Charles Turner Dazey

“ He had said that she must wait until he was a flute-player no longer and that when that glad time came, he would, himself, pick out for her the handsomest and bravest gentleman whom he could find and bring him to her, ready-made, to love. She knew he felt a great contempt for riches; she knew that his experience of America had far from prepossessed him in favor either of the country or the people in it. She was absolutely certain that the man whom he would choose for her would be a very different sort of person from John Vanderlyn. ”

“ Miss Alathea Layson, the elder of the two, was slight, beautifully groomed despite the long and dirty trip on rough cars over the crude road-bed of a newly graded railway. A woman whose thirtieth birthday had been left behind some years before, she still had all the brightness and vivacity of the twenties in her carriage and her manner. Her voice, as it drifted to the young moonshiner, was a new experience to him—soft, well modulated, cultivated, it was of a sort which he had never heard before, and, while it seemed to him affected, nevertheless thrilled him with an unacknowledged admiration. ”

“ It is the hand of fate that grips the heart till we must follow—follow. We cannot hold back, my Anna; I could not hold back, your lovely mother, she could not hold back. Ah, one must follow when Love's hand is clasped about one's heart and leads! Some day you will understand and many things will then be clear to you. It is the glow of ardor in the eyes, reflected from the flame which burns deep in the heart—the flame which melts, which welds a link, a mystic bond, to bind for all eternity." He opened his eyes, now, and smiled at her. "That, liebschen—that is love—ah, that is love. ”

“ He remembered what Madge Brierly had said about the engineers with their blue paper plans and their ability to read from them and work by them. He saw them at their work, and the spectacle made him feel inferior, which had never happened in his free, untrammeled life of mountain independence before. There were a dozen men about the work of the same type as Layson's, and their calm cocksureness as they directed all these mysteries amazed him, overwhelmed him, made him feel a sense of littleness and unimportance which was maddening. ”

“ The slavey promised, but the seed was sown. From that time on full many a small attention fell to the Herr Kreutzer and his pretty, gentle-mannered, dark-haired, big-eyed Anna of which the landlady knew nothing, and many a dream of romance did the smutted slavey's small, sad eyes see in the kitchen fire on lonely evenings while she was waiting for the last lodger to come in before she went to bed behind the kindlings-bin. And the central figures of these dreams were, always, the beautiful young German girl and her dignified, independent, shabby, courteous old father. ”

“ He had leaned his ever-present rifle up against a stump, had laid the old game-sack, still burdened with the stolen dynamite, upon the ground, close to it, and was prepared to talk the matter out, to one end or the other. He loved her with the fierce love of the primitive man; his rising wrath against the circumstances amidst which he seemed to be so powerless had made him sullen and suspicious; mountain life, continual defiance of the law, unceasing watchfulness for "revenuers," does not teach a man to be smooth-mannered, half-way in his methods. ”

“ The "foreigner" had fascinated Madge, made him look cheap and coarse, uncouth and undesirable.
As he had walked along the roads which, later in the morning, Madge had followed, he had frowned blackly at the sunrise and the waking birds, kicked viciously at little sticks and stones which chanced along his way. Never a smile had he for chattering squirrel or scampering chipmunk; fierce, repellant was the brown brow of the mountaineer, despite the glory of the morning, and black the heart within him with sheer hatred of Frank Layson and the class he represented. ”

“ Soon, though, the old man plainly utterly forgot the fact that there were other people near than the now quiet child, its mother, his Anna and himself, for he threw more force into his playing. The steerage-passengers drew closer in a reverent silence, as the European peasant always will at sound of really good music, and many of the first-cabin passengers joined John at the rail, attracted by the sweet and soaring melody. ”

“ It left her free for other things; it made the other things essential to her happiness. How empty is a mother's life when from it, out into the world, her only son goes venturing, none but a mother knows. Mrs. Vanderlyn had striven to fill hers with social episodes and had not done so to her satisfaction. There were things, she had discovered, which money, by itself, cannot accomplish and the learning had astonished her. She had thought a golden key would certainly unlock all gates. ”

“ Revenuers never will get run of it."
The place had a mighty fascination for him, as if it might have played a tremendous part in long-gone passages of his own life. As he stood gazing at it cautiously, the mountaineer seemed definitely to emerge from his low-country dress and superficial "bluegrass" manner, fastened on him by long years of usage. Old expressions of not only face but muscles came clearly to the front. Now, no person watching him, could ever for a moment doubt that he was mountain-born and mountain-bred, if they but knew the ear-marks of that people—almost a race apart. ”

“ It had been the gossip of the little orchestra in London that musicians, in New York, if worthy, were always in demand; that when they played they were paid vastly. Tales often had been told of money literally [112] thrown to players by delighted members of appreciative audiences—money in great rolls of bank-notes, heavy gold-pieces, bank checks. Nowhere in the world, not even in the music loving Fatherland, a wandering trombonist who had visited the states had solemnly assured him, were expert performers on any sort of instrument so well paid and so well beloved as in the city of New York. ”

“ Without a word, without a second's pause, Madge, for the unknown jockey was, of course, the little mountain girl, jumped upon Queen Bess and hastily rode off, to be greeted, with a mighty outburst of cheering and applause as the favorite appeared before the waiting crowds in unmistakably fine condition and mounted by a rider whose every movement showed a perfect knowledge of the work and complete sympathy with the beautiful animal he rode. ”

“ You must not question me, mine liebschen; but, someday it may be that I shall no longer flute-play in a garden. Someday, maybe, things are better with us. You must wait a while, to see if that comes true. Then—then, when it is true, I pick out for you, ach! the handsomest, the bravest gentleman that I can find. I bring him to you, and I say: 'Anna, you love him!' That is all. ”

“ His dreams were rudely interrupted as Joe Lorey stepped ominously from behind the rock where he had waited for him.
"Hold up your hands!" the mountaineer commanded, with his rifle levelled at the advancing youth.
"Joe Lorey!" exclaimed Layson.
"You know what air between us. Your time air come. If you want to pray, do it quick, for my finger air itchin' to pull th' trigger."
Layson's blood and breeding told, in this emergency. He did not flinch a whit. "I'm ready," he said calmly. "I'm not afraid to die, though it's hard to meet death at the hands of a coward." ”

“ He had not seen the youth before. Joe, half jealous, half contemptuous, of Layson's fine friends from the bluegrass, had kept out of their sight, although he had watched them furtively from covert almost constantly; and, it chanced, had not been so much as mentioned by either Frank or Madge while the party from the bluegrass lingered at the camp, save when Madge told the tragic story of her childhood while Holton stood aloof, for reasons of his own, hearing but imperfectly.
Now the unexpected sight of the young man, for some reasons, made the old one gasp in horror. ”

“ Arrived at the confusion of the railway station known as Waterloo, Herr Kreutzer helped his Anna from the cab, paid the cabman from his slender store of silver, hired a porter with another shilling to take all their luggage to the train and went to get their third-class railway tickets, keeping, meanwhile, a keen eye for anyone who looked to be a German of position, and noting with delight that in the crowd not one pair of moustaches stuck straight up beside its owner's nose. ”

“ A climber, who had failed to climb the highest social ladder, the handsome, haughty lady found a certain satisfaction in sitting for ten days upon the very apex of another ladder—briefer, less important, very little, to be sure, but still a social ladder—and giving it a quick, sharp shake as humble people put their feet upon it timidly, bowing and smiling tentatively at her unresponsive person. It was a sort of balm to her sore soul so see them tumble metaphorically, upon their backs. Her demeanor on the Rochester was the demeanor of a princess among aliens whom she utterly despises. ”

“ Once only did the man become confused among the woods-paths (where a stranger might have lost himself quite hopelessly in twenty minutes) and that was at a point not far from where Madge Brierly and Layson had, on their way up from the clearing, paused while she told her youthful escort of the grim but simple tragedy of her feud-darkened childhood. Before the old man reached this spot he had been traveling with puzzled caution, for a time, across a slope rough-scarred by some not ancient landslide which had changed the superficial contour of the mountain-side. ”

“ He stopped short in the doorway, looking with amazement at her work of packing for departure.
"Why, Madge!" said he. "What does this mean? Packing up! Surely you're not going away!" There was a thrill of real distress in his pleasant, vibrant voice which comforted her.
"Yes, I'm going back to th' mountings. I was ... goin' afore, but I couldn't miss that hoss-race."
"Madge," he cried impulsively, "you must not and you shall not go. I cannot bear to think of you wasting your life in the lonely mountains. Madge, your land will make you rich, and with your brightness you could study and learn. ”