bibi.” There was a lump in his voice. It was the
first time he had been able to speak of it.
“Yes;” her own throat was so strained that for a moment she could not go
on. “But,” it struck her again, “I don't suppose an unbiased observer would
think it exactly festive for you.”