Part 3
The juggler lifted his eyes to the face of the man opposite. They dilated and lingered fascinated with a sort of horror; for that strange anamorphosis had once more possessed it. All at variance it was with its natural contours, as the heated air streamed up from the bed of half-calcined stone,--trembling through this shimmering medium, yet preserving the semblance of humanity, like the face of some mythical being, demon or ghoul. A dawning significance was on his own face, of which he was unconscious, but which the other noted. How might he utilize this property of air and heat and quicklime in some of those wonders of jugglery at which he was so expert? More than once, as he walked away, he turned back to gaze anew at the phenomenon, his trim figure lightly poised, his hand in his belt, his blazer thrown over his arm, that gleam of discovery on his face.
As the encompassing rocks and foliage at last hid him from view, Peter Knowles looked down into the fire.
“That air a true word. The quicklime would eat every bone,” he said slowly. “But what air _he_ aimin’ ter know fur?” And once more he looked curiously at the spot where the juggler had vanished, remembering the guise of discovery and elation his face had worn.
II.
Late that night old Tubal Sims lingered on his hearthstone, brooding over the embers of the failing fire. As he reviewed the incidents of the evening, he chuckled with a sort of half-suppressed glee. His capacities for enjoyment were not blunted by the event itself; the very reminiscence afforded him a keen and acute pleasure. In all his sixty years he had never known such a vigil as this. He could not sleep for the crowding images with which his brain teemed. Each detail as it was enacted returned to him now with a freshened delight. The objections urged by the audience on the score of necromancy gave him peculiar joy; for he and his wife were of a progressive tendency of mind, and had that sly sense of mental superiority which is one of the pleasantest secrets to share with one’s own consciousness. As he sat on a broken-backed chair, his shoulders bent forward and his hands hanging loosely over his knees, the hard palms rubbing themselves together from time to time, for the air was growing chilly, the light of the embers on his shock of grizzled hair, and wrinkled face with its long blunt nose and projecting chin, and small deep-set eyes twinkling under their overhanging brows, he now and again lifted his head to note any sudden stir about the house. So foreign to his habit was this long-lingering wakefulness that it told on his nerves in an added acuteness of all his senses. He marked the gnawing of a mouse in the roof-room, the sound of the rising wind far away, and the first stir of the elm-tree above the clapboards. A cock crew from his roost hard by, and then with a yawn Tubal Sims pulled off one of his shoes and sat with it in his hand, looking at it absently, and laughing at the thought of old Parson Greenought and his interference to discourage Satan. “I wisht I could hev knowed what the boy would hev done nex’, if so be he hed been lef’ alone.” He made up his mind that he would ask the juggler the next day, and if possible induce a private repetition of some of the wonders for the appreciation of which, evidently, the public sentiment of Etowah Cove was not yet ripe. For the juggler was his guest, having reached his house a few evenings previous in the midst of a storm; and asking for shelter for the night, the wayfarer had found a hearty welcome, and was profiting by it. Sims could hear even now the bed-cords creak as he tossed in uneasy slumber up in the roof-room, so still the house had grown.
So still that when a deep groan and then an agonized gasping sigh came from the sleeper, the sounds were so incongruous with the trend of old Tubal Sims’s happy reflections that he experienced a sudden revulsion of feeling that was like a shock. The rain began to fall on the roof; it seemed to come in fine lines on a fluctuating gust, for it was as if borne away on the wings of the wind, and the eaves vaguely dripped.
“But oh,” cried the sleeper, “the one who lives! what can I do!--for whose life! his life! his life!” and spoke no more.
Yet the cabalistic words seemed to ring through the house in trumpet tones; they sounded again and again in every blast of the wind. The place had grown cold; the fire was dead on the hearth; it was the unfamiliar midnight. Old Tubal Sims sat as motionless as if petrified. He had never heard of the process of mind-reading, but he would fain decipher these sleeping thoughts of his guest. He found himself involved in tortuous and futile speculations. Who was “the one who lives,” whose life this stranger grudged? And following the antithesis,--not that Tubal Sims would have thus phrased it,--was there then one who died? And why should the recollection return in the deep slumbers of the night and speak out in this weird dreaming voice.
It occurred to Tubal Sims, for the first time, that there was something inexplicable about this man. Apparently, he had no mission here save for the exhibition of jugglery,--how suddenly it had lost its zest! He knew naught of the people or the surrounding region; he had no baggage, no sort of preparation for continued existence, not even a change of clothes. Mrs. Sims, being subsidized to supply this deficiency, had already constructed for him one blue homespun shirt, which evidently astounded him when he first beheld it, so different it was from the one he wore, but which he accepted meekly enough. Tubal Sims told himself that he had been precipitate in housing this stranger beyond a shelter during the storm.
To this it had come,--the happy dreaming over the fire, renewing a pleasure so rare,--to these vague fears and self-reproaches and suspicions and anxious speculations. He stumbled to bed at last in the dark, yet still the words and the tone haunted him. It was long ere he slept, and more than once he was roused from slumber to the dark silence by the fancy that he heard anew the poignant iteration.
If the juggler had dreams, they may have weighed heavily upon him the next day, for he came down the rickety stairs, pale and silent, with heavy-lidded eyes and dark blue circles beneath them. Under Mrs. Sims’s kindly ministrations he sought in vain to eat the heavy thick biscuit, the underdone fried mush, and the fat greasy bacon; for Mrs. Sims was not one of those culinary geniuses sometimes encountered at humble boards; in good sooth, but for her cows and chickens, in these early days of his stay in Etowah Cove, he would have fared ill indeed.
“Ye make a better out at swallerin’ needles ’n ye do swallerin’ fried ’taters,” she declared, with a reproachful glance, supplemented by her good-humored chuckle.
He could make no sort of compact with the beverage she called coffee, and after the merest feint of breakfast he took his host’s angling-tackle and wended his way down to the river, observing that the fish would bite well to-day, since it was so cloudy. Cloudy it was, undoubtedly, sombre and drear. Now and then drizzling showers fell, and when they ceased the mists that rose in the ravines and skulked in every depression were hardly less dank and chill. The river, in its deep channel between jagged rocky gray bluffs and shelving red clay banks of the most brilliant terra-cotta tones, was of the color of copper instead of the clear steel-gray or the silvered blue it was wont to show, so much of the mud of its borders did it hold now in solution, brought down by the rains of the night. Here and there slender willows hung over it in lissome and graceful wont, with such vivid vernal suggestions in the tender budding foliage as to cause the faint green tint to shine with definite lustre, like the high lights in some artificial landscape of a canvas, amidst the dark dripping bronze-green pines of the Cove, which from this point the young man could see stretching away in sad-hued verdure some three or four miles to the opposite mountain’s base,--the breadth of the restricted little basin. This was the only large outlook at his command; for behind the house he had quitted, the slopes of the wooded mountain rose abruptly, steep, rugged, soon lost among the clouds. He gazed absently at the little cabin, the usual structure of two rooms with an open passage, as he lay on the shelving rock high above the river, the fishing-pole held by a heavy boulder fixed on it to secure it in its place, his hands clasped under his head, his hat tilted somewhat over his eyes; for despite the paucity of light in the atmosphere the mists had a certain white glaring quality.
Meanwhile, he was the subject of a degree of disaffected scrutiny from indoors.
“Jane Ann,” said Tubal Sims, suddenly interrupting the loud throaty wheeze by which his help-meet beguiled the tedium of washing the dishes, and which she construed as that act of devotion commonly known as singing a hymn, “that thar man ain’t got no bait on his hook.”
Jane Ann set the plate in her hand down on the table, and turned her broad creased face toward her husband as he sat smoking in the passage, just outside the door.
“Then he ain’t goin’ ter ketch no feesh,” she replied logically, and lifting both the plate and her droning wheeze she resumed her occupation.
Tubal Sims, like other men, fluctuated in his estimation of his wife’s abilities according as they seemed to him convertible to his aid. Ordinarily, he was wont to commend Jane Ann Sims’s logical common sense as “powerful smartness,” and had been known to lean on her judgment even in the matter of “craps,” in which, if anywhere, man is safe from the interference and even the ambition of woman. He rejoiced in her freedom from the various notions which appertain to her sex, and felt a certain pride that she too had withstood the panic which had so preyed upon the pleasures of the “show.” But now, when her lack of the subtler receptivities balked him of a possible approach to the key of the mystery which he sought to solve, he was irritated because of her density of perception, and disposed to underrate her capacities to deduce aught from that cabalistic phrase which he alone had heard uttered in the deep midnight and from such slender premises to frame a just conclusion. And furthermore, with the rebuff he realized anew that Jane Ann Sims was a woman, incompetent of reason save in its most superficial processes, or she would have perceived that the significance of the unbaited hook lay in the strange mental perturbation which could involve the neglect of so essential a particular, not in the obvious fruitlessness of the labor. Jane Ann Sims was a woman. Let her wash the dishes.
“Naw,” he said aloud, half scornfully, “he’ll ketch no feesh.”
Mrs. Sims ceased to wheeze, and her fat face relapsed from the pious distortions of her psalmody into its normal creases and dimples. “I be plumb fit ter fly inter the face o’ Providence,” she said, as she moved heavily about the table and slapped down a blue platter but half dried.
“What fur?” demanded the lord of the house, whose sense of humor was too blunted by his speculations, and a haunting anxiety, and a troublous eagerness to discuss the question of his discovery, to perceive aught of the ludicrous in the lightsome metaphor with which his weighty spouse had characterized her disaffection with the ordering of events.
“Kase Euphemy ain’t hyar, o’ course. Ye ’pear ter be sorter dunder-headed this mornin’!” Thus the weaker vessel!
She wheezed one more line of her matutinal hymn in a dolorous cadence and with breathy interstices between the spondees; then suddenly and finally discarding the exercise, she began to speak with animation: “I hev always claimed an’ sot out ter be suthin’ of a prophet,--ye yerse’f know ez I be more weatherwise ’n common. I be toler’ble skilled in cow diseases, too; an’ I kin say ’forehand who be goin’ ter git ’lected ter office,--ginerally, though, by knowin’ who hev got money an’ holds his hand slack; an’ I kin tell what color hair a baby be goin’ ter hev whenst he ain’t got so much ez a furze on the top o’ his bald pate; an’ whenst ye ’low ye air strict sober of a Christmastime or sech, I kin tell ter a--a quart how much applejack hev gone down yer gullet; an’”--
He sacrificed his curiosity as to her other accomplishments as a seer, and hastily inquired, “What on the yearth hev sot ye off ter braggin’ this-a-way, Jane Ann? I never hearn the beat!”
“I ain’t braggin’,” expounded Mrs. Sims. “I be just meditatin’ on how forehanded I be in viewin’ facts in gineral; an’ yit,”--her voice rose in pathetic exasperation,--“the very day o’ the evenin’ this hyar stranger-man got hyar I let Euphemy go over ter Piomingo Cove ter visit her granny’s folks; an’ the chile didn’t want ter go much,--war afeard o’ rain, bein’ dressed out powerful starched; an’ I, so forehanded in sight, told her ’twarn’t goin’ ter rain till evenin’.”
“Waal, no more did it. Phemie war under shelter six hours ’fore it rained.”
“Lawd-a-massy!” cried Mrs. Sims, at the end of her patience. “What war the use o’ creatin’ man with sech a slow onderstandin’? I reckon the reason woman war made arterward war ter gin the critter somebody ter explain things ter him! Can’t you-uns sense”--she directly addressed her husband--“ez what I be a-tryin’ ter compass is why--why--I could tell ter a minit when the storm war a-comin’, an’ yit couldn’t tell the juggler war comin’ with it?”
Tubal Sims, staring up from under his shaggy eyebrows, his arms folded on his knees, his cob pipe cocked between his teeth, could only ejaculate, “I dunno.”
“Naw, you-uns dunno,” flouted Mrs. Sims, “an’ you-uns dunno a heap besides that.”
He received this fling in humble silence. Then, after the manner of the henpecked, unable to keep out of trouble, albeit before his eyes, and flinching at the very moment from discipline, he must needs inquire, “Why, Jane Ann, what you-uns want the pore child hyar fur? Ye git on toler’ble well with the cookin’ ’thout her help. Let Phemie git her visit out ter her granny in Piomingo Cove,” he concluded expostulatingly.
There was not a dimple in Mrs. Sims’s face. It was all solid, set, stern, fat. She sunk down into a chair and folded her arms as she gazed at him. “Tubal Cain Sims,” she admonished him solemnly, “ef I hed no mo’ head-stuffin’ ’n you-uns, I’d git folks ter chain me up like that thar tame b’ar at Sayre’s Mill, so ez ’twould be knowed I warn’t ’sponsible. Ye hev yer motions like him, an’ ye kin scratch yer head like him, too; but he can’t talk sense, an’ ye can’t nuther.” She paused for a moment; then she condescended to explain: “I want that child Euphemy hyar kase she oughter hed a chance ter view that show las’ night.”
His countenance changed. He too valued the “show” as a special privilege. He was woe for Euphemia’s sake, away down yonder in the backwoods of Piomingo Cove.
“Mebbe he mought gin another show over yander ter the Settlemint,” he hazarded. “The folks over thar will be plumb sharp-set fur sech doin’s whenst they hear ’bout’n it.”
The sophistications of polite society are not recognized by the medical faculty as amongst the epidemics which spread among mankind, but no contagious principle has so dispersive a quality in every feature of the malady. Given one show in Etowah Cove, and Tubal Cain Sims developed the acumen of a keen _impresario_. He saw the opportunity, counted the chances, evolved as an original idea--for the existence of such a scheme had never reached his ears--a successful starring tour around the coves and mountain settlements of the Great Smoky range.
The melancholy expressed in the slow shaking of Mrs. Sims’s head aroused him from this project.
“Naw,” she said; “the fool way that the folks tuk on ’bout Satan--they’d better hev the high-strikes ’count o’ thar sins--an’ thar theatenings an’ sech will purvent him. He won’t show agin. An’ I be plumb afeard,” she cried out in renewed vexation, “the man will get away from hyar ’thout viewin’ Euphemy. I’ll be bound he hev never seen the like of her!” with a joyous note of maternal pride.
The pipe turned around in Tubal Sims’s mouth, and the charge of fire and ashes and tobacco fell unheeded on the floor. Like a voice in his ears the echo of that strange cry of the sleeper came to him out of the deep darkness of the stormy midnight, with the problem of its occult significance, with the terror of its possible meaning, and every other consideration slipped from his consciousness. The perception of the mental trouble expressed in the man’s face, its confirmation even in the trifle of the unbaited hook, returned to Sims, with the determination that he must know more of him or get him out of the Cove before Euphemia’s return. “The man’s dad-burned good-lookin’,” he said to himself, perceiving the fact for the first time, since it had a personal application. “An’ Phemie be powerful book-l’arned, an’ be always scornin’ the generality o’ the young cusses round about, kase she knows more ’n they do. Mebbe he knows more ’n she do.” He pondered for a moment on the improbability that daughter Euphemia’s knowledge, acquired at the little schoolhouse where the “show” had been held, was exceeded by the fund of information stored in the brain-pan of any single individual since the world began. At all events, anxiety, complications, familiar association in the sanctions of the fireside, impended. This was a man with a secret, and, innocent or guilty, a stranger to his host. He must be quick, for Mrs. Sims--transparent Mrs. Sims!--was even now evolving methods by which Euphemia might be summoned peremptorily from Piomingo Cove, and canvassing means of transportation. She chuckled even amidst her anxieties. The juggler, in all his experience,--and his conversation now and again gave intimations that he was a man of cities and had seen much folk in his time,--had never viewed aught like Euphemia, and if scheming might avail, he should not leave Etowah Cove till this crowning mercy was vouchsafed him.
Whether Tubal Sims vaunted his wife’s mental qualities or derided them,--and his estimate swung like a pendulum from one side to the other, as her views coincided with his or differed from them,--he knew that on this topic she was immovable. To pierce the juggler’s heart by a dart still more mystic and subtle than aught his skill could wield was her motive. Help must come, if at all, from without the domestic circle. He waited, doubtful, until after dinner, and as he looked about for his hat, his resolution taken after much brooding thought, he noted a change in the weather-signs. The wind was blowing crisply through the open passage. The mists had lifted. The river, dully gurgling in the dreary early morning, had begun anew its lapsing sibilant song that seemed a concomitant of the sunshine; for the slanting afternoon glitter was on the water here and there, and high on the mountain side all the various green possible to spring foliage was elicited by the broad expanse of the golden sheen that came down from the west. He noted, as he took his way along the road, that the recumbent figure once again on the ledge below was not asleep, for the juggler lifted his hand as the rocks above began to reflect the beams on the water in a tremulous shimmer, and drew his hat further over his eyes. “Ye mought hev better comp’ny ’n yer thoughts, Mr. Showman, I’m a-thinkin’,” Tubal Sims muttered, and he mended his pace.
His path, much trodden, wended along about the base of the range, and finally, by a series of zigzag curves, began to ascend the slope. The clouds, white, tenuous, were flying high now. The sun had grown hot. Already the moisture was dried from the wayside foliage of laurel as he came upon the projecting spur of the range where the lime-burners worked. The logs, protected from the rain by a ledge of the cliff, had been piled anew with layers of limestone, and the primitive process of calcination had begun once more. Here and there were great heaps of fragments of rock placed close at hand, and numerous trees had been felled for fuel and lay at length on the ground, yet so dense was the forest that the loss was not appreciable to the eye. The stumps and boles of these trees furnished seats for a number of lounging mountaineers, in every attitude that might express a listless sloth. Those who had come to work felt that they had earned a respite from labor, and those who had come to talk hastened to utilize the opportunity. Their conversation was something more brisk than usual, accelerated by interest in a new and uncommon topic. As Sims had foreseen, the events of the previous evening occupied every thought, and several of the group experienced a freshened joy in detailing them anew to Peter Knowles, who alone of all the neighborhood for a circuit of twenty miles had been absent. He had heard every incident repeatedly rehearsed without showing a sign of flagging interest. Now and then he bent his brows and looked down at the quicklime scattered on the ground, and silently meditated on its capacity to destroy flesh and bone and on the juggler’s unhallowed curiosity.
“A body dunno how ter git his own cornsent ter b’lieve his own eyesight,” one of the men reflectively averred. The interval since witnessing the astounding feats of the prestidigitator had afforded space for rumination, and but served to deepen the impression of possibilities set at naught and miracles enacted.
“That thar man air in league with Satan,” declared another, “Surely, surely he air.” He accentuated his words with his long lean forefinger shaken impressively at the group.
“Ye mark my words,” said Peter Knowles suddenly, still eying the refuse of quicklime on the ground, “no good hev kem inter the Cove with that thar man.”
“Whar’d he kem from, ennyhows?” demanded the first speaker.
“Whar’d he kem from?” repeated Knowles, peering over the great kiln. “From hell, my frien’,--straight from hell.”
He had the combined drone and whine which he esteemed appropriate to the clerical office; for although he had never experienced a “call,” he deemed himself singularly fitted for that vocation by virtue of a disposition to hold forth at great length to any one who would listen to his views on religious themes,--and in this region, where time is plenty and industry scanty, he seldom lacked listeners,--a conscience ever sensitive to the sins of other people, and great freedom in the use of such Scriptural terms as are debarred to persons not naturally profane or suffering under the stress of extreme rage.
“Waal, sir!” exclaimed old man Cobbs, sitting on a stump and gently nursing his knee. He spoke with a voice of deep reprehension, and as simple an acceptance of the possibility of hailing from the place in question as if it were geographically extant.
Ormsby, who had been standing leaning on an axe, silently listening, laughed slightly at this,--an incredulous laugh. “Folks ez git ter that kentry don’t git back in a hurry,” he drawled negligently, but with a manifest satisfaction in the circumstance, as if he knew of sundry departed wights whom he esteemed well placed.
“How d’ye know they don’t?” demanded Peter Knowles. “Ain’t ye never read the Scriptures enough ter sense them lines, ‘Satan was a-walkin’ up and down through the yearth,’ ye blunderin’ buzzard, an’ _he_ fell from heaven?”
The young fellow’s robust figure was clearly defined against the western sky. He swung his axe nonchalantly now, for to be an adept in reading and remembering the Scriptures was not the height of his ambition. Nevertheless, the idea of the possibility of being in the orbit, as it were, of an earthly stroll of the Prince of Darkness roused him to argument and insistence on a less terrifying solution of the mystery.
“He telled it ter me ez he kem from Happy Valley,” he volunteered.