Part 8

And to this taunt the unhappy Mr. Pettingill could offer no response, save an inarticulate gruffness that only betokened his ill-will and the ill grace with which he accepted defeat. The dirge-like monody to which he seemed to have attuned his spirit was but the retroactive effect of the gayety of the infair, the swinging back of the pendulum as far as it was flung forth. More sophisticated people have encountered that melancholy reflux of pleasure, and, with the knowledge that the cure lies in "a hair of the dog that bit you," find a revival of their capacities for gayety in new scenes of mirth. But the society of the cove had not these opportunities for extension and reduplication. There were no more infairs nor dances nor weddings. Mr. Pettingill was constrained to recover the tone of his spirits as best he might, despite the sheer descent from the heights of the gayeties of the feast he had made to the humdrum level of his daily life, with all the zest taken out by contrast. Few people over eighteen have this experience without acquiring with it such philosophy as serves to nullify it, but it made Mr. Pettingill very sour at sixty.

"Where is Letitia?" queried Shattuck, who had missed that element which gave a different interpretation to the whole life of the house, which lent most blithesome wings to the heavy-footed hours. He had wondered all the previous day, but until her name was mentioned he would not ask.

"Litt? She went ter stay with Adelaide," said Mrs. Pettingill, complacently knitting. "Litt air more company 'n help. I miss her powerful."

"I kin spare her easier 'n ennything round the house," observed her father, acridly.

Mrs. Pettingill burst into an unexpected laugh. Her eyes twinkled with reminiscent raillery as they were fixed upon her husband, who seemed a trifle out of countenance.

"Waal, Litt _do_ make remarks," she offered in explanation.

"I have observed that," said Shattuck.

Mrs. Pettingill became all at once grave and concerned. The quality of Litt's remarks was disconcertingly satiric, and she deprecated the fact that the stranger should have acquaintance with them. Shattuck reflected her embarrassment in some sort; it suggested "remarks" upon him which he had not had the opportunity of hearing, the very recollection of which in his presence evidently confused their amiable auditor, as if the mere consciousness of them implied discourtesy.

"Naw," she went on, somewhat precipitately, addressing herself rather more directly to Cheever, "Adelaide ain't goin' home ter her folks. Steve lef' his craps all laid by, an' 'ceptin' fur cuttin' wood an' fetchin' water thar warn't much use fur him thar. I dun'no' what Adelaide wanted with Letishy; she jes' seemed ter cling ter her. I 'lowed ter Litt ez _she_ warn't no comp'ny fur grief. But Litt, she 'lowed ez leetle Moses war apt ter make her sorrowful enough fur chief mourner at a fun'al 'fore he got done with her. His temper fairly tarrified her."

Cheever suddenly seemed disposed to bring his visit to an end. He had an inattentive look during Mrs. Pettingill's last words, an introspective pondering thoughtfulness, inconsistent with his almost suspicious and vigilant habit of countenance. He started as if with an effort to recapture his vagrant wits, and it was a long moment of review before he understood Mrs. Pettingill's commonplace remonstrance, "What's yer hurry, Buck?"

Mr. Pettingill, sufficiently averse, for not unnatural reasons of his own, to conversation with Shattuck alone, made haste to second her. "Ye 'pear ter be scorchin' ter git away," he said, although under normal circumstances both would have considered Buck Cheever's society no boon. They were aware that ordinarily he, with his ne'er-do-weel record, would have been flattered by their courtesy. They noted, with a sort of unformulated speculation and curiosity, his indifference to it, the definite intention expressed in his face, the preoccupation with which he looked to his saddle-girth and his stirrup-irons before he mounted. Even to their languid and half-dormant perceptions the fact was patent that he was going because he had got what he had come for. In their simplicity they thought it was his luncheon!

Despite his lank length and slouching awkwardness afoot, he was a sufficiently imposing horseman when he swung himself into his saddle and speedily went down the winding way. He rode with his chin high in the air, his legs stretched straight to the extreme length of the stirrup-leathers, not rising to the motion of the horse, but sitting solidly in the saddle as if he were a part of the animal, like an equestrian statue endowed with motion. A gallant horse it was, unlike the humble brutes of the mountaineers, with good blood in his throbbing veins and fire in his full eye, and a high-couraged spirit breathing in the dilatations of his thin red nostrils; he was singularly clean-limbed; his red roan coat shone like satin; he had a compact hoof, a delicate, ever-alert ear, a small bony head, and a long swinging stride as regular as machinery. If it were possible to disconcert Buck Cheever, it might be accomplished by the question how he became possessed of this fine animal--finer even than the mountain men in their limited experience were able to appreciate. He had been known to account for him as being identical with a certain lame colt, which he had bought a few years before from Squire Beamen in the valley. "I didn't gin much fur him, bein' his laig war crippled, but he cured up wonderful. An' I wouldn't sell him now. He's some lighter-complected 'n he war then, through bein' sun-burnt. That's how kem ye didn't know him fur the same. He's better-lookin' now, though I hev ter handle his nigh fore-laig keerful."

This "nigh fore-laig" was lifted and thrust forth with a vigorous, high-stepping action that would have attested much for veterinary surgery had it been a restored instead of a pristine power. Beneath it the miles of sandy road, now sunshiny, now flecked with the shadows of the wayside trees, reeled out swiftly; the landscape seemed speeding too, describing some large ellipse.

Cheever's far-seeing gray eyes rested absently on the shifting scene as on and on he went--a certain supercilious observation it would seem, since from the backward pose of his head he looked out from half-lowered eyelids. It was too familiar to him, too stereotyped upon his senses, to produce responsive impressions, and he was familiar with few others, and knew no contrasts. 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. Not to his. And he was as unmindful of the purple bloom that rested upon other ranges as they drew afar off, of the swift clear water of the river crossing his path again and again, of the cardinal-flower on the bank, so stately and slender, with the broken reflection of its crimson petal glowing in a dark swift swirl below--as oblivious as they were of him. Only he noticed the sky, the clouds, harbingers of change, despite the azure above and the golden illusions of sunshine in which all the world was idealized--change, although the long, feathery, fleecy sweeps of vapor, like the faint sketchings of snowy wings upon the opaque blue, otherwise void, might seem only lightest augury.

"Mares' tails," he soliloquized as he went. "Fallin' weather."

The voice of the cataract had long been on the air, growing louder and louder every moment--only its summertide song, when languors bated its pulses, and daily its volume dwindled. He had heard it call aloud in the savage ecstasy of the autumn storms, when reinforced by a hundred tributaries, and bold and leaping in triumph. And he knew it, too, in winter--a solemn hush upon it, a torpor like the numb chill of death, its currents a dull, noiseless, trickling flow through a thousand glittering icy stalactites. So well he knew it that for its sake he would not have glanced toward it.

Nevertheless, he drew his horse into a walk, and gazed fixedly out of his half-closed eyes up the long gorge between the ranges, at the river, at the glassy emerald sheet of the water-fall, and at the little house hard by. Its door was closed, as if it too had been deserted; and it seemed very small in the shadow of the great mountains, against whose darkling forests its little gray roof and its tendril of smoke were outlined; but it was only a moment before his quick eye detected the presence of the household. Down by the water-side the three were. The great caldron betokened a wash-day; the fruits of the industry were already bleaching and swinging in the fragrant air on the Sweet-Betty bushes. The fire smouldered almost to extinction under the caldron, which barely steamed with a dull, lazily wreathing, lace-like vapor; the work was evidently all done. Adelaide sat upon the roots of a tree, her arms bare, her chin in her hand, her eyes, that had learned all the brackish woe of futile weeping, ponderingly fixed upon the never-ceasing, shifting fall of the water. Letitia, too, was silent as she leaned upon the paddle that was used to beat the clothes white, its end poised upon the bench. Moses, seated in a clumped posture, with his legs doubled in a manner impossible to one of elder years and less elastic frame, now and again babbled aloud disconsolately, and ground his gums with the cruelty of rage and with great distortion of his indeterminate features. He had so implacable an air of such crusty gravity as he sat on the fine green moss, with his obedient vassals about him, and his newly washed habiliments, ludicrously small, swinging on the perfumed branches of the undergrowth, that he might have provoked a smile from one less preoccupied than Cheever. The keen eyes of the horseman--very watchful they were under their half-drooping lids--were fixed upon the two young women.

The horse, alternately bowing low and tossing up his head with its waving mane, moved in an easy, light walk that hardly raised a mote of dust upon the road, overgrown with the encroaching weeds, and intimating few passers. The sound was thus muffled, and Cheever was not observed until he was close at hand. Letitia was first to recognize him, and, as she turned toward him, her blue eyes said much, he felt, but in a language that he wot not of. In some sort her inscrutability disconcerted him. He was sensible of being at a loss as he reined up at the riverside. He seemed to forget, to vaguely fumble for the motive that led him here. The dreary indifference on Adelaide's face as she met his gaze restored in some degree his normal mental attitude. He was conscious of a sort of vague wonder that there was no sense of humiliation, of mortified pride, in its expression. The supreme calamity of her loss had dwarfed into nullity all the opinion of others, all the bitterness of being the theme of pitying, half-scornful gossip. The cove was nothing to her, and nothing all it could say. She was bereaved.

As to Moses, he should never feel the loss; she would be to him father and mother too. And if Moses had been unduly pampered heretofore, he bade fair now to break the record of all spoiled babies. Never a gesture was lost upon her, never a tone of his oft inharmonious voice. Now, because the horse which Cheever rode suddenly caught his attention, and his discordant remonstrance with his teeth ceased abruptly, she looked around with a wan, pleased smile curving her lips. The little biped gazed up at the great, overshadowing four-footed creature with a gasp of joy, delighting in his size and the free motion of his whisking tail. A dimple came out in Dagon's pink cheek, although a tear still glittered there. He was suddenly indifferent to his teeth, and showed them all in a gummy smile. Then, with a self-confidence in ludicrous disproportion to his inches, he pursed his lips, and giving an ineffectual imitation of a chirrup, and a flap of the paw, he sought to establish personal relations with the big animal, who took no more notice of the great Dagon than if he had been a wayside weed, but bent down his head and pawed the ground.

"The young un likes the horse," Cheever observed, leniently, conscious of sharing the "young un's" weakness in equine matters, and seizing the opportunity to so naturally open the conversation, for he was not, in a manner, received at the Yates house. "How air ye a-comin' on, Mis' Yates?" he continued, his voice seeking a cadence of sympathy.

"Toler'ble well," replied Adelaide, reticently, scarcely disposed to discuss her sorrows with this interlocutor. She turned her eyes toward the water-fall once more, and her quiet reserve would have discouraged another man from pursuing the conversation. Cheever, blunt as his sensibilities were, could have hardly failed to apprehend the intimations of her manner, so definite were they, so aided by the expression of her face; but he had his own interest in the premises, and he was not likely to be easily rebuffed.

"I hev been mightily grieved an' consarned ter hear how Steve hev tuk an' done," he went on, his countenance readily assuming a more sympathetic cast than was normal to it, since, as they were on a lower level, his downward look seemed but a natural slant, and not the same suspicious, sneering, supercilious disparagement from under half-drooped eyelids which his usual survey betokened. "I war powerful grieved," he reiterated. "I never would hev looked fur sech conduc' from Steve."

She made no answer, but her eyes turned restlessly from one point to another; her face was agitated. It was a critical moment. She felt as though she could scarcely forgive herself should she weep to the erratic measure of Cheever's shallow commiseration. It was an affront to her sacred grief. And she had no pretext to withdraw.

Letitia had not been addressed, but she seemed to find that fact no hindrance to assuming a share in the conversation. "Ye war grieved!" she exclaimed, with a keen, frosty note in her voice, as she swayed her weight upon the paddle, poised on the wash-bench. "I never war so _tee_-totally delighted with nuthin' in my life. Steve Yates never 'peared so extry ter me. Moses thar air fower times the man he war, an' fower times, I dun'no' but _five_ times"--mathematically accurate--"better-lookin'. I never war so glad in all my life ez ter hear he hed vamoosed."

A most ingenuously merry face she had, with its red lips curving, and its dimpled cheeks flushing, as she turned her clear sapphire eyes up to the rider; but a duller man than he might have read the daring and the ridicule and the banter in their shining spheres. His look of mingled reproach and anger had, too, a scornful intimation that she had not been spoken to, as he glanced indifferently away, passing her over. This was implied also in the pause. It seemed as if he could not bring himself to make a rejoinder. It was Mrs. Yates, evidently, with whom he wished to confer. But conversation with her on this theme was apparently impracticable, and yet on this theme only would he talk. He therefore sought presently to make the best of the situation, and to avail himself of Letitia as a medium for his ideas. He reckoned for a time without his host, for he only received a superfluity of her ideas.

"Waal, sir," he exclaimed at last, in polite reproach, "I dun'no' why ye be glad he is gone. I dun'no', but 'pears ter me ye mought be more cornsiderin' o' Mis' Yates."

"Hev ye lived ez long ez ye hev in this life, an' not f'und out yit ez nobody cornsiders nobody else?" she cried, with affected cynicism. "Waal, ye air some older'n me," she continued, blandly smiling--conscious of his grizzled hair, he was a trifle confused by this limited way of putting the difference in years--"but I be plumb overjoyed o' Steve's caper, 'kase I git a chance ter 'company Mis' Yates. Ye know"--looking up gravely at him--"I hev hed a heap o' trouble a-fotchin' up my parents in the way they should go--_specially dad_. They air fractious yit wunst in a while. An' now ef they ain't obejient an' keerful o' pleasin' me, I jes' kin run away from home an' 'company Mis' Yates. An' ef Mis' Yates don't treat me right, an' Moses gits _too_ rampagious, I kin run away ter my home folks agin, an' fetch up my parents some mo' in the way they should go--_specially dad_."

Mrs. Yates gave a short hysterical laugh, ending in a sob. Cheever, his cheek flushing under this ridicule, looked down at the mocking little creature still leaning on the paddle as it rested upon the bench. Letitia's face had grown suddenly grave. Her blue eyes, with a strange far-seeing look in them, seemed to pierce his very soul.

"Thar's nuthin'," she said, slowly--"thar's nuthin' ter improve the health an' the sperits an' the conduc' o' yer family like runnin' away. _Tell Steve Yates that fur me!_"

He started as if he had been shot. A sharp, half-articulated oath escaped his lips. His manner betokened great anger, and his eyes burned. He could hardly control himself for a moment, and Adelaide, her pale face still more pallid with fear, trembled and sprang to her feet.

"I dun'no' what ye mean by that," he cried, indignantly. "An' ef _ye_ war a man ye shouldn't say it twicet. I ain't seen Steve Yates, an' ain't like ter see him. _I_ hed nuthin' ter do with his runnin' away. Lord! Lord!" he added, bitterly, "I 'lowed some folks in the cove, specially some o' the name o' Pettingill"--he had forgotten the good corn-dodger--"hed in an' about accused me o' everything, but I didn't expec' Steve Yates's runnin' away, 'kase he war tired o' his wife, ter be laid at my door. Naw, Mis' Yates"--he turned toward her earnestly--"I dun'no' _nuthin'_ o' the whar'bouts o' yer husband. Ef I did, I'd go arter him ef 'twar fifty mile, an' lug him home by the scruff o' his neck ter his wife an' chile."

"I b'lieve ye," said Adelaide, in a broken voice, the tears coming at last--"I b'lieve ye. Don't mind what Litt say. She always talks helter-skelter."

Letitia stood looking from one to the other, her alert, exquisitely shaped head, with the hair smooth upon it, save where it curled over her brow and hung down from the string that gathered the ringlets together at the nape of the neck, clearly defined against the dark-green foliage of the young pines, that brought out, too, in high relief the light blue of her cotton dress. Her glance was full of gay incredulity, and she evidently found food for satiric laughter in the mental standpoint of first one and then the other. It is seldom that a creature of so charming an aspect is the subject of so inimical a look as that which he bent upon her. But he replied gently to Mrs. Yates:

"Don't ye pester 'bout that, Mis' Yates. Ye hev got plenty ter pester 'bout 'thout it. I jes' kem ter ax ye how ye war a-goin' ter git along 'bout craps an' cuttin' wood an' sech like. I be mighty willin' ter kem an' plough yer corn nex' week ef 'tain't laid by, an' I 'lowed I could haul ye a load o' wood wunst in a while ef ye war so minded. I 'low everybody oughter loan ye a helpin' han', now Steve is gone."

Once more her tears flowed. The generosity and kindness implied in the offer touched her heart as the deed might have done. And yet her gratitude humiliated her in some sort. She was ashamed to have the cause to be beholden to such as Buck Cheever for a kind word and a proffered service. She shook her head.

"Naw," she said, the prosaic words punctuated by her sobs; "the corn's laid by, an' the cotton an' sorghum an' terbacco." She stopped to remember that Steve Yates, constitutionally a lazy fellow, and fonder far of the woods and his gun than of the furrow and the plough, had never failed in any labor that meant comfort to the household, though he did little for profit. She recalled like a flash a thousand instances of this care for her and for Moses. Why, was not one animal of every kind--a calf, and a lamb, and a filly, and a shote--upon the place marked with little Moses's own brand? She wondered how often she had heard Steve say, as he sat meditating before the fire, "By the time he's twenty he'll hev some head o' stock o' his own, ye mark my words." And last year the cotton was soft and clean beyond all their experience, and the flax was fine, and the weaving had been successful out of the common run, and little Moses's homely clothes thus appeared to their unsophisticated eyes very delicate and beautiful, and she had been almost ashamed of Stephen's pleasure in this smart toggery--it seemed so feminine. And now he was gone! And here she, the object of this constant, honest, thrifty care of the thriftless Yates, was weeping because of a kind word, and thanking Buck Cheever for remembering that she might need to have wood hauled.

"We don't need wood," she said, "'kase Cousin Si Anderson sent his nevy, Baker Anderson--he's 'bout sixteen year old--ter haul wood an' be in the house of a night, 'count 'o robbers an' sech, though Letishy an' me air nowise skeery."

"Naw," put in Letitia, suddenly; "an' I didn't want him round hyar, nohow. I jes' kin view how reedic'lous I'd look axin' the robber ter kem in an' help wake Baker Anderson, 'kase we-uns couldn't wake him--he bein' a hard sleeper, sech ez Gabriel's trump wouldn't 'sturb from his slumber--so ez we could git the boy ter the p'int o' sightin' a rifle. Naw! Steve war perlite enough ter leave one o' them leetle shootin'-irons ye call pistols hyar, an' plenty o' loads fur it. It's handy fur folks o' my size. An' Moses air men folks enough 'bout the house ter suit my taste."

Cheever made no sign that he heard. His eyes still rested with their sympathetic expression--patently spurious--upon Mrs. Yates. To the hard, keen lines of his face the affected sentiment was curiously ill-adjusted. Letitia's eyes were fairly alight as she gazed at him, gauging all the tenuity of this æsthetic veneer.

"I be glad ter know ye air so well pervided fur, Mis' Yates," he said; "an' so will all yer frien's be. Ye air mighty well liked in the cove an' the mountings hyarabouts. I dun'no' ez I ever knowed a woman ter hev mo' frien's. Ye hev got a heap o' frien's, shore."

"Lots of 'em hev been hyar jes' ter find out how she takes it," remarked the small cynic. "An' 'fore they go away they air obleeged ter see ez _I_ bear up wonderful."

Letitia had dropped the paddle, and was leaning back against the silver bark of a great beech-tree. She had plucked a cluster of the half-developed nuts from the low-hanging boughs, and as she bent her head and affected to examine them she half hid and half vaunted a roguish smile.

"They hev all kem, sech acquaintances ez I hev got," said Adelaide, flustered by this attack upon the motives of the community, fearful that Cheever might repeat it, and thus eager to set herself right upon the record. "Folks hev been powerful good; everybody hev kem round-about ez knowed Steve."

"'Ceptin' Mr. Rhodes," observed Letitia. "He war toler'ble constant visitin' hyar whilst in the neighborhood ez long ez Steve Yates held forth. But ez it air agin the religion o' wimmen ter vote, an' they think it air a sin, this hyar wicked Mr. Rhodes, ez air stirrin' up all the men folks ter tempt Satan at the polls, jes' bides up thar at some folkses ez be named Pettingill, they tell me, a-nussin' of his nicked head. He knows Adelaide an' me air too righteous ter vote, so he don't kem tryin' ter git us ter vote fur him."

"Whar's Fee Guthrie?" asked Cheever, suddenly, reminded of him by the allusion to the wound he had given the candidate.