The road into which they presently came astonished the Duke of Dorset.
It was sixty feet wide, smooth as a boulevard and drained with tile. It
was supported below by a stone wall, surmounted by a balustrade, and
was protected from the slipping of the mountain, at certain points, by a
parallel stone wall equally massive. It was covered brown and soft
with a carpet of fir needles, and arose in an easy grade above the sea,
turning northeastward into the mountains. Strewn with the foliage of
autumn, the fir needles, wisps of yellow fern, hits of branches swept
together against the stone wall by the wind, it seemed a thing toned and
softened into harmony with the wilderness through which it ran.
The stone balustrade set there, naked and jarring, by the builder, had
been planted along its border with vines. Vines massed the whole of it;
vines patched, laced, and streaked with crimson, with yellow, with green
of a thousand shades, moving from one color imperceptibly into another.
The wall, too, set against the face of the mountain was thus screened
and latticed. The vines fed with dampness from the earth behind the
wall were almost wholly green, while those banking the balustrade were
largely crimson, a mass of scarlet, flecked with dead leaves, falling
now and then, with a faint crackling like tiny twigs snapping in a fire.
The scene was a thing fantastic and tropical. Below was the sea, to the
eye oiled and polished, bedded with opal, shifting in the light; and
above were the gigantic firs, their brown bodies standing close in
a sort of twilight, cast by the verdigris branches crowded together,
shutting out the sky; and between, the road crept upward, winding across
ravines into the mountains, banked with green and scarlet, and carpeted
soft to the foot with brown.
Hurriedly--with a haste incomparable--the wilderness had adopted this
intruder; within five years it had covered from sight every trace of
human fingers; the work had been swiftly done, and yet carried the
effect of years leisurely expended. Nature returning with all things
slowly to the wilderness centuries after man was dead. The Duke of
Dorset was not a person easily swung skyward by a bit of sun and color.
He was accustomed to that brooding mood, lying over solitary lands; to
the dignity, to the majestic silence, obtaining in the courts of Nature;
to the gorgeous pageantry of that fantastic empress; to the strange,
almost human hurry with which she strove to obliterate any trace of man
encroaching on her kingdom. And yet, he could not recall anything on the
continent of Europe equal to this scene, unless the mountain behind
the great road leading to Amalfi, above the Mediterranean, were again
clothed with that primeval forest marked by the Phoenician.
The Duke followed behind the big swinging mountaineer and his gaunt,
gigantic mule, all moving without a sound, over the bed of soft fir
needles, along this road thus clothed and colored as though infinitely
old. They might have been traveling on some highway of that mighty
fabled empire for which Fernando de Soto hunted the wilderness, with men
in armor.
It was a day of autumn, soft in this Western country. A time of Indian
summer, the sky deep blue, with here and there a cloud island, unmoving
as though painted on a canvas. The mountain chain running northward
along the coast faded imperceptibly into haze. Above and within the
immediate sweep of the eye the day was bright, but when the eye lifted
to a distance the haze deepened, as with smoke coming somewhere from
behind the world.
The Duke of Dorest lengthened his stride and came up to the mountaineer.
He wished to know something about this remarkable estate, having the sea
and wilderness for boundary. He wondered how old it was, how long this
road had been built--the work looked like the labor of centuries.
"How long has Mr. Childers owned this estate?" inquired the Duke.
"About ten year, I reckon," replied the man.
"And before that," said the Duke, "who owned it?"
The mountaineer, lifting his chin, took a deep breath and exhaled it
slowly between his lips.
"Well, stranger," he drawled, "I reckon God Almighty owned hit before
that."
"You mean," said the Duke, "that this whole estate was then wilderness
as I see it here?"
"Jist as the blessed God made hit," replied the man, "before He rested
on the seventh day."
The Duke understood now something of the plan of this American Childers.
He had secured, here on the coast, a great tract of wild, primeval
forest, and was making of it an estate suited to his fancy. He smiled at
the assurance of one assuming a labor so gigantic. Either the man was
a dreamer, forgetting the brevity of life, or he was Pharaoh, or more
likely yet, a fool. It took three hundred years to make a garden;
and yet here was a great wilderness cleaned of its fallen timber and
climbing through the mountain was this road--the work surely of no
little man steeped in fancies. The Duke, pricked to wonder, strove to
draw from the mountaineer some idea of this man, but he got in answer a
jumble of extravagance and prophecy, drawled out in a medley of idiom,
imagery, and scrappy biblical excerpts.
Childers was like those seditious persons who had builded the Tower of
Tongues, like that one who had embellished Babylon; he had come into the
West, got this great tract of virgin country, "an' set up shop agin',
God Almighty!" The man made a great sweeping gesture, covering the
mountains to the east. Who was Childers to change what God was pleased
with? This night, or on some night desperately near, his soul would be
required of him. He was over eighty. Did he hope to live forever? He had
finished the term allotted man to live, and by reason of strength, had
made it fourscore years. Did he think that Death, riding his pale
horse, had forgotten the road leading to his door? Pride goeth before
destruction! But this was something more than pride. It was a sort of
sedition--a sedition that Jehovah would put down with the weapon of iron
and the steel bow.
The declamation amused and puzzled the Duke of Dorset. He attributed
the motive of it to the universal dislike of the peasant for the landed
proprietor, to the distress with which the aborigine sees his forest
felled and his rivers bridged. But the speech of it; the biblical
words with which it was clothed; the intimate knowledge of the
Hebrew Scripture which it indicated, was a thing, in this illiterate
mountaineer, wholly incredible.
The man was swinging forward with long strides; the gunny sack across
his shoulder; the mule's bridle over the crook of his arm; his tanned
face stolid as leather. The Duke, walking beside him, put the question
moving in his mind.
"My friend," he said, "what trade is it that you follow?"
The man walked on a moment, as though uncertain in what catalogue of
trades he should be listed. He put up his hand and loosed the white
button on his shirt, leaving his broad-corded throat, tanned like his
face, open to the air. He thrust his thumb under his woolen brace,
lifted it slowly, and moved his thumb down from the shoulder to the
trousers button. Finally he spoke, coupling his vocations, since he was
not able to say that either occupied exclusively his talents.
"Well, stranger," he said, "I crap some, an' I preach the Word."
The Duke did not understand this answer, and he probed for a further
explanation. He learned that the man was not a native, that he had come
here from the great range of mountains running along the western border
of Virginia. He had come, as he believed, by a Divine direction. The
angel of the Lord had appeared to him and said: "Arise and get thee
across the desert into the wilderness, for God hath there a work for
thee to do." And he had obeyed, as Philip before him had obeyed, when
that angel had directed him to go toward the south unto the way that
goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is a desert.
The Duke of Dorset vaguely understood then that the man was some sort
of little farmer and some sort of priest, come hither on some imagined
mission. But he had no idea of the circuit rider, that primitive,
sturdy, religious enthusiast who believed in a God of vengeance and a
hell of fire, as the Scriptures said it; who took his theology from no
school of cardinals, from no articles of faith; who recognized no
man standing between himself and God; who read the Bible and no other
book--moving his broad finger slowly along under the line--and took
that Book to mean literally what it said. A servant of God, but of no
authority below Him. And yet a mountaineer, illiterate and narrow,
poor as the peasants of Russia, tilling a bit of land for the barest
necessities of life, and traveling incredible distances to the cabin
church for no pay save that promise to him beyond the reach of rust.
The Duke of Dorset got his answer, and he got something more than that,
he got his question back. He had opened the door, and he could not
immediately close it.
"An' you, stranger," the man had added, "what might you do?"
The Duke smiled to find this question as difficult for him as it had
been for his companion. He walked as far and he took as long a time
to answer as the mountaineer. He was greatly amused, but he was also
somewhat puzzled. He found himself fingering his chin, thumbing his
waistcoat, like this farmer priest. Then he laughed. "I believe I could
get a living with the rifle," he said, "if I had to do it."
The man took the answer in all seriousness and with composure.
"Well," he said, drawling the words as though they were a reminiscence,
"this were a great huntin' country, I reckon, before Childers set up fur
God Almighty."
The mountaineer lifted his sack from one shoulder carefully to the
other, glanced up at the sun, standing above the mountain, and clucked
to his mule. The Duke of Dorset, walking beside the man, studied him
through the corner of his eye. The bulk and sinew of the man contrasted
strangely with his gentle manner.
His words of withering invective contrasted still more conspicuously
with the drawling gentle tone in which they were spoken. The Duke of
Dorset was acquainted with the mad priest, the passionate fanatic,
furious, lashing, but here was one who said these things softly, with no
trace of feeling, like one speaking a doom as gently as he could.
The Duke began to regard the man with a newer interest. He wondered on
what errand the man was going when he found him, and what it was that he
carried so tenderly in his sack, as though it were a thing fragile and
delicate. He had seen a Scottish gillie carry jugs of whisky carefully
like that in the ends of a bag swung over a pony. With the thought he
gave the sack a little closer notice. He observed that the mountaineer
attended thus carefully to but one end of the sack, the end which he
carried over his shoulder on his chest, the other end he left to pound
and swing as it liked.
At noon the great road, winding in a gentle grade around the mountain,
spanning its gullies with stone arches, reached the summit, and
the mountaineer turned out, following a trail along the ridge to a
knoll--covered, as the road was, with a carpet of brown fir needles, and
bordered with a few old trees, huge and wind shaken. Below this knoll,
welling out over the roots of trees, was a spring of water, running into
a bowl, deep as a bucket, cut out of the rock. The men drank and then
the mule thrust her nose up to the eye pits into the crystal water and
gulped it down in great swallows, that ran like a chain of lumps, one
after the other, under the skin of her gullet. The mountaineer removed
the sack carefully from his shoulder, and opened the end which had
been swinging all the morning against his back. This end of the sack
contained oats, and clearing a place on the ground with his foot, he
poured the oats down for the mule's dinner; then, he got out a strip
of raw bacon, wrapped in a greasy paper, some boiled potatoes, a baked
grouse, and what the Duke took to be a sort of scone, very thick and
very yellow.
"I reckon we wont stop to do no cookin' jist now," the mountaineer
observed apologetically, and returned the bacon to its greasy wrapper.
Then he opened his hands over the frugal luncheon.
"Strengthen us with this heah food, O God Almighty! so our hands kin be
strong to war, an' our fingers to fight agin the Devil an' his angels."
And the two men ate, as men eat together in the wilderness, without
apology and without comment. When he had finished, the Duke of Dorset
stretched himself out on the warm fir needles with a cigarette in his
fingers.
The mountaineer took a pipe out of his trousers pocket, the bowl, a
fragment of Indian corncob, the stem cut from an elder sprout, and with
it some tobacco. He looked at the Duke a moment hesitating, with the
articles in his hand, then he said: "Stranger, air you in a right smart
hurry?"
The Duke opened his eyes; above him was the sky, deep, blue, fathomless,
latticed out by the crossing fir tops; under him the bed was soft and
warm, the pungent air of the forest crept into his lungs like opium.
"No," he answered, "why hurry out of a paradise like this." Then he
dropped the cigarette from his fingers and lay motionless, looking out
over the world of forest. The mountaineer filled his pipe, crumbling the
tobacco in his hard palm, lighted it with a sputtering sulphur match
and smoked, leaning back against the giant tree trunk--a figure of
incomparable peace.
Presently the Duke of Dorset, looking landward across the mountains,
dreamy, soft, rising into a sky of haze, caught a bit of deepened color,
a patch of some darker haze lying above the distant sky line--lifting
a wisp of black, and spreading faintly, like a blot against that
shimmering nimbus in which the world was swimming. The thing caught
and held the Duke's wayward attention. He sat up and pointed his finger
eastward.
"Is that a forest fire?" he said.
The mountaineer took his pipe out of his mouth, regarded the distant
horizon for a time in silence, then he replied slowly. "No," he said,
"hit air not a forest fire."
"What is it, then?" said the Duke.
"Well, stranger," replied the mountaineer, "I call that air thing, 'The
Sign.'"
Then he arose abruptly, like one who had said more than he intended,
took up his rope bridle from the ground, forced the bit into the mule's
mouth, and stood caressing the beast's nose, and drawing her great ears
softly through his hand.