DWELLERS IN THE HILLS + THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER + THE GILDED CHAIR. Melville Davisson Post
blacksmith paid no attention. He pumped his bellows with his back toward us.
"Christian!" repeated the hunchback, and his voice was the ugliest thing I have ever heard. It was low and soft and went whistling through the shop. "Do you hear me, Christian?"
The smith turned like an animal that hears a hissing by his heels, threw the tongs on the floor, and glared at Ump. "I won't do it," he snarled.
"Easy, Christian," said the hunchback, with the same wheedling voice that came so strangely through his crooked mouth. "Think about it, man. The horse is barefoot. We should be much obliged to you."
I do not believe that this man was a coward. It was his boast that he could shoe anything that could walk into his shop, and he lived up to the boast. I give him that due, on my honour. Many a devil walked into that shop wearing the hoof and hide of a horse and came out with iron nailed on his feet; for example, horses like the Black Abbot that fought and screamed when we put a saddle on him first and rolled on the earth until he crushed the saddle-tree and the stirrups into splinters; and horses like El Mahdi that tried to kill the blacksmith as though he were an annoying fly. It was dangerous business, and I do not believe that old Christian was a coward.
But what show had he? An arm's length away was the powerful Jud whose hand had just now held the smith out over the corner of the world; and the hunchback squatted on the floor with the striking hammer in his long fingers, the red glint under his half-closed eyelids, and that dangerous purring speech in his mouth. What show had he?
The man looked up at the roof, blackened with the smoke of half a century, and then down at the floor, and the resolution died in his face. He gathered up his scattered tools and went over to the horse, lifted his foot, cut the nails, and removed the pieces of broken shoe.
Then he climbed on the anvil, and began to move the manufactured shoes that were set in rows along the rafters, looking for a size that would fit.
"Them won't do," said Ump. "You'll have to make a shoe, Christian."
The man got down without a word, seized a bar of iron and thrust it into the coals. Jud caught the pole of his bellows, and pumped it for him. The smith turned the iron in the coals. When it glowed he took it out, cut off the glowing piece on the chisel in his anvil, caught it up in a pair of tongs and thrust it back into the fire. Then he waited with his hands hanging idly while Jud pulled the pole of the old bellows until it creaked and groaned and the fire spouted sparks.
When the iron was growing fluffy white, the smith caught it up in his tongs, lifted it from the fire, flung off a shower of hissing sparks and began to hammer, drawing it out and beating it around the horn of the anvil until presently it became a rough flat shoe.
The iron was cooling, and he put it back into the coals. When it was hot again, he turned the calks, punched the nail holes and carried it glowing to where the horse stood, held it an instant to the hoof, noted the changes to be made, and thrust it back into the fire.
A moment later the hissing shoe was plunged into a tub of water by the anvil, and then thrown steaming to the floor. Ump picked it up, passed his finger over it and then set it against El Mahdi's foot. It was a trifle narrow at the heel, and Ump pitched it back to the smith, spreading his fingers to indicate the defect. Old Christian sprung the calks on the horn of the anvil, and returned the shoe. The hunchback thrust his hand between the calks, raised the shoe and squinted along its surface to see if it were entirely level. Then he nodded his head.
The blacksmith went over to the wall, and began to take down a paper box. The hunchback saw him and turned under the horse. "We can't risk a store nail," he said. "You'll have to make 'em."
For the first time the man spoke. "No iron," he answered.
Ump arose and began to look over the shop. Presently he found an old scythe blade and threw it to the smith. "That'll do," he said; "take the back."
Old Christian broke the strip of iron from the scythe blade and heating it in his forge, made the nails, hammering them into shape, and cutting them from the rod until he had a dozen lying by the anvil. When they were cool, he gathered them in his hand, smoothed the points, and went over to El Mahdi.
The old man lifted the horse's foot, and set it on his knee, and Ump arose and stood over him. Then he shod the horse as the hunchback directed, paring the hoof and setting the nails evenly through the outer rim, clipping the nail ends, and clinching them by doubling the cut points. Then he smoothed the hoof with his great file and the work was over.
We rode south along the ridge, leaving old Christian standing in his shop door, his face sullen and his grimy arms folded. I flung him a silver dollar, four times the price of the shoeing. It fell by the shop sill, and he lifted his foot and sent it spinning across the road into the bushes.
The road ran along the ridge. A crumbling rail fence laced with the vines of the poison ivy trailed beside it. In its corners stood the great mullein, and the dock, and the dead iron-weed. The hickories, trembling in their yellow leaves, loomed above the fringe of sugar saplings like some ancient crones in petticoats of scarlet. Sometimes a partridge ran for a moment through the dead leaves, and then whizzed away to some deeper tangle in the woods; now a grey squirrel climbed a shell-bark with the clatter of a carpenter shingling a roof, and sat by his door to see who rode by, or shouted his jeer, and, diving into his house, thrust his face out at the window. Sometimes, far beyond us, a pheasant walked across the road, strutting as straight as a harnessed brigadier,—an outlaw of the Hills who had sworn by the feathers on his legs that he would eat no bread of man, and kept the oath. Splendid freeman, swaggering like a brigand across the war-paths of the conqueror!
We were almost at the crown of the ridge when a brown flying-squirrel, routed from his cave in a dead limb by the hammering of a hungry woodpecker, stood for a moment blinking in the sunlight and then made a flying leap for an oak on the opposite side of the road; but his estimate was calculated on the moonlight basis, and he missed by a fraction of an inch and went tumbling head over heels into the weeds.
I turned to laugh at the disconcerted acrobat, when I caught through the leaves the glimpse of a horse approaching the blacksmith-shop from one of the crossroads. I called to my companions and we found a break in the woods where the view was clear. At half a mile in the transparent afternoon we easily recognised Lem Marks. He rode down to the shop and stopped by the door.
In a moment old Christian came out, stood by the shoulder of the horse and rested his hand on Marks' knee. It was strange familiarity for such an acrimonious old recluse, and even at the distance the attitude of Woodford's henchman seemed to indicate surprise.
They talked together for some little while, then old Christian waved his arm toward the direction we had taken and went into his shop, presently returning with some implements in his hand. We could not make out what they were. He handed them up to Marks, and the two seemed to discuss the matter, for after a time Marks selected one and held it out to old Christian. The smith took it, turned it over in his hand, nodded his head and went back into his shop, while Marks gathered up his reins and came after us in a slow fox trot.
We slipped over the ridge and then straightened in our saddles.
"Boys," said the hunchback, fingering the mane of the Bay Eagle, "that was a bad job. We ought to be a little more careful in the pickin' of enemies."
"Damn 'em," muttered Jud, "I wonder what mare's nest they're fixin'. I ought to 'a twisted the old buck's neck."
The hunchback leaned over his saddle and ran his fingers along the neck of the splendid mare. "Peace," he soliloquised, "is a purty thing." Then he turned to me with a bantering, quizzical light in his eyes.
"Quiller," he said, "don't you wish you had your dollar back in your pocket?"
"Why?" said I.
"It's like this," said he. "One time there was an' old miser, an' when he was a-dyin' the devil come, an' set down by the bed, an' the devil said, 'You've done a good deal of work for me, an' I reckon I ought to give you a lift if you need it. Now, then, if there's any little thing you want done, I'll look after it for you.' The miser said he'd like to have an iron fence round his