Part 14

"Ha! ha! ha! 'Poor thing!' She never made _you_ learn to kick and bite and fight to keep a whole skin and a whole set of bones. Fee Guthrie don't say 'poor thing!' I won't go back to the first husband, for I hadn't the pleasure of his acquaintance, and he may have died simply because it was too much trouble to live."

"And _you_ made her believe that you thought your grandfather was in love with her--had been rejected by her. You deceived her!"

"Man alive! how could I? She knew she never saw him but once in her life. And how can I make tenders of his affections at this late day? Tenders of affection are not retroactive. A man can't flirt as proxy for his dead grandfather. It was merely a little electioneering compliment."

"Oh, Rhodes, how do you manage to look yourself in the face in the mirror?" exclaimed Shattuck, with a laugh.

"I look at myself in the mirror with a good deal more pleasure than is proper, I expect," said Rhodes, smoothing his handsome and lustrous red-brown beard. He tipped his straw hat over his smiling, full-lashed dark eyes, for they were out of the shadows at last, and in the sun amongst a stretch of the barley. The wind bent it; long glintings of pale light pervaded it. The whole field was of a delicate, fluctuating green, with these fine undulations like quicksilver running over it. Sometimes the shadow of a cloud came, a thing swiftly scudding and noiseless too, and the green, hitherto held in indefinite solution, was precipitated into a pure emerald tint, for this was a later sowing than the spaces further down the slope, which had grown tawny with ripeness, and showed on the hither side the long swaths from the cradling, drying upon the ground. The cradles lay there too, and beneath the dark shadow of a great spreading buckeye-tree in a corner of the fence--the only one in the field that bore its pristine richness of foliage, for the rest, gaunt and bare, girdled long ago, towered into the air, dead, white, and unsightly--lounged the two brothers, loitering away the heated hour.

From the depths of the cove below, this field on the mountain slope was visible a long way. Shattuck remembered having observed it as a dull, light-tinted, tiny square in the midst of the dense primeval woods that encompassed it. Now he looked with interest to identify in turn the landmarks of the cove. So purple it was in the distance, save where the slopes rose on either hand, and the summits of the forest grew gradually into a bronze hue, and thence to the deep, restful green of the full summertide. Far away all the horizon was bounded by many a range and peak, painted in all the gradations of blue, from a dull, blurred tint to the finest turquoise delicacy, and rising tier upon tier, till at last the enamelled sky limited the climbing heights. Here and there in the depths below, vague lines marked where the fences ran. A tiny curl of smoke first betokened the Yates cabin; he saw the sun strike full on its shining roof. But most salient of all, the river gleamed a steely gray beneath the craggy walls of the gorge, and the cataract danced all white and green, like a jewel endowed with a flashing life. This only, in the sweet serenity and peace of the scene, seemed to move. The wind came and went, it is true, but with scant token of its presence; only now and again a suggestion of the pallid reverse side of the leaves bestreaked the mountain slopes and marked its path. A flock of sheep feeding in a brambly, rocky space were as motionless as a pastoral scene on canvas. Once a glow of an intense blood-bay color struck his keen eye, and made him aware that a horse was tethered a little way down from the house; the sun struck upon the glossy flank; then the animal slipped into the deep shadow, and was seen no more.

None of this had Rhodes observed. His eyes were fixed upon the two brothers as they lounged amongst the grass and weeds in the fence corner, culpably overgrown in the eyes of a farmer, but cool and sweet in the dense shade of the buckeye-tree, and with sundry long tangled vines of the purple and white passion-flowers, clear-eyed in the grass, and the scarlet trumpet-blossom flaring over the staked and ridered rail-fence. There could hardly be two men less alike, the difference accented since they were both bareheaded--the one with his grave, forceful features, at once sullen and sad, his long curling hair hanging on the shoulders of his blue cotton shirt; the other bullet-headed, close-cropped, with a twinkling, merry eye, a propitiatory expression, a broad face that would look young even when it should be withered and wrinkled like a shrivelled apple, and the coarse brown tufty hair should be as white as snow. The latter looked up with a ready-made, adjustable smile as Rhodes's hearty "Howdy, boys?" rang upon the perfumed air. The candidate did not wait for them to rise, but flung himself at length into the sweet grass, taking his hat off his head and leaning his shoulders against the big buckeye-tree.

"Waal, how do _you_-uns do, Mr. Rhodes?" said Ephraim, with smooth cordiality. "How be you-uns a-kemin' on these days? A month o' Sundays sence we hev seen ye."

He then looked quickly at his brother, with an anxious submission of his conduct for the fraternal approval. For Ephraim Guthrie labored heavily between the quick geniality of a mercurial temperament, a lack of confidence in his own judgment, and a childlike reliance on his brother's opinion: without its coincidence with his own he could not be at ease for a moment. He always spoke precipitately on the impulse of the first, was checked by the second, and waited with pathetic anxiety for the third. He was all things to all men, and this vacillating lack of consistency rendered his amiability of little value in the estimation of the candidate. Rhodes saw with disappointment the other brother, the valid object of conciliation, rise, after a mutter of salutation, to join Shattuck, who, with a nod to the two, had turned away, and stood, with one hand in his pocket, silently surveying the scene below him. He only lifted his eyes slightly in recognition of Guthrie's approach as the burly young mountaineer drew near him, and it was his uncommunicative host who spoke first.

"Glad ter see ye, Mr. Shattuck--glad ter see ye on the mounting."

Shattuck divined that he enjoyed unusual cordiality in being deemed by his host preferable for conversation to Rhodes. The injury which Guthrie had inflicted upon the candidate, and which he had been thought to so magnify, recurred to his mind, with the further fact that it was no accident. Guthrie evidently still cherished the motive that prompted it, and bore malice. It was intention that had led him to leave the candidate to talk to the plastic younger brother while he himself held aloof under the guise of joining the other guest. Nevertheless, his ear was keen for the conversation between the two, which the crafty Rhodes may have in part designed for him, and Shattuck was aware that it was only a divided attention with which he was favored. He responded, however, with equal courtesy.

"A fine view you have here, Mr. Guthrie--a very fine view. I don't know its equal anywhere."

Guthrie glanced quickly at him, then ran his eye over the scene, with the effect of seeing it for the first time. He knew no other aspect of the world. It had never occurred to him that the lives of many other people were not bounded by these fine and massive symmetries of mountain ranges in every tender phase of purest color; by infinite distances, challenging the capacities of farthest vision; by softest pastoral suggestions of cove and slope; by primeval wildernesses and stern and rugged solemnities of crags; by phantasmal chutes of flying mountain torrents. His sense of its beauty was blunted by the daily habit of its presence; paradoxically, it could be brought home to him only if it were swept away.

"Yes," he said, uncertainly, "an' we'd hev a good lookout fur corn ef we could hev mo' rain." And he cast a weatherwise eye angrily at the sky, where all the clouds seemed gadding abroad a-pleasuring only, and with no idea of utility as they dallied with the wind. "Not," he added, with an after-thought and a certain precipitation, as if he were afraid that the remark might be overheard, and forthwith acted upon--"not ez I want ter hev enny fallin' weather nuther till we-uns git in this hyar barley."

The differing interests of his crops evidently divided his affections, and he was in the normal condition of the farmer disappointed in either rain or shine.

They stood silent for a moment by the fence, and as Shattuck turned one of the great trumpet-flowers in his hand and looked down into its scarlet horn, then let the tendril spring back elastically into its place, Rhodes's words came to them as he wrestled with Eph Guthrie's presumable political persuasions against him. These were altogether assumed by the candidate for the purposes of argument, for which the plastic Eph furnished but a straw man, as it were, easily knocked down, requiring to be cleverly and surreptitiously picked up again by his insistent opponent, in order to plant still more well-delivered and coercive blows.

"Fee 'ain't got no grudge against me, I know," Rhodes was saying. "_I_ don't bear no malice for a little tussle like that, and I _know_ Fee don't."

"How ye know he don't?"

Shattuck was startled by hearing this _sotto voce_ comment upon the dialogue by Fee in person close to his elbow. He turned and looked at the man, seeking to convey in the glance an intimation that he had spoken his thought aloud and that it had been overheard. Felix Guthrie evidently cared as little as might be. His eyes met Shattuck's unabashed.

"Fee ain't in no wise malicious," Eph piped up.

"I know it--I know that--no man better," Rhodes interrupted him promptly, for he knew that Eph could talk by the yard measure on the subject of his brother's perfections, so close was the fraternal bond. "I _know_ Fee can't bear malice. I like Fee, and Fee likes me, and won't do a thing against me--not a thing!"

"Waal, ye better not be too sure o' that," the voice at Shattuck's elbow said, in that suppressed, significant soliloquy.

Shattuck, embarrassed by these confidences in prejudice to his friend's loudly expressed conclusions, was about to turn away, when Guthrie's hand was laid upon his arm.

"Stranger," he said, his head with his big broad hat and its clinging curls bent forward, "don't it 'pear a sorter cur'ous dispensation to you-uns that that man yander b'lieves so what he say whenst it air in my heart ter kill him--yes, sir, ter kill him!--if he war ter interfere with me?"

"What!" said Shattuck, uneasily feigning. "Do you want to go to the Legislature too?"

"Legislatur' be damned!" said the other, in a deep husky tone, and with a meeting of the straight heavy eyebrows above his intent eyes. "I ain't keerin' a minit's breath 'bout'n the kentry an' sech. But ef he interferes with me 'bout--'bout Letishy Pettingill, his life ain't wuth much purchase--not," he shook his head with a formidable look in his eye, "much purchase."

Shattuck was roused to a sense of danger. He had already interfered too much, and with disastrous results, in his friend's interests; but here was a peril so patent, so immediate, that it was a most obvious duty to seek to diminish the menace. "You mus'n't be disposed to lay too much blame on Rhodes," he said. "She mightn't like either one of you, but somebody else."

"Who's _he_?" demanded Guthrie, breathlessly, with an evident instantaneous transference of the intention of vengeance and the pangs of anxiety to this myth.

"_I_ don't know. Do you suppose she told _me_? Women don't tell these things; that's one of their little ways."

Guthrie drew a long sigh. "An' a mighty mean way too," he commented.

"And men are not often more communicative," Shattuck dexterously equalized the balance. "Mr. Rhodes hasn't talked to me on the subject, but I think I might undertake to say for him that he doesn't want to interfere with you in that quarter."

"He did the night o' the infair at Pettingill's," the slow mountaineer argued, with a swift application of logic.

"Oh, pshaw! he didn't want to 'dance Tucker,' that's all," said Shattuck, with a laugh, and once more seeking to turn away.

Guthrie's hand closed upon his arm; his eyes were on the stretch of barley, bending and swaying as the wind swept through its pliant blades, and shoaling from an argentine glister to green, and from green again to elusive silver glintings--what time the cove below was dark and purple and blurred, as a great white cloud hung, dazzling and opaque, high, high in the sky, and, as it passed, the valley grew graduually into distinctness again, with the privilege of the sunshine and the freedom of the wind, and all its landmarks asserted anew.

"Stranger," Felix said, lowering his tone, "she made ch'ice o' him stiddier me. _I_ hed the right ter dance with her, an' she made ch'ice o' him."

"What of it? That happens every day; a woman prefers one man to another. 'Tisn't worth a quarrel."

"'Pears ter me it's better wuth killin' a man fur than all the other quar'ls that men die in daily."

Shattuck, looking into those vehement eyes, felt an uncomfortable chill stealing along his spinal column, hearing all the time Rhodes's hearty voice as he lay all unconscious on the grass, and held forth to the acquiescent, utterly unimportant Ephraim.

"Would that make her like you any better if she liked him?"

Guthrie's eyes turned ponderingly away to the roof gleaming in the cove that sheltered her at the moment.

Shattuck took confidence. "That isn't the way to make her like you, and that's what _you_ want."

"Hain't Rhodes been thar lately?" demanded Guthrie. "I axed her, but she hev got sech a tormentin' way she wouldn't tell me."

"Only to talk to Mrs. Yates, and see if he could do anything to help her to hear from her husband. Oh, Rhodes would like Letitia a deal better if she could vote for him. He would go to see her every day _then_, you might be sure."

Guthrie cast a glance of frowning contempt over his shoulder at Rhodes; then, with a sudden change of tone, he said: "I hev been mightily troubled in my mind lately 'bout'n him. I war fitten ter hope in my heart ez he wouldn't git well, though I hev been layin' off ter repent some, fur I know _that_ ain't well pleasin' ter the Sperit. I wouldn't hold Rhodes no gredge ef 'twarn't fur her. An' though she showed she hed ruther dance with him than with me, she _don't_ 'pear ter like him noways special. An' sometimes I feel like I ought ter make myse'f easy."

The pitiable vacillations of a lover's hopes and fears appealed to Shattuck. The strength of the man's will, the sternness, almost savagery, of his character, added a force to all that he said, not lessened by Shattuck's knowledge of the object of his affections, or, rather, that upon that aerial and whimsical identity little knowledge was predicable. His disposition was to reassure, to soothe.

"Oh, you may indeed make yourself easy as far as Rhodes is concerned," he insisted. "Rhodes is thinking about nothing in this world but his election, and you ought to show a generous, friendly spirit, and vote for him, and let by-gones be by-gones."

"Oh, Lord! I'd jes' ez soon vote him inter a seat 'mongst the choir o' archangels ez not--though he'd look mighty comical thar, I'm a-thinkin'--ef I war sure ez he warn't gittin' ahead o' me 'bout Litt Pettingill."

He sighed deeply, and cast an absorbed, unseeing glance over the landscape. His strong brawny hand, still on Shattuck's arm, trembled slightly.

"I ain't like other men, stranger. I never loved nobody but her in all my life. Hate hev been my portion. Hard licks hev been my policy, an' the more ye air ready ter give, the less ye hev ter take. That's the way the world goes."

And Shattuck could not gainsay this dictum of the mountain philosopher, albeit the world from which he deduced this cogent truth was but the breadth of the cove.

"Ephraim I hed ter stan' up fur, bein' ez he war so all-fired helpless whenst small, but it air sorter of a habit o' takin' keer o' him an' speakin' him fair, account o' other folks treatin' him mean; I never sure enough keered fur him--though I don't want him ter hear me _say_ that, nuther. I never knowed what love meant till I tuk ter dreamin' 'bout Litt all night an' studyin' 'bout her all day. An' I do swear it's in my heart ter kill enny man ez kems atwixt us."

"Well, 'tisn't Rhodes," Shattuck declared, easily. "And to that I'd be willing to take my oath."

"Ye see, stranger, I be mightily afflicted," said Fee Guthrie, and his strong voice trembled.

"You don't look like it, my friend," returned Shattuck, with a smile.

"Oh, I _am_!" cried the other, with a poignant intonation. "Even ef Rhodes warn't ahead of me, an' ef she liked me, she moughtn't be willin' ter marry me. Some wimmen wouldn't. I hev got that step-mam o' mine ter take keer of; many a gal wouldn't 'gree ter 'bide with her. An' I can't leave her!"

Shattuck, tiring but a moment ago, felt a freshening of interest. "Why," he said, "I have heard that she was unkind to you and your brother when you were children."

"Onkind! Lord! that warn't the word fur it till I got the strength ter be more onkind ter her. But she don't own nuthin'. She 'ain't got nuthin' ter live on. I promised my dad ter support her."

There was a pause.

"Stranger, folks tell a heap o' tales on her. They 'low she killed her fust husband, an' hev 'witched folks, and casts the evil eye. She wouldn't be safe. Ef 'twarn't fur my dad fust, an' then fur me, she'd hev been made ter answer ter the folks in the cove fur her deeds. But the Guthries hev the name o' shootin' mighty straight. So she hev been lef' ter be."

There was another pause while he took off his hat and fanned himself with its broad brim. With it still in his hand he resumed: "She 'witched my dad, I reckon, ter git him ter marry her, though folks said she war good-lookin' in them days. An' dad ez good ez 'witched me; it's an evil spell he flung around me, sure. I knowed what he war goin' ter ax me on his death-bed; I jes' knowed it in all my veins, in every drap o' blood. The doctor said he couldn't live fur twelve hours more. An' I got on my horse an' I rid away. I rid fur an' I rid constant, an' when the horse couldn't git along no furder I rested under a tree. I rid fur forty-eight hours--mind ye, the doctor said _twelve_--an' at last I 'lowed 'twar safe ter kem home. I kem. An' thar, propped up in the bed, war the skeleton o' a man with Death's hand on his throat, waitin' fur me an' fur my promise--an' Death waitin' too. I reckon Death tuk right smart pleasure in that minit--he knowed he got us both through that promise, fur life couldn't mean nuthin' fur me arterward. An' somehow, though I hed fled that promise, I couldn't holp makin' it. How kin ye look in a dyin' man's eyes an' deny him? I promised I'd bide with her an' take keer of her ez long ez she should live. He war dead in a minit. He jes' waited till the words passed my lips. An' he looked at me. An' then he fell back dead."

Shattuck was silent. Even his facile optimism was at fault for the nonce. And after another long-drawn sigh Felix went on:

"'Tain't made my life easy. I knowed that minit I went into chains, fur a promise ter the dead ain't like one ter the livin'. An' though I owe her nuthin' but gredges, both fur me an' Ephraim, 'tain't in gredges I be 'lowed ter pay the debt. I never knowed the weight of it, though, till I met that thar leetle snip o' a gal. 'Pears ter me Litt ain't like nobody that ever lived afore; the very way she turns her head air diff'ent, an' the hair grows on it not similar ter none. Folks round about the mountings say she ain't good-lookin', but her face shines ter me in the darkest night."

"She _is_--she is beautiful, and the rarest type of beauty," cried Shattuck, warmly; "she is unique. She would be considered most beautiful anywhere else."

Guthrie turned upon him a face aglow with gratification. "That's what makes me like you-uns, stranger," he said, cordially. "Ye 'pear ter _sense_ things so. But I war set agin ye some, at fust, knowin' ye ter be Rhodes's friend," he added, frankly. "She likes ye too, Litt do. The t'other night whenst I war visitin' thar she talked ter Mis' Yates an' me an' Baker Anderson 'bout nuthin' in this worl' but you-uns, an' how smart an' perlite ye be, an' book-l'arned, an' diff'ent from them in the cove."

Shattuck received this with a vague, indeterminate thrill, which he did not then discriminate as premonition, but which he remembered afterward.

Guthrie was beset by no suspicion. "Lord!" he exclaimed, his face fervent and flushed, "ef I could take that thar leetle gal's hand in mine ter walk through this life, I could make the journey well pleasin' ter the Lord, though I don't reckon I'd keer whether 'twar heaven or hell arterwards. 'Twould make up ter me fur all the troubles I hev hed in this life. An' they ain't a few--they ain't a few. But I be powerful hampered, powerful hampered, stranger, even ef I warn't so all-fired 'feared o' Rhodes. She never would abide ter live along o' my step-mam, an' I can't leave her. I hev swore a oath ter the dead." Then he seemed to shake off his fears. "It's done me good ter talk so free. I couldn't hev done it--ter a stranger too--'ceptin' I knowed what store Litt set by ye, an' how smart she 'lows ye air."

Once again that vague prophetic disquiet thrilled along Shattuck's nerves. Felix had put his hat again upon his head; his face was softened with a reminiscent smile, as his eyes dwelt upon the furthest blue peaks, most illusory semblances of mountains, faint sublimations of azure, refined almost to nullity, upon the horizon.

"T'other night, what time she could spare from tormentin' Baker Anderson--an' she do make _him_ funny enough ter set a horse a-laffin'--she spent in tellin' them cur'ous tales ye hev set a-goin' 'bout the folks ez war in this kentry 'fore the Injuns. An' Baker axed ef them Phœnicians warn't jes' the Fed'ral army. He 'peared ter think ez ye hedn't got the news o' the War yit. It liked ter hev killed Litt. She couldn't quit laffin'. But she tuck Mis' Yates up mighty short 'bout the Leetle People, an' 'lowed ye didn't want ter examinate thar graves fur gain, but fur knowledge fur the hist'ry o' the kentry."

And suddenly Shattuck's eyes were alight. He took instant advantage of this unexpected recruit to the ranks of scientific investigation. "She was exactly right, and shows her common-sense. And I wish, Fee"--he adopted a cordial familiarity of tone in his anxiety--"you would take that view yourself, and let me examine one or two of those graves."

Guthrie evidently experienced an inward struggle. He was divided between a sincere attraction which he felt toward the stranger, a wish to please, and a repugnant reluctance into which conscience--his queer, distorted, backwoods conscience--entered largely.