Part 7

There was a shocked gravity and surprise even on Letitia's face. Adelaide had looked away toward the road, affecting to watch for an approach, in despair of being able to fitly meet Shattuck's gaze after saying this, which seemed to affect other people as a commonplace matter, but to her was an accusation of the deepest turpitude. The countenance of the infant Moses, still bent upon him with a sternly investigating stare, was the only one whose gaze had not a covert reproach. He hardly cared to argue with their prejudice. He sought to effect a diversion--in questionable taste he might have deemed it at another time, however little taste might be considered to be concerned in his conversation with the humble mountaineers. He had often heard, and had formally accepted as worthy of credence, the popular axioms concerning the dangers of interference between man and wife. But he certainly did not anticipate the effect of his words when he said:

"I shall have to look out for you, I hear. You are such a friend to the Little People that you have loaded a rifle for me. What sort of a shot are you, now; and how far will your rifle carry?" He cocked his cigar between his teeth, and looked at her with an air of good-natured raillery.

Her face seemed, in the shadow of her purple sun-bonnet, to be slowly turning to stone, so rigid and white it was. She did not reply, but as he noted her startling change of expression he felt a sudden rush of indignation. The mountaineers, with their unconscious ignorance, their intolerance of all standpoints save those within their own limitations, their arrogations of censorship, their suspicions of occult wickedness in his motives and intentions, their overt assumption of a right to direct the public conscience, had begun to strongly anger him. His capacity for making allowances was all at once exhausted, and he found the intensity of her look strangely irksome.

"Well, what's the matter?' he asked, a trifle more roughly than he ever permitted himself to speak to a woman; for he was a man of consciously chivalric impulses, which he had willingly permitted to agreeably tinge his manners. He held his cigar suspended between his fingers while he waited.

"Did--did Steve tell you-uns _that_ word?" she cried, in a tone like despair.

"Why, yes," he returned, promptly.

There was a moment when the vivid sunshine, the cool, dank shadows of the foliage stirring with such soft dryadic murmurs above her head, the song of the bird from the strong, rich effulgence of the corn-field, the chant of the river, even the cry of her child, were as null to her as if her every faculty had been numbed in the centuries of death that crumbled slowly the pygmy burying-ground.

"Did _he_ tell that word on me?" she cried at last, her voice rising discordantly. "He hev gone--he hev gone fur good. He warned me ef I teched that rifle ter fire at them that disturbed the rest o' the Leetle People whilst waitin' fur jedgment--or said that word--that he'd turn me out'n his door. But he 'lowed 'twar the easiest way ter go hisself. An' he hev gone--gone fur good." And once more she lapsed into stony immobility.

Mr. Shattuck turned his cigar and looked down at it. It was a casual gesture, but there was a spark of irritation in his eye. He had lost all appreciation of any element of interest in her beauty, in the picturesque charm of the surroundings. The incongruity that he and his semi-scientific researches in his idle summer loiterings should become involved in a foolish quarrel between a mountaineer and his wife struck him as grotesque, and offended his every sense of the becoming. He had piqued himself somewhat upon his sensibilities, his ever-ready sympathy with all sorts and conditions of people. He had fine abilities in many æsthetic ways; he could discern the higher values, to seek to make them his own and assimilate them. He appreciated the correct standpoint; he felt the susceptibility to the glow of a noble emotion, and he appraised its possession exactly as he did his knowledge of the Italian language--a fine thing _per se_, and one to grace a gentleman. His capacity to enter into the feelings of the mountaineers, to meet them, despite the heights of his learning and his social position, without effort and without affectation, had extorted the admiration and emulation of his friend the politician, versed in all the arts of currying favor. But he was not equal to this crisis, since it bore heavily upon the fund of pride encompassing his own personality. His consideration, his kindness, his whole attitude was to them as themselves, not in any sort as one with himself. He had not a word of pity for her; he did not see, with that fine far sight which he sometimes called insight, her long, desolate future that challenged her eye and turned her heart cold; he had no perception of those farthest perspectives of altruism, a share in another's morbid terror--he so despised her folly.

And when once more she broke silence--"He hev gone!"--"I reckon not," he said, coolly, still looking with a smile at the end of his cigar, and presently returning it to his lips.

The nervous strain of the moment seemed hardly capable of extension till that most wearing and jarring sound, a fretful child's discordant wail, rose upon the air. Perhaps her rigid arm hurt Moses; perhaps he detected that something was going awry with her; perhaps he merely felt too long overlooked and neglected; but the great Dagon lifted a stentorian and unwelcome cry, and paused only with an air of vengeance, as if he expected all who beheld to be properly dismayed, seized his pink sun-bonnet by the crown, and cast it from him on the ground with a great sweep of his short arm. As he gazed around, bald-headed, to note the effect, his sullen eye encountered Letitia's, who was for once in her life silenced and amazed by the turn affairs had taken. She made an effort to regain her balance.

"I ain't s'prised none ef ye want some water," she said, producing the great brown gourd, and bending down to submerge it in the depths of the cool, gurgling, crystal spring.

"Leetle Mose," emitting a piercing shriek of anger that she should take the liberty of addressing him, flung himself with averted face into his mother's arms. The tone went through Shattuck's head, so to speak; his brows knitted involuntarily with pain; he was about to rise to go in-doors, for the possible embarrassments and discomforts of conversation with old Zack Pettingill were insignificant indeed to the hardships encountered in the society of "leetle Mose," upon whom he cast a look of aversion, forgetting that he was a specific unit of that genus, man, for whom Shattuck felt so largely.

Feminine ears seem curiously callous to that frenzied infantile shrillness. Letitia, all unaffected, brought the brimming gourd close to the shrieking Mose, who turned to find it beside him. Now the way had been long, and the sun was hot, and had burnt the great Dagon as if he had been any common person. The deep coolness of the gourd--it must have been very large to his eye--allured him. He involuntarily gave a bounce and a gurgle of delight. Few people ever saw "leetle Mose" smile, and a most beguiling demonstration it was. His elastic pink lips parted wide; his few teeth, so hardly come by, glittered; his very tongue, coyly dumb--though it was better tutored than it would admit--might be seen frisking between his gums. He waited expectantly for his mother for a moment, and as she did not move he permitted Letitia to serve him; he reached out eagerly, holding the gourd with both hands, lifting his pink feet as if he intended to stay the bottom of the vessel by those members, and after several futile, ill-directed bounces he succeeded in applying his soft lips to the verge. He stopped, sputtering, once to look up, with laughing eyes full of gladness and with a dripping chin, at Letitia, and then, as he plunged his head again to the water, they could hear him laughing and gurgling in the gourd that echoed cavernously. The specific unit became all at once more tolerable to contemplate. Shattuck, in laughing ridicule of him, glanced at Letitia. Her eyes did not meet his. She was staring intently at the section of the road visible at some little distance by the side of the corn-field. He turned to follow her gaze. He had not before noticed the thud of hoofs; the sound was upon the air now. From out the deep shadow about the spring naught was visible in the sun-flooded highway but a cloud of dust, every mote red in the dazzling radiance. The approach had been obscured by the intervening undergrowth that grew close about the river where the road came down to the bank. He could still hear the thud of hoofs. Did he fancy it, he asked himself suddenly, or was there something erratic suggested in the sound? Certainly the interval was strangely long, reckoning by the distance, while they stood and watched the close undergrowth on the opposite bank, and waited for the rider to emerge from the covert. At last, as the horse appeared, the mystery was solved. He was a bay horse, in good condition, with a long stride, and an old-fashioned Mexican saddle with a high-peaked pommel. He came down the slope and waded into the water in a slouching, undetermined way, now and then turning his head to look with wondering dissatisfaction at the heavy, swaying stirrups as his movements caused them to lunge heavily back and forth--for they were empty, and the saddle bore no rider. He paused to drink in the middle of the stream, but as Letitia ran toward him, calling "Cobe! Cobe!" he desisted, looked intelligently at her, and again at his swaying empty stirrups. He could have told much, evidently, if he had not been dumb. Then he came readily trotting through the water, which swept away from his swift strides in foamy circles, and, struggling up the bank, let her catch his bridle and stroke his head. He shook his mane and neighed with pleasure to be at home again.

Adelaide was standing, her child in her arms, gazing breathlessly at him. Letitia, still stroking the animal's head, had turned a pale face and eyes full of vague appeal upon Shattuck.

"I don't understand," he exclaimed.

"This is the horse he rode," she said.

V.

The news of the horse's return with an empty saddle was received at first lightly enough by others. The treasures of old Zack Pettingill's whiskey keg and his wife's cherry-bounce, lavished forth on the preceding evening, were deemed amply sufficient to account for any eccentricities of equestrianism. But when several days had passed without the reappearance of the dismounted horseman, the slowly percolating gossip touching a conjugal quarrel began to offer another and a more exciting interpretation of the mystery. So general was its acceptance that although a company of men organized a search and patrolled the roads and the by-paths and the mountain-sides, it was with scant hope or expectation of any definite discovery, and inquiry of the physician whom Yates had been despatched to summon resulted only in a verification of the popular conviction that he had never delivered the message. Thus the fears evoked for his safety were very promptly merged in reprehension, and speculative gossip was mingled in equal parts with pity for his wife.

"Who'd ever hev thunk ez Adelaide Sims, counted the prettiest gal this side o' nowhar, would hev been deserted by her husband 'fore three years war out?" Mrs. Pettingill said, meditatively, her pipe between her lips, as she "walked" a spinning-wheel into the house, making it use first one and then the other of its own spindling legs to achieve progression rather than lifting it by main force. She half soliloquized and half addressed a tall, lank mountaineer who sat upon the edge of the porch, his horse grazing hard by. He had stopped on the pretext of asking for a "bite," saying that he had travelled far over the mountain, looking up some stray cattle of his, and albeit Mrs. Pettingill disapproved of his reputation, the "snack" that she could give him was one of those admirable things in itself that could not go amiss even with a sinner. He had a big-boned, powerful frame and was middle-aged; but despite that his hair was streaked with gray, and the crow's-feet about his eyes gave evidences of the lapse of time, he was the very impersonation of the spirit of "devil may care." He had a keen, hooked nose, an eye far-seeing, gray, and of a steely brilliancy, and the thin lips of his large mouth, mobility itself, curved to a vast range of expression. His manner implied an elated, ever-ready, breezy confidence; his eye now covertly measured you, then gayly overlooked you as of no manner of consequence. His reputation might, indeed, be accounted a doubtful one. He had come before the bar of justice several times: the altering of the brand on certain cattle herded upon the "Bald" had been laid at his door; the manner in which a horse had been lost, by a drover passing through the country, and found in his possession, had been called into question. On each occasion his escape had been made good by the lack of adequate evidence to convict, although little doubt existed as to his guilt. He was one of those singular instances of an undeserved popularity. Better men, amply able to discern right from wrong, often opined that there was no great harm in him, that injustice had been done him, and that much meaner men abounded in the cove who had never been "hauled over the coals." He had been a brave soldier, although the flavor of bushwhacking clung to his war record. He had certain magnetic qualities, and there were always half a dozen stout fellows at his back--ne'er-do-weels like himself. He had been suspected of moonshining, but this was not considered a natural sequence of his lawless habits, for many otherwise law-abiding citizens followed this pursuit; in defence, they would have urged, of their natural right of possession--to make what use they chose of their own corn and apples, as their forefathers had done in the days before the whiskey tax. Buck Cheever's suspected adherence to the popular standpoint on this burning question might have been considered to only lower the tone of the profession.

Mrs. Pettingill regarded him with contradictory emotions. As a religionist, she felt that she would prefer his room to his company; but his room was but scant encroachment, for he only sat upon the edge of the porch, and he by no means asserted any equality of piety or moral standpoint; on the contrary, he seemed to esteem her, and, by her reflected lustre, Mr. Pettingill, as shining lights, and vastly different from the general run of the cove. His breezy talk was peculiarly refreshing to her in the midst of the ordeal, still in process, of restoring the routine of twenty years, shattered by the havoc of the infair. He had a discerning palate and a crisp and flexible tongue, and she felt, with a glow of kindness, that he said as much in praise of her corn-dodgers, which formed a part of his lunch, as any one else would have said for her pound-cake.

"Mos' folks don't sense the differ in corn-meal cookin'. It takes a better cook ter make a plain, _tasty_ corn-dodger, ez eats short with fried chicken, 'n a cake."

"It takes _Mis' Pettingill_ ter make this kind o' one," he protested, with his mouth full. "No sech air ever cooked ennywhar else I ever see."

"I hev got some mighty nice fraish buttermilk, Buck, jes' churned," she remarked, precipitately. "I be goin' ter fetch ye a glass right off."

Old Zack Pettingill, with his shock head of thick gray hair, and his deeply grooved face, sat in his shirt-sleeves in his accustomed chair on the porch, and his expression betokened a scorn of his helpmeet's susceptibility to the praises of her culinary accomplishments, and held a distinct intimation, by which Buck Cheever might have profited had he been so disposed, that he was not to be propitiated in any such wise. Little, however, Buck Cheever cared. The lady in command of the larder dwarfed her husband's importance.

"Yes, 'm," he drawled, taking up the thread of the gossip where the victualling interlude had left it; "Adelaide's been left. That's mighty bad. An' I reckon it hurts her pride too." He showed himself thus not insensible to æsthetic considerations.

"I'll be bound it do," Mrs. Pettingill agreed, as she seated herself. She cast a speculative look upon her husband, silent and grum as if he had been thus gruffly carved out of wood. He had been a stumbling-block in many respects in his conjugal career. He was "set" in his ways, and some of them she felt were ways of pure spite. She had never before realized, however, that his continued presence was a thing to be thankful for. Such as he was, she had him at hand. Public pity, which the sensitive feel as public contempt, had never been meted out to her because of his desertion. Thus, although she could with convenience have dispensed with him, and his loud harangues, and his overbearing ways, and his dyspepsia--the cove said he had been fed till he foundered--which placed an embargo on three fourths of the dishes on which she loved to show her skill, he was revealed to her suddenly as a boon in that he would yet stay by her, and the phrase "a deserted wife" had no affinity with her fully furnished estate.

"Waal, Steve always 'peared ter me a good match whenst he war young"--she meant unmarried--"though riprarious he war, an' sorter onstiddy an' dancified, but I never 'lowed he'd hev done sech a mean thing. An' that thar baby o' theirn! well growed, an' fat, an' white, an' strong, but, I will say, _bad_ ez the Lord ever makes 'em. Waal, waal, a body dun'no' _how_ thar chil'n will turn out; them with small famblies, or none, oughter thank the Lord--though _that_ ain't in the Bible. 'Blessed be the man with a quibble on 'em.' That's what the Good Book say."

This was a new view with Mrs. Pettingill. She had often floutingly wished she had a "sure enough fambly," as if her own were so many rag dolls. "Jes' _one_ son," she would say; "an' him, through being in love, hed ruther eat his meals at the Gossams'--'long o' Malviny Gossam--whar they don't know no mo' _how_ ter cook a corn puddin' or a peach cobbler 'n ef they war thousand-legs; an' jes _one_ darter, ez will pick a chicken bone an' call _it dinner_! an' a 'speptic husband ez hev sech a crazy stommick that jes' 'Welsh rabbit' will disagree with him!"

What sort of chance was there here for a woman who knew what good cooking was? "Ef 'twarn't fur the visitors ez kem ter the house," she often declared, "I'd git my hand out."

"Folks raise thar chil'n wrong," said old man Pettingill in a dirge-like tone--"raise 'em for the devil's work like I raise my cattle fur the plough. Marryin' is a mighty serious business. Yes, sir!"

"A true word!" interpolated his wife, desirous of not seeming behindhand in this view of the seriousness of matrimony, in order to intimate that whatever reason he had to be solemn upon the subject, she too had cause to be sobered by it. She knitted a trifle faster, and her needles clicked resentfully.

"Yes, sir," he reiterated. "An' steddier singin' o' psalm tunes over the bride an' groom, an' a-prayin' over 'em, an' hevin' a reg'lar pray'r-meetin', repentin' o' sins an' castin' o' ashes on thar heads, we hev _dances_, an' _dancin' Tucker_, an' all manner o' eatables, an' infairs, ez ef they war a-goin' ter dance through life, when married life is mos'ly repentance."

"That it is!" exclaimed Mrs. Pettingill, forgetting her gratitude that she too had not been "left." "Repentance o' ever bein' married. Sackcloth an' ashes is the word!"

Old Pettingill took no notice of this confirmation of the letter if not the spirit of his dogma, save by a surly baited glance, and went on: "Church members though we all war, we stood round an' watched them young folks dance ter the devil till he fairly riz up through the floor an' smit one of 'em down."

"By gosh!" exclaimed Cheever, a sudden fear and wonder upon his face; "which one war smit?"

"'Twar Len Rhodes," his host began, but Mrs. Pettingill's wheeze, persistently sibilant, dominated even his louder tone.

"Don't you-uns be 'feared, Buck. Satan hisself didn't show up. He struck through Fee Guthrie's arm--a mighty survigrous one. Ye know the En'my hev got the name o' bein' toler'ble smart, an' he never made ch'ice o' a spindlin' arm."

Once more Mr. Pettingill resumed, overlooking what she had said: "An' so Mr. Shattuck hyar 'lowed the law would be down on us ef Mr. Rhodes didn't hev his own doctor-man--ez 'peared ter be the apple o' his eye! An' bein' ez my son war the groom, an' the 'casion war the infair, I couldn't send him off, an' I jes' axed Steve Yates ter go fur the doctor, an' go he did."

"An' go war _all_ he did," interpolated Mrs. Pettingill; "he never kem back no mo'."

"I be powerful obligated ter him ez he never tuk my bay horse-critter along; sent him home with the saddle onter him an' all. I dun'no' but what I be s'prised. Ef he war mean enough ter desert his wife, he air plenty mean enough ter steal a horse."

Shattuck, who was lounging with a cigar in a big arm-chair, looked frowningly at the speaker. He had felt much distress that it should have been upon his insistence that the young man was despatched upon that errand whence he had never returned. He could hardly control his anxiety and forebodings while searching parties went forth; and so earnestly he hoped that no broken and bruised body would be found along the roadside, betokening a fatal fall from the saddle, no trace of robbery or foul deed resulting in death, that when public opinion settled upon the theory of Yates's desertion of his wife he experienced a great relief, a welcome sense of irresponsibility. And yet this was so keen and vivid that he could but reproach himself anew, since he so rejoiced because of the disaster that sealed her unhappiness. His spirits had recovered somewhat their normal tone, but nevertheless he could ill endure an allusion to his share in the circumstances that precipitated the event.

"How air she a-goin' ter git along?" demanded Cheever; a sufficiently uncharacteristic question, since his was not the type of practical mind that is wont to occupy itself with domestic ways and means. "Goin' back ter her own folks?"

"She 'lows she'd ruther die. She's goin' ter stay thar in her cabin an' wait fur him," said Mrs. Pettingill. "Sorter seems _de_-stressin', I do declar'! A purty, young, good, r'ligious 'oman a-settin' herself ter spen' a empty life a-waitin' fur Steve Yates ter kem back. _He_'ll never kem. He's in Texas by now," she declared, hyperbolically; for Texas is the mountaineer's _outremer_. "Litt say she ain't never goin' ter git married," she continued, irrelevantly.

"How long d'ye reckon she'll stick ter _that_?" demanded old Pettingill, sourly, glancing up from under his grizzled eyebrows.

"Waal," his wife defended her, "she hain't never got married yit, and that's more'n _ye_ kin say."