Charles Egbert Craddock

“ 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. ”

“ With averted eyes Guthrie shrank back, and, as his shadow withdrew, the moon shone straight into the tiny crypt, and Shattuck leaned forward to look. An exclamation, not of triumph, of horror, smote the air sharply. The mountaineer, with all his pulses aquiver, looked down into his coadjutor's white, startled face. Shattuck was kneeling beside the open grave, holding the coveted jug in his hand, full of silver currency. The slow mountaineer, hardly mastering the idea, turned to the coffin. If it still held bones, they lay beneath a pair of folded saddle-bags that filled the narrow space. ”

“ A lateral spur was in the immediate foreground, high, steep, and heavily wooded, the monotony of the deep, restful green of its slopes broken here and there by vertical lines of gleaming white, betokening the trunks of the beech-trees amidst the dark preponderance of walnut and pine; more than one hung, all bleached and leafless, head downward, half uprooted, for thus the wind, past this long time, left trace of its fury. A stream—a native mountaineer, wild and free and strong—took its way down the gorge between the spur and the mountain from which it shot forth. ”

“ And Rhodes's laugh was the vulgarity of the vandal.
The state of vacuity that does not feel and cannot know is made cognizable sometimes to the thinking and the feeling soul by a dreary sense of solitude, for which the consciousness of the finer susceptibility does not compensate. It was not that Shattuck resented the fact that his friend's limitations precluded his sharing these enthusiasms, as that that burden of isolation, that painful consciousness of a lack of congeniality, that yearning for fellowship, so poignant to the gregarious human animal, came upon him for the moment ”

“ The waning moon in the skies had swung now so high that her white light lay upon the verge of the niche with a sharply drawn and jagged outline—the shadow of the roofing ledge. Momently this belt grew broader, and the glow of the coals more dully red. The two mountaineers who were deputed to watch while the others slept beguiled the tedium by a game with a greasy pack of cards, using as a table the seat of a saddle laid between them as they half reclined on the floor, and played less by the light of the fire than the clear lustre streaming in at the arched opening of the grotto. ”

“ If Rhodes had been entirely at liberty, it is doubtful whether he would have remained. There was something so menacing in the old woman's eye, so coercively albeit vaguely frightful to the imagination, that the idea of spending a few hours alone with her, to eat at her board and sit by her fireside and listen to her talk, with that thin friendly veneer scarcely concealing the harsh vindictiveness of her nature, was not to be contemplated with equanimity. ”

“ Guthrie was a stranger here. He had never before seen so great a house as the rambling old brick dwelling. When he had dismounted at the fence he was for a moment at a loss how to enter. A porch was at the front and another at the side, and while he hesitated a vague glimmer of yellow light came through the masses of the foliage that clustered about one of the windows. He opened the gate; his foot fell noiselessly upon the weed-grown path. A great white lily was waving in the gloom close by—he saw it glimmer—another, and another ”

“ And when he could no longer be fed, she exerted herself to entertain him in the brief interval before the young fellow, tired out with the day's ploughing or hunting, would succumb to the heat and the stillness, and nod before the fire. Doubtless this talk was a salutary necessity for Adelaide, for the days were full of tears, and the nights of sighs and wakeful hours, and dreams of vague unhappiness and discordant, half-realized terrors. Letitia's smiling assurance, "How ye an' Steve air a-goin' ter laff an' laff over this some o' these days!" ”

“ The musician was a wise man in his generation, and understood the human nature amongst which his lot was cast. He had kept sundry "Tuckers" dancing, as mechanically and unwillingly as if they trod on hot iron, long, long after they had despaired of ever hearing again the "Gen'lemen ter the right" which gave them their chance, often elusive, to escape. But he made Fee Guthrie's "Tucker" a short rôle. The spectators were hardly accustomed to him in the unbeloved character when the sudden command "To the right" smote sharply upon the air, and the circle was awhirl anew. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Otherwise Shattuck could not have believed his senses. "Are you—are you—" he stammered, overlooking in his agitation the slight gesture of salutation with which the stranger recognized his presence there—"are you a regular graduate of a medical college?"
The mountaineer bent a lack-lustre eye upon him. "Which?" he said, in amazement.
"What sort of doctor are you?" demanded Shattuck, troublous recollections of the old idea of charms and spells rising to his mind. ”

“ The "Tucker" looked at him with a doubtful, red, frowning face; but as Rhodes jocularly took his place in the centre, and the violin began a pizzicato movement, as if all the strings were dancing too, with a long sigh of relief he accepted the situation, and presently joined in the laugh at the lorn candidate-Tucker.
The fact of an ulterior motive is a wonderfully reconciling influence. Leonard Rhodes was dancing his way into the ballot-box, and thus it was that he thought it consistent with his dignity to seek to be an especially comical "Tucker." ”

“ Thus the farthest mountain's azure glowed for him in vain. The multitudinous shades of green in the rich drapings that hid the gaunt old slope near at hand with masses and masses of foliage—from the sombre hue of the pine and fir, through the lightening tones of the sycamore and sweet-gum, to the silvered verdure of the aspen-tree swinging in the wind—might be a revelation to other eyes of the infinite gradations, the manifold capacities, of the color. ”

“ When she sang in fitful fragments a crooning lullaby to her own child, who had made all childhood doubly dear and doubly sacred to her heart, she was wont to watch pensively the tender glow of evening reddening there, so soft, so brilliant, so promissory of the splendid days to come that it needs must suggest that supernal dawn when the Little People should all rise to greet the rising sun that they had seen set for the last time so long ago. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And by many a fireside is told the story of the heavy doom that fell on all who carried their schemes therein and sought to know its secrets. But the birds nest in its deep shades. Every year the laurel blooms anew. And Adelaide, looking with pensive eyes upon it from her home, happy once more, can still forecast the coming of that fair spring when the morning stars shall sing together in the vernal dawn of a new heaven and a new earth, and this mortality shall put on immortality. ”

“ He felt as in a horrible dream, when the consciousness of fantasy opens before the oppressed senses. More than once a touch upon his arm failed to rouse him. When he turned his head at last he saw, half hidden by the boughs of the blooming laurel, Letitia crouching tremulously in the shadow. He did not wonder how she came there now, nor note that the door of the little log cabin was open, and its inmates, roused by the tumult, were standing on the porch. ”

“ A wild acclamation of jeering joy had arisen among the spectators, who during Rhodes's incumbency had grown tired and lost zest, for it was seldom, indeed, that Felix Guthrie "danced Tucker." As the young mountaineer, lowering and indignant, stood looking at Rhodes, the genuine mirth of the situation was communicated once more to the dancers, to the violin, and to the spectators, and the whole infair was throbbing with a new lease on life. ”

“ In the few years that she had lived here, a stranger herself, in some sort—not accustomed, as was her husband, to a lifelong vicinage to the pygmy burial-ground—she had developed no receptivity to that uncanny idea of a race of dwarfs. Always as children she had thought of the Little People; she had made no effort to reconcile this theory with the strange fact that no similar sarcophagi, enclosing larger frames, were known of far or near; she found no incongruity in the idea that infants should have been thus segregated in death from all their kindred ”

“ Even so still, so calmly pensive was the time that the far-away murmur of the water-fall came to Yates's ears, or it may be to his memory only, which transmitted the fancy transmuted in sound to his sense. He lounged, half pillowed upon his saddle, in the circle about the fire, and strove to drink and laugh and talk with the rest. Many a merry jest had those walls echoed, seeming almost sentient in emulation of the boisterous joy. ”

“ Carew looked quickly at the woman. Her face had stiffened; it hardly seemed alive; it was as inanimate as a mask, some doleful caricature of humanity and sorrow, forlornly unmoving, with no trace of beauty or intelligence to hallow it; she might seem to have no endowment in common with others of her kind, save the capacity to suffer. The child's face reflected hers as in a mirror. The same feeble, pitiable affectation of surprise was on each when the sheriff exclaimed, suddenly, "What's that?" ”

“ Yates, following the direction of his intent gaze, experienced a trifle of surprise that it should be nothing more striking than Letitia Pettingill, the daughter of the house, standing in the doorway silently watching the dancing.
"A scrap of a gal" she was esteemed in the mountains, being a trifle under the average height, and delicately built in proportion. The light flickering out upon the porch barely showed the dark-green background of hop-vines in the black darkness without. ”

“ The occasion was propitious, for a collision on such a scale was a rare opportunity to his bridled pugnacity, and with his posse at his back the consequences of defeat were infinitely reduced. The realization that Guthrie defied his power, even thus supported, cried aloud for due recognition, but gentler counsels prevailed in that stormy half-second while his broad chest heaved and his eyes flashed. His prospects as a candidate hampered him. Mutiny in the forces of so popular a man as he affected to be was an incongruity of insistent significance to the returns of the midsummer election. ”

“ It was so patent a possibility that Shattuck should have used his friend's temporary unconsciousness and his own affected solicitude as a blind to despatch Steve Yates upon some mysterious errand of their own, from which he was never intended to return, that it amazed all the cronies that so obvious an idea had never occurred to them before. Far more natural than that Shattuck should experience so preposterous a fear for so slight a hurt. "Why," said the old man, "Rhodes looks ez survigrous ez that thar oak-tree!" ”