Part 3

Embarrassed at being found in company so ecclesiastically mixed, Brevard irrelevantly felt of the young man’s coat.

“Tollable thin for this weather,” he said.

“The exercise of riding keeps me warm,” answered the preacher and changed the subject. “I didn’t expect to find all my people here” (with kind eyes he seemed to single out his own). “I’m _glad_ of it,” he continued heartily. “I’m _glad_ to see the whole neighbourhood joining hands.”

He praised the tree, gave a few minutes to general and friendly discourse, arranged with Brevard the personal matter which had been the object of his call, wished them a “Merry Christmas” and went out. They heard him speak to his horse as he untied him but in a moment he entered the cabin again. He came forward haltingly and laid a hand upon the back of a bench, fidgeting like an embarrassed schoolboy as he began to speak:

“Brethren, I spent last night twenty miles from here up on the Harriman Mountain. You-all know what Harriman is like.”

Colonel Ledbetter twisted himself round and faced the speaker.

“It’s the barrenest, ungratefulest land in the North Callina Mountains” (his voice had a defiant twang as if he challenged contradiction), “and how old Preacher Carr wrastles a livin’ out of that place he’s settled on, is more’n I can study out.”

“It’s Preacher Carr I want to speak to you about. You-all know that Brother Carr can get a crop out of a piece of ground if any one can. Next to men’s souls he loves the soil, and, my friends, whether we work with things physical or spiritual, it’s the loving touch that coaxes on the harvest. You-all know that, with late spring frosts and summer droughts, this has been a hard year for our farmers—your own cribs are only half full of corn and your fodder stacks are few and small; and yet your valley is a Land of Promise compared to Harriman’s Bald. Preacher Carr and his wife are facing a winter of want. They gave me the mountaineer’s welcome, but when she prepared the supper, I heard her gourd-scoop scrape the bottom of the meal bin, and this morning a creditor led away their staggering, starving cow. And yet Brother Carr is not decrepit; he is still hale and hearty but—God pity the old when their work is taken out of their hands before their graves are ready for them.

“He asked after his people in Junaluska (you will be ‘_his_ people’ as long as his loyal old soul harbours a sentiment) and, when I told him I should pass through here this evening, he said, ‘Tell them a God-bless you, for me.’ Some one has told him that his old church is well-nigh gone to ruin and he asked me to take notice of it as I passed by and to shut the door if it stood open.

“So I have come back to ask you to add to your Christmas list the name of your old neighbour, friend, and pastor, this needy servant of God. He has not forgotten you and I know you will not forget him.”

He turned and walked out of the cabin and the group sat in silence till the sound of his horse’s hoofs grew faint.

“Them was good old times,” reiterated the deacon’s wife.

“I was some to blame when Preacher Carr was sent away,” said Colonel Ledbetter, “I own up to it but——”

“You hadn’t a mite more to say about it than the rest of us had——”

“I hadn’t a thing in the world agin him,” the old man went on without noticing the interruption; “’twas only that two other churches was a-runnin’ opposition to us and their preachers were young men and were drawing off our young people; I thought if we had a young man to preach for us we might get ’em all back again. ’Twas zeal that made me do it, misguided zeal; you see I hadn’t studied it out about religious secks then as I have since.”

But we need not give a full report of that meeting. It was not conducted by parliamentary rules, but its enactments went into effect next day.

Grover Cleveland and gran’daddy, side by side in the old farm wagon, took the road while it was still so dark that they must needs give the mules the rein. But there were other early risers in that community, for by sunrise Campbell and Greenlee and Brevard and others were playing away with hammer and trowel upon the Ledbetter cabin. They repaired the roof, they cemented into place the loose stones of the fireplace, and topped out the fallen chimney; between the logs they spatted clay—taken from the road in front but good as imperial Cæsar’s—and stopped the cracks “to keep the wind away.” They propped the leaning cow shed and before noon an occupant, “mighty nigh all Jersey,” was chewing her cud, while over her head was stored fodder sufficient to keep her chewing till pastures were green. Her neighbour on the other side of a partition was a Kentucky-bred roan mare, which but a few hours ago had been the property of Captain Campbell; he had appeared upon the scene riding a gray and leading the roan all saddled and ready for the road and had made her comfortable in this new home.

In durance a heterogeneous collection of chickens were making one another’s acquaintance over a collation of corn, the only unsociable one among them being Aunt Dicey’s old black hen; her powers were all employed in an effort to rid herself of a streamer of red flannel which the old lady had tied to her tail to discourage her sitting propensities.

Within doors the Christmas tree with its unshed mask still monopolized one room, but in the other cheerful hands worked a metamorphosis. Cobwebs, litter, and soil disappeared, and furniture, country made but adapted to its purpose, took its place. Upon the tough and rough old chestnut floor they levelled a bed of hay and, so that it was soft as pillows to the tread, what matter that each breadth of the rag carpet they spread upon it showed different tones of homemade dyes and the weave of a different loom? In one corner they corded together a bedstead in the good old fashion of their great-grandparents, and the bed they reared upon it was a marvel. There was a mattress of oat straw and one of corn-husks, a bed of stripped hens’ feathers and one of geese feathers, and bolsters and pillows in numbers sufficient to accommodate a family of hydras. Aunt Dicey furnished blankets spun and woven by her own hands from wool of her own shearing, and among a collection of quilts was a wonderful one of old Mis’ Jimson’s piecing. It contained, by actual count, three thousand one hundred and seventy-nine pieces and she called it “The Foundation of the Great Deep.” When at last that bed was made up, the turkey red cherubs on the pillow-shams (almost the only shams that modernity had introduced among those artless people) lay very close to the rafters. Its makers viewed it with admiration and complacency, but Deacon Higgins looked dubious:

“They’re a tollable spry old couple,” he said, “but”—and he wheeled a barrel of potatoes alongside as a suggestion of means of getting into bed.

It would take a readier pen than mine to enumerate and describe all the gifts that were brought to that plenishing. The cupboard door refused to close upon the array of ham, hominy, and honey (the three h’s of the mountaineer), the salt-rising bread, and the soda biscuit.

Major Greenlee was a carpenter. For half a day he planed, sawed, and hammered in a corner and when his work took form it was a capacious meal bin. When bagfuls of corn meal had been emptied into it till it was “plumb full” they all surveyed it with satisfaction and “reckoned the gourd wouldn’t scrape the bottom of that before spring.”

All day long pedestrians and vehicles had been coming and going before the old house as never before in its history and yet when the sun had set the sky on fire behind the Bald, the gathered people were still awaiting an arrival.

They scanned a mountain road above them, visible only in short lengths where it emerged from the forests into the clearings.

“I see ’em!” a far-sighted old man shouted with a boy’s enthusiasm, “I see Colonel Ledbetter’s white mules! Now they’re behind May’s Peak, you’ll see ’em come out on t’other side.”

And so they watched them from point to point and every time they came into view a squad ran in to re-inspect the cabin and see that every thing was in order.

At last the white mules stood before the door. Colonel Ledbetter and Grover Cleveland sat on the front seat of the wagon, and on chairs behind them sat Preacher Carr and his wife.

Strong hands assisted the wife to alight, but the preacher sprang over the wheel to greet his people. They crowded round him and the young cried, “Merry Christmas,” and the old said, “Welcome Home.”

They seated the pair beside their old beloved fireside. They were eight years older than when they had left it. The preacher had “held his own,” but when they took off the good wife’s bonnet her hair showed very white. A tender hand smoothed it.

“We are growing old,” said the preacher, but they told him that the gospel that he preached and lived would never grow old. They told him too of repairs to be made in the old church; it would look just as it used to look but over the door there would be the inscription:

THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and thy neighbour as thyself.

The tree was stripped; the white mules were headed homeward; old man Ledbetter gathered up his reins and a tired little lad nestled close to his side.

“Wake up, Grover Cleveland, wake up! Don’t you hear ’em singing! Jine in, Grover Cleveland, jine in!”

Within the cabin a chorus swelled; without, one thin little voice piped free and clear:

“Crown Him, crown Him, crown Him, Lord of all.”

III

UNCONSCIOUS MENTALITY

What their acquaintances called an “understanding,” existed between Arsula Jordan and Thaddeus Garrett and he had taken her with him up on the mountain to consult Dan Cutter about hauling the timber for a new house. Their horse, Beauregard, having taken the road leisurely, eleven o’clock found them winding along the downhill road but still two miles from their homes in the village.

On their right the Junaluska swirled between its wooded banks. The moon was on their right too, throwing shadows across their road, dense or skeleton, as evergreen or deciduous trees obstructed its radiance.

“I think I see things a-skulkin’ ’cross the road,” said Arsula, crowding Thad more closely; “do you reckon any wild-cats could have come down off the Bald?”

“It’s only the shadders a-shiftin’ theirselves when the wind bends the trees; I didn’t reckon you was that scary, Suly; why there’s nothin’ to be scairt of; _I’m_ here Suly! And _I_ ain’t scairt of anything that travels these yer mountings—leastwise not of anything in flesh and blood.”

“Well I ain’t scart of anything that _isn’t_ flesh and blood.”

“_You say you ain’t?_”

“La, no; I don’t b’lieve in ha’nts.”

“_You say you don’t?_”

“No I don’t; I b’lieve that when a body’s once plumb dead and buried in the ground, he ain’t goin’ to show hisself on the top side of the earth again till judgment day.

“Oh lawdy!” the ejaculation was only aspirated, and Thad brought Beauregard to a stand without speaking to him. They were at a bend of the road where it crossed the river. Above the ford, dark hemlocks arched the stream and the foot log lay in their dense shadow. Upon it something moved like a pale gray cloud, not outlined against the blackness, but softly blending with it.

Beauregard saw it too and pricked up his ears. Thad wound the reins round his right hand and even brought his left into action though with a soft apology to Suly:

“Looks like I might want all the hands I’ve got to hold him. You take a tight holt of me,” he counselled under his breath and, as the spectre neared the farther side, proceeded chidingly: “It’s powerful triflin’, Suly, to go to talkin’ ’bout ha’nts when you’re out in the woods at night—it’s tollable sure to call ’em up”—a rustling among the dry leaves under the bushes changed the course of his remarks.

“If the durn thing ’ud move a little faster, I’d drive into the water and stand a spell; witches and ha’nts and all them things is shy of water.” There was a closer scurry among the leaves and at a twitch of the reins Beauregard drew them into the ford and stopped there in obedience to another silent signal.

Above the rustling they heard a panting breath, and another ghost, a nimbler one, was on the log, a light, flying shadow against the dark, stationary ones.

“Sho,” said Suly, “it’s only a dog.” She started to whistle but Thad clapped his hand over her mouth:

“For gracious sake, Suly, don’t do that—it’s awful darin’.”

She was gurgling and spurting in an effort to regain her right of free speech when together the apparitions seemed to slip off the log upon the other side.

“I tell you it’s Colonel Ledbetter’s Dixie,” she cried as a dog frisked out into the moonlight; “and sure’s you’re born that’s little Grover Cleveland! and he’s walkin’ in his sleep again—poor little soul! Git up Beau!” She clutched at the reins, but Thad caught her hand.

“Poor little soul!” she repeated. “His gran’daddy’d go plumb distracted if he knowed that little soul was out on the mountings this time o’ night; nothin’ on him either, I reckon, but just his little shirt! Thad, if you don’t drive on right now, I’ll jump into the crick, I vow I will! I want to get my hands on him—poor little soul!”

When Beauregard trailed out upon the other side Suly leaped to the ground. “I want to see how he looks when he’s took this-a-way.”

The boy was several rods ahead trudging abstractedly along, his little, faded, blue-checked shirt playing about his knees, his bare feet taking the road unhesitatingly, his half-closed eyes looking neither right nor left nor seemingly before him. Curious, pitiful, Arsula walked beside him for a few steps in silence. He didn’t hear her nor the creak of the wagon behind her. His physical senses were in suspension. He was intently acting out some dream that dominated his little brain.

Head and tail adroop, Dixie was following so closely that now and again his muzzle touched the little loosely hanging hand. He seemed to take no more notice of Arsula as she came abreast than did his child master; but _he_ was not walking in his sleep, for, though his dejected head never swerved, his eyes turned sidewise in their sockets and his lips wrinkled in very unbecoming folds above his teeth.

“Grover Cleveland,” Suly spoke softly, for, despite her brave common sense, she felt awed in this presence of a ruling, supernatural mentality; besides she wanted to spare the little favourite the shock of a too sudden awakening. But the boy walked on.

“Grover Cleveland, oh, Grover Cleveland!” she said more emphatically and gently put out her hand to take him by the shoulder.

“Gr-r-r-r-r-r!” said Dixie.

“Now look here Dixie Ledbetter,” she scolded severely, “you needn’t go to putting on any such airs as that when I’m around. I wouldn’t do Grover Cleveland mean a mite sooner’n you would, and you know it. And more than that, if I’d been in your place I’d have found some way to wake him up before he’d tramped this far in the cold. And more than that, t’other side the ford you went tearin’ off after a rabbit or a ’possum or a coon, and left him to find his way all by hisself. Now you get over there and don’t you say no more to _me_!”

Ashamed of his shortcomings or awed by her gestures, which were imperious, Dixie slunk to the other side of his master who, partially recovered by the unusual tones, came to a stand dazed and trembling.

“Poor little soul!” she said dropping to her knees and putting her arms about him. “Wake up, dear, and don’t you be scairt a mite, for it’s only Suly; you know Suly, don’t you?” her voice broke and a tear or two ran over her cheeks.

The child, coming slowly back to consciousness, gazed blankly into her face, then turned and peered into the woods, drawing his breath in hard, dry sobs. Then he recognized Dixie and felt of his tattered ears with a weakly caressing motion.

“Yes, Dixie’s here,” coaxed Suly, “and I’m here and Thad’s here with the wagon and we’re goin’ to carry you right home to your gran’daddy.”

By now Thaddeus was beside them. “Well, what about it!” was all he could say, but he acted promptly upon Suly’s bidding and lifted the boy into the wagon.

Suly wrapped him in a time-worn blanket of confederate gray that had been doing duty as a cushion and set him between them.

“Now where was you a-goin’ to?” interrogated the amazed Thaddeus, taking up the reins and driving slowly on.

“I—don’t—know,” sobbed the child.

“Why he was going home,” kindly assisted Suly.

“Where have you been at?” persisted Thaddeus.

“I—don’t—know.”

“Well how’d you _git_ here, anyway?”

“Now Thad, you quit pesterin’ him,” commanded Suly.

By now the boy was quite himself and making desperate efforts to breathe without sobbing. “It’s powerful mizzable to be borned with ways that you can’t help,” he faltered, and the girl essayed to change the current of his thoughts.

“You knowed your Aunt Carliny and little Jakey had come back here to live, didn’t you, Grover Cleveland?”

“She done gran’daddy mean,” answered the boy and added after a long, tremulous breath, “Jakey’s shoes is wore out.”

They drove on in silence. When the boy had become quiet and too sleepy, Arsula believed, to take notice of what she was saying, she ventured to relieve her mind of some of its distracting emotions.

“If Carliny was where she’d ought to be, a-keepin’ house for her father, this little soul’d never get out of the house at night without her knowin’ it—I’m plumb sure of that. To think of her livin’ away off up there in that gully where nary somebody passes, month in and month out, in a ole hut with nothin’ but a dirt floor and no window; and chinks between the logs that you can put your hand into and her father the best-off man round yer! What you reckon he’d say if they was found froze plumb to death? And he such a powerful pious man and a-standin’ way up high in the church! Free-handed too—where he takes a notion—givin’ the preacher his rent free and all the wood he’s a mind to cut and haul and all the apples and corn and potatoes he’s a mind to harvest; and a-pilin’ up fodder stacks close to ole Mis’ Jimson’s fence and a-pullin’ out a rail with his own hands so’s her ole cow can get her head through and help herself.

“Carliny told me with her own lips that after she and her boy had come all the way from Yancey County—mighty nigh every step afoot too—her father wouldn’t let her in. She wouldn’t have come—for she’s got along tollable since she’s been a widow—only but she heard that he and Grover Cleveland wasn’t doin’ any good a housekeepin’ by theirselves; and it hurt her powerful to think that her sister Missouri’s little boy wasn’t gettin’ the right kind of care.

“Everybody’s clean done out about it. The preacher, he set out to labour with him, but Colonel Ledbetter he give him to understand that he was oversteppin’ his authority and since then nary neighbour darst speak up. But I’d give a pretty to tell Colonel Ledbetter what _I_ think of him, and I aim to do it this very night.”

“Don’t you, Suly; ole man Ledbetter ain’t pleasant to talk to when he’s riled.”

There came the sound of some one tearing through the woods, and Thad brought Beauregard to a sudden stand. “Here we are,” he shouted.

“You-all got him!” called a quavering voice out of the darkness.

“Got him sure-’nough, Colonel Ledbetter. Captured him way off down by the ford!”

“I been trampin’ the woods for a hour lookin’ for him and I’m hoarse as a crow callin’ for him. Is he dressed up much?”

“Not much. Some durn fools would have took him for a ha’nt but I don’t never run from nothin’ and Suly here, she’s some spunky too.”

They drove slowly to the house the old man keeping abreast. The door stood open and from within shone the light of a flickering hearth fire.

Grover Cleveland shed his blanket, sprang over the wheel while it was yet in motion, and fled into the house and out of sight.

The old man chuckled. “The little feller’s right much ashamed of hisself when he’s found out in one of his spells. I reckon he cried some when you-all woke him up—he gen’ally does.

“Them that’s had nothin’ to cry for’s the ones that’s done the cryin’,” teased Thad.

“I don’t care if I did,” said Suly preparing to accept the invitation to “stop in by a spell.” “It must be a mighty nasty feelin’ to wake up in the woods at night and not know how you got there.”

“So it is, so it is,” said Colonel Ledbetter leading the way into the house. “I ain’t no mind to be stern with him, for he comes true and honest by the trick. I done it myself when I was a boy.”

He replenished the fire and lit a candle.

“He sleeps right there betwixt me and the wall,” he pointed to a bed in the corner, “and I can’t contrive how he manages to give me the slip so often; he’s got some sort of sleepin’ slyness that he ain’t no more notion of when he’s awake, than a angel. Barricadin’ the door ain’t no good. One night I tied him fast to my wrist so’s he couldn’t move without wakin’ me up, but that seemed to hurt the little fellow’s feelin’s powerful an’ I didn’t try it again.”

Nothing was to be seen of Grover Cleveland. Suly went to the bed.

“I should think he’d smother to death,” she said, “he’s drawed the Valley of the Mississippi clean over his head and he’s fast asleep.” She arranged a little breathing place for him.

The old man came and stood beside her.

“I helped quilt this quilt,” she went on, carefully folding it away from the face of the child, “it was the first quiltin’ party I ever went to and I took the tuck out of my frock to go. This was the first Valley of the Mississippi ever seen round yer and Missouri was mighty proud of it; she had the pattern sent from Georgy.”

“Them blue pieces over there,” said the old man, “is pieces of her frock; it was a store frock; and these yer streaked pieces on this side” (he traced them with an unsteady finger), “was my wife’s. Grover Cleveland, he calls that side his, because it’s pieces of his mother’s frock, and this side mine and he won’t never get into bed till his half’s on his side.”

Suly lifted a corner of the quilt into the light; “Here’s some of Carliny’s frock,” she led, but he would not follow.

“I bought Grover Cleveland a pair of boots this mornin’ and he was the proudest little somebody you ever looked at. Now where is them boots at?”—he was looking under the bed—“he set ’em up right here as careful as if they was glass and they was there after he went to sleep.”

This owner in fee-simple of eleven hundred acres of land, more or less, was living in one room and dishes, cooking utensils, clothing, shovels, rakes and various paraphernalia of his farming and housekeeping operations were littered about in bewildering confusion. He moved everything in his search for the boots, Arsula assisting.

“Carliny’s a mighty good housekeeper,” she remarked as she shook out and hung up some wearing apparel that had been piled in a corner. “She’d make things look a heap different if she was here.”

“Was he barefoot when you come acrost him?”

“Yes. Carliny, she’d manage it so that poor little soul wouldn’t go caperin’ about at night.”

“Them boots has taken to theirselves wings.”

“I’m afraid Carliny’s goin’ to freeze to death up there this winter—or starve—one.”

“Them boots had blue tops; they was Grover Cleveland’s own choice; blue always takes his eye.”

“It’s time we was movin’ on, Suly,” said Thad going to the door.

The girl had to stop beating the bush. “Carliny and Jakey ain’t a-doin’ any good up there, Colonel Ledbetter; they’re both a-lookin’ puny. She wants you and you want her, and Grover Cleveland, he wants her powerful, poor little soul! ’Tain’t right, nor Christian, nor human, nor common sense, nor horse sense, nor nonsense, nor any kind of sense for you to be so set. She’s your own flesh”—she stopped, awed by his steady stare at her.