The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories Part 7

"Water ain't dangersome, nowise," retorted the elderly Persimmon, with a snarling smile. "Healthier 'n whiskey, my frien',--_heap_ healthier 'n whiskey."

Boyd's serious countenance colored darkly red with wrath. Among the aggressive virtues of old Persimmon Sneed were certain whiskey-proof temperance principles, the recollection of which was peculiarly irritating to Silas Boyd, known to be more than ordinarily susceptible to proof whiskey.

"I be a perfessin' Baptis', Mr. Sneed," he retorted quickly. "I got no objection ter water, 'ceptin' fur the onregenerate an' spurners o'

salvation."

Now Persimmon Sneed had argued the plan of atonement on every possible basis known to his extremely limited polemical outlook, and could agree with none. If any sect of eclectics had been within his reach, he would most joyfully have cast his spiritual fortunes with them, for he felt himself better than very many conspicuous Christians; and as he would have joyed in a pose of sanct.i.ty, the reproach of being a member of no church touched him deeply.

"I ain't no ransomed saint, I know," he vociferated,--"I ain't no ransomed saint! But ef the truth war known, ye ain't got no religion nuther! That leetle duckin' ez ye call 'immersion' jes' diluted the 'riginal sin in ye mighty leetle. Ye air a toler'ble strong toddy o'

iniquity yit. That thar water tempered the whiskey ye drink mighty leetle,--mighty leetle!"

The Christian grace of Silas Boyd was put to a stronger test than it might have been deemed capable of sustaining. But Sneed was a far older man, and as nothing short of breaking his stiff neck might suffice to tame him, Silas Boyd summoned his self-control, and held his tingling hands, and gave himself only to retort.

"I wouldn't take that off'n ye, Mr. Sneed, 'ceptin' I be a perfessin'

member, an' pity them ez is still in the wiles an' delusions o'

Satan."

What might have ensued in the nature of counterthrust, as Persimmon Sneed heard himself called by inference an object of pity, the subsidiary group were spared from learning, for at that moment the sound of steps heralded an approach, and Ben Hanway came into the circle, and sought to claim the attention of the party, inviting them to dine and pa.s.s the nooning hour at his house. His countenance was adjusted to the smile of hospitality, but it wore the expression like a mask, and he seemed ill at ease. He had been contending all the morning with Narcissa's freakishness, which he thought intensified by the presence of the valley man, who was returning the civility of that ill-omened visit, and who, by reason of the abnormal excitements of the day, had been received with scant formality, and was already upon the footing of a familiar friend. Selwyn stood smilingly in the way hard by, speaking to those of the men as they pa.s.sed who gave his presence the meed of a start and a stare of blank surprise, or a curt nod. Narcissa lingered in the background, beneath a great oak; her chin was a little lifted with a touch of displeasure; the eyelids drooped over her brown eyes; her hands, with her wonted careless gesture and with a certain mechanical effort to dispel embarra.s.sment, were raised to the curtain of her white sunbonnet, and spread its folds wingwise behind her auburn hair. Sundry acquaintances among the honorary attendants paused to greet her pleasantly as they pa.s.sed, but old Sneed's disapprobation of a woman's appearance on so public an occasion was plainly expressed on his features. For all the Turks are not in Turkey. She followed with frowning, disaffected eyes the procession of men and horses and dogs and colts wending up to the invisible house hidden amongst the full-leaved autumn woods.

"Well, that's the jury of view; and what do you think of them?" asked Selwyn, watching too, but smilingly, the cavalcade.

"Some similar ter the cor'ner's jury. But _they_ hed suthin' ter look tormented an' tribulated 'bout," said the girl, evidently disappointed to find the jury of view not more cheerful of aspect. "But mebbe conversin' a pa.s.sel by the way with old Persimmon Sneed is powerful depressin' ter the sperits."

Selwyn's face grew grave at the mention of the coroner's jury.

"I'm afraid that poor fellow missed something good," he said.

Still holding out her sunbonnet in wide distention, she slowly set forth along the path, not even turning back, for sheer perversity, as she saw Ben look anxiously over his shoulder to descry if she followed in the distance.

"Thar ain't much good in life nohow. Things seem set contrariwise."

Then, after a moment, and turning her eyes upon him, for she had an almost personal interest in the man whose tragic fate she had first of all discovered, "What sorter good thing did he miss?" she asked, as she settled her sunbonnet soberly on her head.

"Well"--Selwyn began; then he hesitated. He had spoken rather than thought, for he thought little, and he was not used to keeping secrets. Moreover, despite his courageous disbelief in his coming fate, he must have had some yearnings for sympathy; the iron of his exile surely entered his soul at times. The girl, so delicately framed, so flower-like of face, seemed alien to her rude surroundings and the burly, heavy, matter-of-fact folk about her. Her spirituelle presence did away in a measure with the realization of her limitations, her ignorance, and the uncouth surroundings. Even her dress seemed to him hardly amiss, for there then reigned a fleeting metropolitan fas.h.i.+on of straight full flowing skirts and short waists and closely fitting sleeves,--a straining after picture-like effects which Narcissa's attire accomplished without conscious effort, the costume of the mountain women for a hundred years or more. The sunbonnet itself was but the defensive appurtenance of many a Southern city girl, when a-summering in the country, who esteems herself the possessor of a remarkably beautiful complexion, and heroically proposes to conserve it. Unlike the men, Narcissa's personality did not suggest the distance between them in sophistication, in culture, in refinement, in the small matters of external polish. She seemed not so far from his world, and it was long since he had walked fraternally by the side of some fair girl, and talked freely of himself, his views, his plans, his vagaries, as men, when very young, are wont to do, and as they rarely talk to one another. He had so sedulously sought to content himself with the conditions of his closing existence that the process of reconciling the habit of better things was lost in simple acceptance. He was still young, and the sun shone, and the air was clear and pure and soft, and he walked by the side of a girl, fair and good and not altogether unwise, and he was happy in the blessings vouchsafed.

After a moment he replied: "Well, I thought he might have made a lot of money. I thought I might go partners with him. I had written to him."

Her face did not change; it was still grave and solicitous within the white frame of her sunbonnet, but its expression did not deepen. She did not pity the dead man because he died without the money he had had a chance to make. She evidently had not even scant knowledge of that most absorbing pa.s.sion, the love of gain, and she did not value money.

"Somehow whenst folks dies by accident, it 'pears ter me a mistake--somehows--ez ef they war choused out'n time what war laid off fur them an' their'n by right." Evidently she did not lack sensibility.

"Yes," he rejoined, "and you know money makes a lot of difference in people's lives there in the valley towns. Lord knows, 't would in mine."

He swung his riding-whip dejectedly to and fro in his hand as he spoke, and she pushed back her sunbonnet to look seriously at him. He was a miracle of elegance in her estimation, but the fawn-colored suit which he wore owed its nattiness rather to his own symmetry than the cut or the cloth, and he had worn it a year ago. His immaculate linen, somewhat flabby,--for the mountain laundress is averse to starch,--had been delicately trimmed by a deft pair of scissors around the raveling edges of the cuffs and collar, and showed rather what it had been than what it was. His straw hat was pushed a trifle back from his face, in which the sunburn and the inward fire competed to lay on the tints.

She did not see how nor what he lacked. Still, if he wanted it, she pitied him that he did not have it.

"Waal, can't you-uns make it, the same way?"

She asked this sympathetically. She was beginning to experience a certain self-reproach in regard to him, and it gave her unwonted gentleness. She felt that she had been too quick to suspect. Since Ben's report of the reconnoitring interview on which she had sent him in Con Hite's interest, she had dismissed the idea that Selwyn was in aught concerned with the traveler's sudden and violent death; and she did not incline easily to the subst.i.tuted suspicion that the dead man was a "revenuer," and that Selwyn had written to him to recommend the investigation of Con Hite, whose implication in moons.h.i.+ning he had some cause to divine.

Narcissa had marked with displeasure Ben's surly manner to the valley man, connecting it with these considerations, and never dreaming that it was her acquaintance which her brother grudged the stranger.

"I ought never ter hev set Ben after him," she thought ruefully.

"He'll hang on ter him like a bulldog." But aloud she only said, "You kin make the money all the same."

"Oh, I'll try, like a little man!" he exclaimed, rousing himself to renewed hope. "I have written to another scientific fellow, and he has promised to come and investigate. I hope to Heaven he won't break his neck, too."

She also marked the word "investigate," which had so smitten Ben's attention, and marveled what matter it might be in the mountains worth investigating, and promissory of gain, if not the still-hunt, as it were, of the wily moons.h.i.+ners. But yet her faith in Selwyn's motives and good will, so suddenly adopted, held fast.

"Con Hite mus' l'arn ter look out fur hisse'f," she thought fretfully, for she could not discern into what disastrous swirl she might be guiding events as she took the helm. "He's big enough, the Lord knows."

The little log cabin on the slope of the ascent had come into sight.

They had followed but slowly; the horses were already tethered to the rails of the fence, and the jury of view and its escort had disappeared within. A very spirited fracas was in progress between the visiting dogs and the inhospitable home canines, and once Ben appeared in the pa.s.sageway and hoa.r.s.ely called his hounds off.

"I ain't a-goin' ter hurry," Narcissa remarked cavalierly. "Let Ben an' aunt Minervy dish up an' wait on 'em. They won't miss me.

Thar's nuthin' in this worl' a gormandizin' man kin miss at meal-times,--'ceptin' teeth."

Selwyn made no comment on this touch of reprisal in Narcissa's manner.

If old Persimmon Sneed had deemed her coming forth to meet them superfluous, she in her own good judgment could deem her presence at table an empty show.

"I ain't a-goin' in," she continued. "Ye kin go," she added, with a hasty afterthought. "Thar's a cheer sot ter the table fur you-uns. I'm goin' ter bide hyar. They 'll git done arter a while."

She sat languidly down on a step of a stile that went over the fence at a considerable distance from the house, and Selwyn, protesting that he wanted no dinner, established himself on the protruding roots of a great beech-tree that, like gigantic, knuckled, gnarled fingers, visibly took a great grasp of the earth before sinking their tips far out of sight beneath. The shade was dense; the sound of water trickling into the rude horse-trough on the opposite side of the path that was to be a road was delicious in its cool suggestion, for the landscape, far, far to see, blazed as with the refulgence of a summer sun. The odor of the apple orchard, heavily fruited, was mellow on the air, and the red-freighted boughs of an old winesap bent above the girl's head as she sat with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand. She gazed dreamily away at those vividly blue ranges, whither one might fancy summer had fled, so little affinity had their aspect with the network of intermediate brown valleys, and nearer garnet slopes, and the red and yellow oak boughs close at hand, hanging above the precipice and limiting the outlook.

"Yes," he said, after a moment's cogitation, while he absently turned a cl.u.s.ter of beech-nuts in his hands, "I'll try it, for keeps, you may bet,--if you were a betting character. There's lots of good things going in these mountains; that is, if a fellow had the money to get 'em out."

He looked up a trifle drearily from under the brim of his straw hat at the smiling summertide of those blue mountains yonder. Oh, fair and feigning prospect, what wide and alluring perspectives! He drew a long sigh. Is it better to know so surely that winter is a-coming?

"An' the sense, too," remarked Narcissa, her eyes still dreamily dwelling on the distance.

He roused himself. The unconsciously flattering inference was too slight not to be lawfully appropriated.

"Yes, the sense and the enterprise. Now, these mountaineers,"--he spoke as if she had no part among them, forgetting it, indeed, for the moment,--"they let marble and silver and iron, and gold too, all sorts of natural wealth, millions and millions of the finest hard-wood timber, lie here undeveloped, without making the least effort to realize on it, without lifting a finger. They have got no enterprise in the world, and they are the most dilatory, slowest gang I ever ran across in my life."

A dimple deepened in the soft fairness of her cheek under the white sunbonnet.

"They got enterprise enough ter want a road," she drawled, fixing her eyes upon him for a moment, then reverting to her former outlook.

He was a trifle embarra.s.sed, and lost his balance.

"Oh, _I_'ll want a road, too, after a while," he returned. "All in good time." He laughed as if to himself, a touch of mystery in his tone, and he took off his hat and jauntily fanned himself.

"Sorter dil'tory yerse'f now; 'pears ter be a ketchin' complaint, like the measles."

Perhaps she secretly resented the reflection on the mountaineers, for there was a certain bellicose intention in her eye, a disposition to push him to his last defenses.

"No; but a body would think a fellow might get enough intelligent cooperation in any promising matter from right around here without corresponding all over the country. And the mountaineers don't know anything, and they don't want to learn anything. Now," convincingly, "what would any of those fellows in there say if I should tell them that I could take a match "--he pulled a handful of lucifers from, his pocket--"and set a spring afire?"

She gazed at him in dumb surprise.