DWELLERS IN THE HILLS + THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER + THE GILDED CHAIR. Melville Davisson Post
cattle grazier.
There was a certain air of strangeness in the way we were met at Nicholas Marsh's house. I do not mean inhospitality, rather the reverse, with a tinge of embarrassment, as of one entertaining the awkward guest. We were evidently expected, and a steaming supper was laid for us. Yet, when I sat at the table and Jud with his plate by the smouldering fire, we were not entirely easy. Marsh walked through the room, backward and forward, with his hands behind him, and a great lock of his iron-grey hair throwing shadows across his face. Now and then he put some query about the grass, or my brother's injury, or the condition of the road, and then turned about on his heel. His fine open face wore traces of annoyance. It was plain that there had been here some business not very pleasing to this honourable man. When I told him we had come for the cattle, the muscles of his jaw seemed to tighten. He stopped and looked me squarely in the face.
"Well, Quiller," he said, with what seemed to me to be unnecessary firmness, "I shall let you have them."
I heard Jud turn sharply in his chair.
"Let me have them? Is there any trouble about it?"
The man was clearly embarrassed. He bit his lip and twisted his neck around in his collar. "No," he said, hesitating in his speech, "there isn't any trouble. Still a man might demand the money at the scales. He would have a right to do that."
My pulse jumped. So this was one of their plans, those devils. And we had never a one of us dreamed of it. If the money were demanded at the scales it would mean delay, and delay meant that Woodford would win.
So this was Twiggs's part in the ugly work. No wonder he ran his horse. Trust a woman for jamming through the devil's business. Nothing but the good fibre of this honourable man had saved us. But Westfall! He was lighter stuff. How about Westfall?
I looked up sharply into the troubled face of the honest man.
"How about the other cattle," I faltered; "shall we get them?"
"Who went for them?" he asked.
"Ump," I replied; "he left us at the crossroads."
The man took his watch out of his pocket and studied for a moment. "Yes," he said, "you will get them."
It was put like some confident opinion based upon the arrival of an event.
"Mister Marsh," I said, "are you afraid of Ward? Isn't he good for the money?"
"Don't worry about that, my boy," he answered, taking up the candlestick, "I have said that you shall have the cattle, and you shall have them. Let me see about a bed for you."
Then he went out, closing the door after him.
I turned to Jud, and he pointed his finger to a letter lying on the mantelpiece. I arose and picked it up. It bore Cynthia's seal and was open.
Let us forgive little Miss Pandora. Old Jupiter ought to have known better. And the dimpled wife of Bluebeard! That forbidden door was so tremendously alluring!
I think I should have pulled the letter out of its envelope had I not feared that this man would return and find it in my fingers. I showed the seal to Jud and replaced it on the mantelpiece.
He slapped his leg. "Twiggs brought that," he said, "an' he's gone on to Westfall's. What does it say?"
"I didn't read it," I answered.
The man heaved his shoulders up almost to his ears. "Quiller," he said, "you can't root, if you have a silk nose."
I think I should have fallen, but at this moment Nicholas Marsh came back with his candle, and said we ought to sleep if we wished an early start in the morning. I followed him up the bare stairway to my room on the north side of the house. He placed the candlestick on the table, promised to call me early, then bade me good-night and went away.
I watched his broad back disappear in the shadow of the hall. Then I closed the door and latched it. Rigid honesty has its disadvantages. Here was a man almost persuaded to insist upon a right that was valid but unusual, and deeply worried because he had almost yielded to the urging. It takes good men to see the fine shades of such a thing.
There was a broad window in this room, with the bare limbs of the maples brushing against its casement. I looked out before I went to bed. Beyond the Valley River, great smoky shadows cloaked the hills, gilded along their borders by the rising moon; hills that sat muffled in the foldings of their robes, waiting for the end,—waiting for man to play out the game and quit, and the Great Manager to pull down his scenery.
I blew out the candle, and presently slept as one sleeps when he is young. Sometime in the night I sat bolt upright in the good bed to listen. I had heard,—or was I dreaming,—floating up from some far distance, the last faint echo of that voice of Parson Peppers.
"An' the ravens they did feed him, fare ye well,
fare ye well."
I sprang out of bed and pressed my face against the window. There was no sound in the world. Below, the Valley River lay like a plate of burnished yellow metal. Under the enchanted moon it was the haunted water of the fairy. No mortal went singing down its flood, surely, unless he sailed in the ship that the tailors sewed together, or went a-dreaming in that mystic barge rowed by the fifty daughters of Danaus.
I crept back under the woven coverlid. This was haunted country, and Parson Peppers was doubtless snoring in a bed.
Chapter XIII
The Six Hundred
It is an unwritten law of the Hills that all cattle bought by the pound are to be weighed out of their beds, that is, in the early morning before they have begun to graze. This is the hour set by immemorial custom.
We were in the saddle while the sun was yet abed. The cattle were on two great boundaries of a thousand acres, sleeping in the deep blue grass on the flat hill-tops. Jud and two of Marsh's drivers took one line of the ridges, and Marsh and I took the other.
The night was lifting when we came out on the line of level hill-tops, and through the haze the sleeping cattle were a flock of squatting shadows. As we rode in among them the dozing bullocks arose awkwardly from their warm beds and stretched their great backs, not very well pleased to have their morning rest broken.
We rode about, bringing them into a bunch, arousing some morose old fellow who slept by himself in a corner of the hill, or a dozen aristocrats who held a bedchamber in some windless cove, or a straying Ishmaelite hidden in a broom-sedge hollow,—all displeased with the interruption of their forty winks before the sunrise. Was it not enough to begin one's day with the light and close it with the light? What did man mean by his everlasting inroads on the wholesome ways of nature? The Great Mother knew what she was about. All the people of the fields could get up in the morning without this cursed row. Whoever was one of them snoozing in his trundle-bed after the sun had flashed him a good morning?
The home-life of the steer would be healthy reading in any family. He never worries, and his temper has no shoal. Either he is contented and goes about his business, or he is angry and he fights. He is clean, and as regular in his habits as a lieutenant of infantry. To bed on the highlands when the dark comes, and out of it with the sun. A drink of water from the brook, and about to breakfast.
We gathered the cattle into a drove, and started them in a broken line across the hills toward the road, the huge black muleys strolling along, every fellow at his leisure. The sun peeping through his gateway in the east gilded the tops of the brown sedge and turned the grass into a sea of gold. Through this Eldorado the line of black cattle waded in deep grasses to the knee,—curly-coated beasts from some kingdom of the midnight in mighty contrast to this golden country. I might have been the Merchant's Son transported by some wicked fairy to a land of wonders, watching, with terror in his throat, the rebellious jins under some enchantment of King Solomon travelling eastward to the sun.
Now a hungry