The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories Part 13

"I likes ye better nor I does Becky Stiles," he said moderately. Then with more fervor, "I likes ye better nor any gal I ever see."

The usual long pause ensued.

"Ye hev got a mighty cur'ous way o' showin' it," Cynthia replied.

"I dunno what ye 're talkin' 'bout, Cynthy."

"Ye hev got a mighty cur'ous way o' showin' it," she reiterated, with renewed animation--"a-comin' all the way down hyar from the mountings ter beat my dad out'n that thar saddle an' bridle, what he's done sot his heart onto. Mighty cur'ous way."

"Look hyar, Cynthy." The young hunter broke off suddenly, and did not speak again for several minutes. A great perplexity was surging this way and that in his slow brains--a great struggle was waging in his heart. He was to choose between love and ambition--nay, avarice too was ranged beside his aspiration. He felt himself an a.s.sured victor in the compet.i.tion, and he had seen that saddle and bridle. They were on exhibition to-day, and to him their material and workmans.h.i.+p seemed beyond expression wonderful, and elegant, and substantial. He could never hope otherwise to own such accoutrements. His eyes would never again even rest upon such resplendent objects, unless indeed in Hollis's possession. Any one who has ever loved a horse can appreciate a horseman's dear desire that beauty should go beautifully caparisoned. And then, there was his pride in his own riding, and his anxiety to have his preeminence in that accomplishment acknowledged and recognized by his friends, and, dearer triumph still, by his enemies. A terrible pang before he spoke again.

"Look hyar, Cynthy," he said at last; "ef ye will marry me, I won't go back in yander no more. I'll leave the premi-_um_ ter them ez kin git it."

"Ye're foolish, Jacob," she replied, still fanning with the yellow calico sunbonnet. "Ain't I done tole ye, ez how they don't think nothin' of ye ter our house? I don't want all of 'em a-jowin' at me, too."

"Ye talk like ye ain't got good sense, Cynthy," said Jacob irritably.

"What's ter hender me from hitchin' up my mare ter my uncle's wagon an' ye an' me a-drivin' up hyar to the Cross-Roads, fifteen mile, and git Pa'son Jones ter marry us? We'll get the license down hyar ter the Court House afore we start. An' while they'll all be a-foolin' away thar time a-ridin' round that thar ring, ye an' me will be a-gittin'

married." Ten minutes ago Jacob Brice did not think riding around that ring was such a reprehensible waste of time. "What's ter hender? It don't make no differ how they jow then."

"I done tole ye, Jacob," said the sedate Cynthia, still fanning with the sunbonnet.

With a sudden return of his inspiration, Jacob retorted, affecting an air of stolid indifference: "Jes' ez _ye_ choose. I won't hev ter ax Becky Stiles twict."

And he turned to go.

"I never said no, Jacob," said Cynthia precipitately. "I never said ez how I wouldn't hev ye."

"Waal, then, jes' come along with me right now while I hitch up the mare. I ain't a-goin' ter leave yer a-standin' hyar. Ye're too skittish. Time I come back ye'd hev done run away I dunno whar." A moment's pause and he added: "Is ye a-goin' ter stand thar all day, Cynthy Hollis, a-lookin' up an' around, and a-turnin' yer neck fust this way and then t'other, an' a-lookin' fur all the worl' like a wild turkey in a trap, or one o' them thar skeery young deer, or sech senseless critters? What ails the gal?"

"Thar'll be n.o.body ter help along the work ter our house," said Cynthia, the weight of the home difficulties bearing heavily on her conscience.

"What's ter hender ye from a-goin' down thar an' lendin' a hand every wunst in a while? But ef ye're a-goin' ter stand thar like ye hedn't no more action than a--a-dunno-what,--jes' like yer dad, I ain't. I'll jes' leave ye a-growed ter that thar post, an' I'll jes' light out stiddier, an' afore the cows git ter Pine Lick, I'll be thar too. Jes'

ez ye choose. Come along ef ye wants ter come. I ain't a-goin' ter ax ye no more."

"I'm a-comin'," said Cynthia.

There was great though illogical rejoicing on the part of the country faction when the crowds were again seated, tier above tier, in the amphitheatre, and the riders were once more summoned into the arena, to discover from Jacob Brice's unaccounted-for absence that he had withdrawn and left the nominee to his chances.

In the ensuing compet.i.tion it became very evident to the not altogether impartially disposed judges that they could not, without incurring the suspicions alike of friend and foe, award the premium to their fellow-townsman. Straight as a s.h.i.+ngle though he might be, more prepossessing to the eye, the ex-cavalryman of fifty battles was far better trained in all the arts of horsemans.h.i.+p.

A wild shout of joy burst from the rural party when the most portly and rubicund of the portly and red-faced judges advanced into the ring and decorated Jenkins Hollis with the blue ribbon. A frantic antistrophe rent the air. "Take it off!" vociferated the bitter town faction--"take it off!"

A diversion was produced by the refusal of the Colbury champion to receive the empty honor of the red ribbon and the certificate. Thus did he except to the ruling of the judges. In high dudgeon he faced about and left the arena, followed shortly by the decorated Jenks, bearing the precious saddle and bridle, and going with a wooden face to receive the congratulations of his friends.

The entries for the slow mule race had been withdrawn at the last moment; and the spectators, balked of that unique sport, and the fair being virtually over, were rising from their seats and making their noisy preparations for departure. Before Jenks had cleared the fair-building, being somewhat impeded by the moving ma.s.s of humanity, he encountered one of his neighbors, a listless mountaineer, who spoke on this wise:--

"Does ye know that thar gal o' yourn--that thar Cynthy?"

Mr. Hollis nodded his expressionless head--presumably he did know Cynthia.

"Waal," continued his leisurely interlocutor, still interrogative, "does ye know Jacob Brice?"

Ill-starred a.s.sociation of ideas! There was a look of apprehension on Jenkins Hollis's wooden face.

"They hev done got a license down hyar ter the Court House an' gone a-kitin' out on the Old B'ar road."

This was explicit.

"Whar's my horse?" exclaimed Jenks, appropriating "John Barleycorn" in his haste. Great as was his hurry, it was not too imperative to prevent him from strapping upon the horse the premium saddle, and inserting in his mouth the new bit and bridle. And in less than ten minutes a goodly number of recruits from the crowd a.s.sembled in Colbury were also "a-kitin'" out on the road to Old Bear, delighted with a new excitement, and bent on running down the eloping couple with no more appreciation of the sentimental phase of the question and the tender illusions of love's young dream than if Jacob and Cynthia were two mountain foxes.

Down the red-clay slopes of the outskirts of the town "John Barleycorn" thunders with a train of hors.e.m.e.n at his heels. Splash into the clear fair stream whose translucent depths tell of its birthplace among the mountain springs--how the silver spray showers about as the pursuers surge through the ford leaving behind them a foamy wake!--and now they are pressing hard up the steep ascent of the opposite bank, and galloping furiously along a level stretch of road, with the fences and trees whirling by, and the September landscape flying on the wings of the wind. The chase leads past fields of ta.s.seled Indian corn, with yellowing thickly swathed ears, leaning heavily from the stalk; past wheat-lands, the crops harvested and the crab-gra.s.s having its day at last; past "woods-lots" and their black shadows, and out again into the September suns.h.i.+ne; past rickety little homes, not unlike Hollis's own, with tow-headed children, exactly like his, standing with wide eyes, looking at the rush and hurry of the pursuit--sometimes in the ill-kept yards a wood-fire is burning under the boiling sorghum kettle, or beneath the branches of the orchard near at hand a cider-mill is crus.h.i.+ng the juice out of the red and yellow, ripe and luscious apples. Homeward-bound prize cattle are overtaken--a Durham bull, reluctantly permitting himself to be led into a fence corner that the hunt may sweep by un.o.bstructed, and turning his proud blue-ribboned head angrily toward the riders as if indignant that anything except him should absorb attention; a gallant horse, with another floating blue streamer, bearing himself as becometh a king's son; the chase comes near to crus.h.i.+ng sundry grunting porkers impervious to pride and glory in any worldly distinctions of cerulean decorations, and at last is fain to draw up and wait until a flock of silly over-dressed sheep, running in frantic fear every way but the right way, can be gathered together and guided to a place of safety.

And once more, forward; past white frame houses with porches, and vine-grown verandas, and well-tended gardens, and groves of oak and beech and hickory trees--"John Barleycorn" makes an ineffectual but gallant struggle to get in at the large white gate of one of these comfortable places, Squire Goodlet's home, but he is urged back into the road, and again the pursuit sweeps on. Those blue mountains, the long parallel ranges of Old Bear and his brothers, seem no more a misty, uncertain mirage against the delicious indefinable tints of the horizon. Sharply outlined they are now, with dark, irregular shadows upon their precipitous slopes which tell of wild ravines, and rock-lined gorges, and swirling mountain torrents, and great, beetling, gray crags. A breath of balsams comes on the freshening wind--the lungs expand to meet it. There is a new aspect in the scene; a revivifying current thrills through the blood; a sudden ideal beauty descends on prosaic creation.

"'Pears like I can't git my breath good in them flat countries," says Jenkins Hollis to himself, as "John Barleycorn" improves his speed under the exhilarating influence of the wind. "I'm nigh on to sifflicated every time I goes down yander ter Colbury" (with a jerk of his wooden head in the direction of the village).

Long stretches of woods are on either side of the road now, with no sign of the changing season in the foliage save the slender, pointed, scarlet leaves and creamy plumes of the sourwood, gleaming here and there; and presently another panorama of open country unrolls to the view. Two or three frame houses appear with gardens and orchards, a number of humble log cabins, and a dingy little store, and the Cross-Roads are reached. And here the conclusive intelligence meets the party that Jacob and Cynthia were married by Parson Jones an hour ago, and were still "a-kitin'," at last accounts, out on the road to Old Bear.

The pursuit stayed its ardor. On the auspicious day when Jenkins Hollis took the blue ribbon at the County Fair and won the saddle and bridle he lost his daughter.

They saw Cynthia no more until late in the autumn when she came, without a word of self-justification or apology for her conduct, to lend her mother a helping hand in spinning and weaving her little brothers' and sisters' clothes. And gradually the _eclat_ attendant upon her nuptials was forgotten, except that Mrs. Hollis now and then remarks that she "dunno how we could hev bore up agin Cynthy's a-runnin' away like she done, ef it hedn't a-been fur that thar saddle an' bridle an' takin' the blue ribbon at the County Fair."

THE CASTING VOTE.

I.

An election of civil and judicial officers was impending in Kildeer County when a comet appeared in the July sky, a mysterious, aloof, uncanny presence, that invaded the night and the stereotyped routine of nature with that gruesome effect of the phenomenal which gives to the mind so definite a realization of how dear and secure is the prosaic sense of custom.

All the lenses of the great observatories of the world had, in a manner, sought to entertain the strange visitant of the heavens. The learned had gone so far as to claim its acquaintance, to recognize it as the returning comet of a date long gone by. It even carried amidst its s.h.i.+ning glories, along the far unimagined ways of its...o...b..t, the name of a human being--of the man who had discovered it on its former visit, for thus splendidly does astronomy honor its votaries. Less scientific people regarded it askance as in some sort harbinger of woe, and spoke of presage, recalling other comets, and the commotions that came in their train--from the Deluge, with the traditional cometary influences rife in the breaking up of "the fountains of the great deep," to the victories of Mohammed II. and the threatened overthrow of Christendom, and even down to our own war of 1812.

Others, again, scorned superst.i.tion, and entertained merely practical misgivings concerning the weight, density, and temperature of the comet, lest the eccentric aerial wanderer should run amuck of the earth in some confusion touching the right of way through s.p.a.ce.

Meanwhile, it grew from the semblance of a vaporous tissue--an illuminated haze only discernible through the telescope, the private view of the favored few--till it gradually became visible to the una.s.sisted eye of the _profanum vulgus_, and finally it flamed across the darkling s.p.a.ces with its white crown of glory, its splendid wing-like train, and its effect of motion as of a wondrous flight among the stars--and all the world, and, for aught we know, many worlds, gazed at it.

Only in some great desert, the vast stretches of unsailed seas, or the depths of uninhabited forests, were its supernal splendors unnoted. It sunk as wistful, as tremulous, a reflection in a lonely pool in the dense mountain wilds as any simple star, a familiar of these haunts, that had looked down to mark its responsive image year after year, for countless ages, whenever the season brought it, in its place in the glittering mail of the Archer, or among the jewels of the Northern Crown, once more to the spot it had known and its tryst with its fair semblance in the water.

The great silver flake which the comet struck out upon the serene surface lay glinting there among the lesser stellar reflections, when a man, kneeling in a gully of the steep bank sloping to the "salt lick," leaned forward suddenly to gaze at it; then, with a gasp, turned his eyes upward to that flaming blade drawn athwart the peaceful sky. He did not utter a sound. The habit of silence essential to the deer-hunter kept its mechanical hold upon his nerves. Only the hand with which he grasped the half-exposed roots of a great sycamore-tree, denuded in some partial caving of the bank long ago, relaxed and trembled slightly.

He was a man of scant and narrow experience, his world the impenetrable mountain wilderness, and, though seemingly the pupil of nature, versed in the ways of beast and bird, the signs of the clouds, the seasons of bourgeoning and burr, it was but of casual external aspects. He knew naught of its wondrous history, its subtler significance, its strange record--the flood-tides registered on that cliff beyond the laurel; the reptilian trail in the ledge beneath the b.u.t.t of his rifle, the imprint still fast in the solid rock, albeit the species extinct; the great bones of ancient unknown beasts sunk in the depressions of this saline quagmire, which herds of them had once frequented for the salt, as did of late the buffalo, and now the timorous deer, wont to come, like shadows wavering in the wind, to lick the briny earth. The strange, glinting blade overhead had no claim on his recognition as the "comet of Aristotle," or the "evil-disposed comet" personified by the Italians as Sir Great-Lance, _il Signor Astone_, or Halley's comet, or Donati's. Self is the centre of the solar system with many souls, and around this point do all its incidents revolve. For _him_ that wondrous white fire was kindled in the skies, for _him_, in special relation to his small life, to the wish nearest his hot human heart, to the clumsy scheme dear to his slow, crude brain. He thought it a warning then: and later he thought this still.

Some vague stir--the wind perhaps, or perhaps a light-footed dryad--flitted past and was gone. The surface of the "lick" rippled with her footprints, and was smooth again. All the encompa.s.sing ma.s.ses of trees and undergrowth about the place were densely black and opaque, giving the sense of absolute solidity and weight, except upon the verges, which were somehow shaded off into a cloudy brown against the translucent dove-tinted tissues in which the night seemed enveloped and obscured save for the white gleaming of the stars. This was the clear color that the brackish water wore as it reflected the night. It reflected suddenly a face--a face with a long velvety muzzle, a pair of spreading antlers, and dark eyes, gentle, timorous, liquidly bright. The water stirred with a sibilant lapping sound as the buck's tongue licked at the margin. Once he held up his head to listen, with his hoof lifted, then he bent again to the ripples. There was slight relation between him, the native of these woods, and that wayward waif of the skies; but among the unnumbered influences and incidents of its course it served to save that humble sylvan life for a s.p.a.ce. The hunter neither saw nor heard.

It was only when the deer with a sudden snort and a precipitate bound fled cras.h.i.+ng through the laurel that Walter Hoxon became aware of his presence, and of the stealthy approach that had alarmed him. The approach was stealthy no longer. A quick, nervous tread, a rustling of the boughs, and as the hunter rose to his feet his elder brother emerged from the undergrowth, taller than he as they stood together on the margin of the lick, more active, sinewy, alert.

"Whyn't ye take a shot at him, Wat?" cried Justus Hoxon tumultuously.

"I'll be bound ye war nappin'," he added in keen rebuke.