Part 24

"I be powerful sorry I kem a-devilin' ye hyar this time o' night fur nuthin'," he said. "I reckon ye think I'm plumb gone destracted 'bout Litt," with a pathetic uplifting of his long-lashed eyes to his interlocutor, who was still sitting in the window. "Ye see a feller like me is mighty forlorn, especially ez I oughter know ez Litt ain't one o' them ez kin be hed fur the askin'. I reckon it'll all come right arter a while?" wistfully interrogative.

"I reckon so," Shattuck was constrained to reply.

Guthrie was never before in so deprecatory or gentle a state of mind. "I feel plumb outdone whenst I remember how I hev talked ter you-uns, ez be so powerful perlite an' saaft-spoken ter all, an' considerin' of feelin's"--Shattuck winced a trifle--"an' how I hev gone on 'bout takin' back promises an' sech. Ye know I don't mean it. Ye air welcome ter dig ennywhar ye wanter on my lan', an' I'll holp ye enny time; now, ef ye like," Guthrie protested with an effort at reparation. "I dun'no' but what it's ez good a time ez enny. Thar's light enough now, an' Mis' Yates mus' be off her gyard; she mus' sleep o' nights--leastwise take cat-naps." He looked up with a propitiatory laugh on his face. "An' I ain't 'feard o' Baker Anderson, nor Litt, nor even Moses."

Shattuck hesitated. He had been more shaken than he would have acknowledged even to himself by the crude suggestion that his name was for a moment connected with one of the brutal and bloody mountain crimes--a mere æsthetic horror, for his mind could not compass the atrocity against probability that the suspicion should be seriously harbored by an officer of the law. He foresaw a night of sleepless irritability, revolving the idea, should he let Guthrie go, although he felt that it should fairly be considered only a fit subject of flout, of ridicule, of inextinguishable laughter. It was rather in the spirit of defending himself against his own capacities for self-torment that he readily turned toward the prospect of diverting his mind, occupying himself with alien interests.

"The spade an' the pick mus' be right thar now," Guthrie observed, by way of urgence. "Eph say he war so flustrated by Mis' Yates's shootin' that he forgot ter fetch 'em back home."

Shattuck looked out at the sober solid shadow of the old brick house, gable and chimney and porch, projected upon the thick herbage of the yard; the silver-green sea of millet glimpsed between the dark branches of the pines; the winding road that led the loitering way to the mountains. "I'll get my hat," he said.

There was no light in the hall save that which the moon cast through the high window on the landing of the stairs. It seemed fibrous, skein-like, pendulous, as far as the balusters; then it fell upon the hall floor below in a distinct, motionless image of the sash and pane, all white and lustrous. By its radiance one could distinguish a hall sofa, long and hard, covered with tattered black hair-cloth; above it, hanging on the wall, the optimistic old barometer that once, perhaps, had been weatherwise, but now insisted that all signs "set fair"; the hall tree, whereon Rhodes's hat swung in its place, while its owner lay unconscious in the room above, the door of which Shattuck need pass with no solicitous tread, for, bating continuance, the pygmies themselves slept not more soundly. The door of his own room stood ajar; the moonlight and the sweet perfumes of the night came in through its open windows. It had a sort of inhabited look, full of comfortable suggestions; perhaps it was only because the fatigue of the day was beginning to hang somewhat heavily on his senses, but as he entered, he stood for a moment irresolute.

In the midst of the dusky uncertainty of sheen and shadow he was abruptly startled to see a dim figure suddenly moving at the opposite side of the room. He advanced a step, and recognized his own image in the indistinguishable mirror. It had a strange, weird effect, this half-seen simulacrum of himself, a skulking, uneasy, secret air that belied its principal, and seemed its own independent attitude, rather than reflected. It was coercive in some sort. He caught up his hat from the table, strode down the hall to Rhodes's door, and thus took those first steps destined never to be retraced. He knocked without response, then opened the door, which creaked raspingly upon its unoiled hinges, rusty with long disuse; and Guthrie, waiting at the window below, amongst the silent pensive lustres of the moon, heard the ringing round voice of Rhodes break forth in drowsy protest, incongruous, prosaic, insistently utilitarian. The interval was short before Shattuck ran down the stair, and sprang through the window, drawing the sash down behind him, and then the two set forth together.

The lilies bloomed at the gate, their chalices full of dew. The mocking-bird sang to the silent moon. Far, far away some watercourse had lifted loud a sylvan song it was not wont to sing by day.

"How still it is! Hear Wild-Duck Creek on the rocks!" Shattuck said as he buckled his saddle-girth and put his foot in the stirrup. The eastern windows were all aflare with a white, opaque radiance in broadened, vitreous, distorted reduplications of the moon. The deep, elongated shadows of the house lay among the orchard boughs. He looked around at the old building when once in the saddle, to see its gables and its chimneys rise anew against the clear sky and the vague outlines of the mountains, only because it pleased him--its solid decency, even dignity, in its honest, unornamented validity, touched his receptive æsthetic sense--not because he divined that he was looking his last upon it. How finite a creature is man; how little he knows his way along these earthly paths--adown which soon or late he goes to meet his fate, never aware how near its approach--one might realize, thinking on a time like this, when these two, all unprescient, rode together to the burial-ground of the "Leetle People." The wind was in their faces--how fresh, how free! The dew glittered in the air; the moon, although yellow and waning, with a melancholy presage in her lessening splendors, made the night like some pensive, softly illuminated day of dreamtides. Their escort of mounted shadows galloped beside them; the turf stretched out into long miles behind their horses' hoofs. They met naught save a fox scudding over a stretch of sward with stealthy speed, and a bundle of feathers between his jaws. The Yates cabin, that Guthrie was first to see, a dimly glimmering gray, was as silent and still as if it housed no life within its walls--as silent and as still as that long slope, with the shadows of the great trees and the intervenient sheen of the moon all adown it, where the Little People had slept this many a day, knowing no waking.

Shattuck led the way. He had turned once more to the tall isolated laurel-bush, almost of tree-like proportions, where he had begun his labors before. He did not at once throw himself from his horse; he was taking note of a strange thing, something that he had not marked heretofore. That mass of bloom and foliage rose between the grave whose stone coffin his pickaxe had struck and any possible surveillance from the Yates cabin. A doubt for the first time stirred in his mind whether it were indeed Adelaide who had fired that murderous rifle ball. The next moment the absorptions of his intentions, his opportunity, usurped all else. He flung himself to the ground, breathless, elated, with an electrical energy in his muscles, as he seized the pickaxe on which Guthrie leaned irresolute, and struck the first blow.

The mountaineer turned his softened moonlit face upon him with a slow smile in his eyes. "I be glad ye hed the grit ter begin; I hain't." The dew had bereft his long curls of their wonted crispness; they hung in lengthened tendrils and dishevelled on his broad shoulders. He pushed his hat far back on his head. His heavy spurred boots were deeply sunken in the long grass. He slowly placed one upon the spade as he drove it down into the mould. "I can't holp bein' sorry fur the Stranger People, ez they air leetle, an' air dead, an' hev been waitin' so long in the dark fur the las' day an' thar summons ter rise."

That sharp smiting of metal upon stone jarred the moonlit quietude, and Guthrie looked up with dilated eyes, his hand quivering on the spade. "This ain't no common grave," he cried; "the ground is loose!"

He was not given to logical deductions; he did not speculate; he only stood staring with wonder; while Shattuck, all unaccustomed to the practical phenomena of digging, apprehended only cause of gratulation that the investigation was to be the less hindered. He made no reply, briskly shovelling out the earth. Presently, with a silent sign to Guthrie, he reached the topmost slab of the strange small sarcophagus. How long since it had seen the light that now fell upon the clay-incrusted stone! When it was first laid here, in what quarter was the moon? How often had it waxed and waned afterward, unmindful? The vibrations of the cataract filled the air with the full pulsings of nature's heart. The wind--wanderer!--came and went, as it did in the days of the pygmies. A flower from the laurel--a mere tissue of a bloom, so fine, so fragile of texture--was wafted down, and fell upon the slab, as transitory, as futile, as unheeded, as ye, O forgotten Little People!

Then the slab was lightly lifted, albeit with trembling hands. 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.

In the confusion that beset his senses, he did not discriminate the thunderous sound that rose upon the air: the flimsy bridge was vibrating under the reckless gallop of a score of horsemen. He only knew, as in a dream, that the moonlight was presently full of swift mounted shadows bearing down upon them, Shattuck still with the jar in his hand, although starting to his feet, and he himself leaning upon the spade. The air reverberated with a savage cheer of triumph. The sheriff had thrown himself to the ground, and with a smile of scornful elation held his pistol at Guthrie's head.

"Ye air no spy, air ye, Fee?" he cried out, with ringing sarcasm. "Got a mighty good reason not ter be. An' I reckon, my pretty Mister Town-man," turning to Shattuck, "ye air no spy nuther. But I'll gin in, Fee, I never war so fooled ez I hev been in you-uns. I never thunk ter set a thief ter ketch a thief this-a-way."

Upon the word, Guthrie, into whose stunned consciousness the truth had gradually sifted, turned, with a flaring color and a fiery eye, and dealt the officer a terrible blow in the face with his whole force. The next moment the two men, their arms interlocked, were swaying to and fro on the brink of the open grave, so nearly matched in strength that it was hard to say which might have prevailed, had not a swift flash of red light sprung out in the pallid moonlight, and a sharp report rung upon the air. They fell apart, the officer staggering backward, but Guthrie sinking down upon the ground, whence he would rise no more.

A mingled clamor, terrible, full of fierce meaning, was suddenly loud upon the night. The shifting temper of the populace was never more aptly illustrated. In an instant the officer was a prisoner in the hands of his posse, and his posse was an infuriated mob. The hoarse cry, "String him up! string him up!" arose more than once. And those who spoke calmly, and with reason and argument, were equally formidable as they called upon the officer to justify his deed.

"Air this the law? No trial! no jury! Not a minute gin him to explain! Call him thief, an' shoot him down, unarmed, in cold blood!"

They pressed about him with eyes hardly less luminous than the eyes of wolves, hardly so gentle, while the officer protested first self-defence.

"With twenty men at yer back?" "An' Guthrie's pistols over yander in the holsters on his saddle?" the refutation rang out. Then, on the repetition of the terrible cry, "String him up!" the effort at exculpation shifted to a claim of the accidental discharge of the weapon. And still the fierce clamor rose anew.

Meantime Felix Guthrie lay very still in the pale moonlight, heedless of vengeance. His long hair stretched backward on the dank grass; his face, upturned to the moonbeams, was calm and untroubled; his hands were listless and limp, and one of the younger men mechanically chafed them as he now and again bent over to seek some sign of life in the fixed eyes.

Shattuck stood bewildered, looking with a sort of numb stupefaction at the prostrate figure upon the grass, and then at the agitated and furious group about the sheriff. The catastrophe, the very scene before him, he could not realize. 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. He only saw her pale elfin face looking out from among the blooms as if she were native to the laurels. Her voice, though it was but a whisper, vibrated with urgency.

"Mount an' ride--_ride_ for yer life!" she said; she held his horse by the bridle. "Thar'll be lynchin' 'fore day." Her tones grew steadier. "Nobody knows who, nor why."

"I'm not afraid of the law," he said, indignantly.

"This ain't law! Gin yerse'f up in town ef ye want law. But ride now--ride off in the shadder! Ride fur yer life!"

From the leafy screen she stepped forth, throwing the reins over the head of the horse, which was frightened and restive, and held the stirrup for Shattuck. The clamorous voices of those angered men rose to a hoarse scream, and the agitated tones of the officer, pleading, arguing, justifying himself, were overborne. Shattuck put his foot in the stirrup. The next moment he was in the saddle. As he looked down, he saw Letitia's face distinctly in the moonlight that trickled through a bough; something of that love of hers, which Guthrie had at once divined and denied and revealed, was expressed in it.

"Ye'll kem back again--some day--some day?" she said.

He clasped her hand as she lifted it.

"Come back? I'd come back if it were from the ends of the earth!" he protested.

A little thing to say, wrung out of the impassioned moment, when, in good sooth, there was no time to measure phrases or take heed of the cadences of the voice. It changed the world for her. He never forgot that radiant face in its sprite-like beauty amongst the moonlit flowers. If there were other eyes in the world so tender, so pathetic, so exquisite, he never saw them before or afterward. No other creature of the earth so looked like one of the air. Even as he sought his escape through the shadows, the dull sound of his horse's hoofs making scant impression in the midst of the pawing of the posse's steeds, he turned to catch through the trees a flitting glimpse of her light dress, her volant attitude, as she sped silently and secretly back to the waiting group on the porch. Then he rode away--rode for his life, as she had bidden him.

And he had good need of speed. How the distorted idea gained credence amongst the infuriated mountaineers it would be difficult to say. It might have been colored by the circumstance that Guthrie could logically be presumed to have had no connivance with the robbers whom he had slain, and no knowledge of where they had hidden their booty; it might have been suggested by the crafty sheriff as a diversion of attention; but the suspicion presently permeated the group that Guthrie had surprised Shattuck in the act of securing the plunder hidden in the pygmy grave. The discovery of the stranger's flight added the semblance of confirmation, and lent energy to the pursuit, which, leading in diverse directions, served to disperse the posse, and thus annul that formidable engine of the law which the strange happenings of the night had turned against the sheriff, who had himself summoned it into existence. It was doubtless with a view to his own safety that he selected for his share of the search the road back to the county town, and with no expectation of the result that awaited him there. The imputation of flight, and of seeking to elude the responsibility of his act, which might otherwise have attached to this precipitate return, was in a measure eliminated by the fact that the fugitive had arrived before him, and had already surrendered to the authorities.

It was a time to which Shattuck could never look back without a wincing loathing for the part he was constrained to play, although, in truth, he fared much better than he could have hoped. It so chanced that the justice of the peace, an old, gentle, friendly man, whom in those early morning hours he had roused, had himself the spirit of an antiquarian; his conversation was replete with the ancient and fading traditions of the Great Smoky Mountains, and he could well appreciate the strength of the archæological interest which had led Shattuck to open the pygmy grave. It seemed in the magistrate's estimation an ample justification for many risks. They were talking of these things quietly in the justice's office when the sheriff joined them. To his prosaic amaze, instead of details of the operation of the law indigenous to the office--points of examining trials and subpœnaings of witnesses, of arrest and commitment--he heard legends of the old Cherokee settlement, Chota, the "beloved town," city of refuge, where even the shedder of blood was safe from vengeance; of the mysterious Ark before which sacrifices were offered; of Hebraic words in the Indian ritual of worship; of the great chieftain Oconostota, and his wonderful visit to King George in London; of the bravery of Atta-Culla-Culla; of the Indian sibyl known as the Evening Cloud, and the strange fulfilment of her many strange prophecies.

Thus submitting his motives to no uncomprehending utilitarian arbitrament, all the rigors of the misunderstanding that Shattuck feared were averted, and he doubtless owed his admission to bail to this fortuitous circumstance. That he never came to trial he was indebted to a chance as friendly, for Millroy, before his death, so far recovered as to make a sworn statement which inculpated only Cheever and the horse-thief's gang, thus relieving Yates as well as Shattuck of all suspicion of complicity in the murder and the robbery.

The mere passing remembrance that his name had ever been mentioned in connection with these crimes was like the thrust of a knife in Shattuck's heart for years thereafter, most of all as his enthusiasms abated, and the more serious interests of life were asserted, and his worldly consequence increased. Sometimes, amidst the wreaths of a post-prandial cigar, a sprite-like face, that seemed even in his unwilling and disaffected recollection supremely fair, was present to him again, and left him with a sigh half pleasure, half pain. Further than this his words were naught, and easily forgotten.

Easily forgotten! Every day that dawned to Letitia's expectant faith held an hour that would bring him. Never a sunset came that was not bright with his promise for the morrow. Down any curve in the road, as it turned, she might look to see him. For did he not say he would come?--and so surely he would! The years of watching wore out her life, but not her faith. And she died in the belief that her doom fell all too soon, and that he would come to find her gone. And she clung futilely to earth for his fancied sorrow.

Since those days the Little People's burying-ground is doubly deserted. But few pass, and they eye it askance. 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.

Meantime the Little People sleep well.

THE END.

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BY MARY E. WILKINS.

A NEW ENGLAND NUN, and Other Stories. 16mo, Cloth, Ornamental, $1 25.

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