The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge and Other Stories Part 25

He bent over the sorghum, silently skimming. His composure was somewhat ruffled, and in throwing away the sc.u.m his gesture was of negligent and discursive aim; the boiling fluid bespattered the foot of one of the omnipresent dogs, whose shrieks rent the sky and whose activity on three legs amazed the earth. He ran yelping to Mrs. Grinnell, nearly overturning her in his turbulent demand for sympathy; then scampered across to the boys, who readily enough stopped their work to examine the wounded member and condole with its wheezing proprietor.

"What ye mean, A'gusta?" Grinnell said at length. "Kase I 'lowed I'd cut thar ears? I ain't foolin'. Kem meddlin' about remarkin' on our chill'n agin, I'll show 'em."

Augusta looked at him in exasperation. "I ain't keerin' ef all the Purdees war deef," she remarked, inhumanly, "but what war them words ye sent fur a message ter Purdee?--'bout pridin' on what ain't theirn."

Grinnell in his turn looked at her--but dubiously. However much a man is under the domination of his wife, he is seldom wholly frank. It is in this wise that his individuality is preserved to him. "I war jes wantin' ter know ef them words war on the rocks," he said with a disingenuousness worthy of a higher culture.

She received this with distrust. "I kin tell ye now--they ain't," she said, discriminatingly; "Purdee's words don't sound like _them_."

"Waal, now, what's the differ?" he demanded, with an indignation natural enough to aspiring humanity detecting a slur upon one's literary style.

"Waal--" she paused as she knelt down to feed the fire, holding the fragrant chips in her hand; the flame flickered out and lighted up her reflective eyes while she endeavored to express the distinction she felt: "Purdee's words don't sound ter me like the words of a man sech ez men be."

Grinnell wrinkled his brows, trying to follow her here.

"They sound ter me like the words spoke in a dream--the pernouncings of a vision." Mrs. Grinnell fancied that she too had a gift of Biblical phraseology. "They sound ter me like things I hearn whenst I war a-hungered arter righteousness an' seekin' religion, an' bided alone in the wilderness a-waitin' o' the Sperit."

"'Gusta!" suddenly exclaimed her husband, with the cadence of amazed conviction, "ye b'lieve the lie o' that critter, an' that he reads the words o' the Lord on the rock!"

She looked up a little startled. She had been unconscious of the circuitous approaches of credence, and shared his astonishment in the conclusion.

"Waal, sir!" he said, more hurt and cast down than one would have deemed possible. "I'm willin' ter hev it so. I'm jes nuthin' but a sinner an' a fool, ripenin' fur d.a.m.nation, an' he air a saint o' the yearth!"

Now such sayings as this were frequent upon Job Grinnell's tongue. He did not believe them; their utility was in their challenge to contradiction. Thus they often promoted an increased cordiality of the domestic relations and an accession of self-esteem.

Augusta, however, was tired; the boiling sorghum and the September sun were debilitating in their effects. There was something in the scene with the youthful Purdee that grated upon her half-developed sensibilities. The baby was whimpering outright, and the cow was lowing at the bars. She gave her irritation the luxury of withholding the salve to Grinnell's wounded vanity. She said nothing. The tribute to Purdee went for what it was worth, and he was forced to swallow the humble-pie he had taken into his mouth, albeit it stuck in his throat.

A shadow seemed to have fallen into the moral atmosphere as the gentle dusk came early on. One had a sense as if bereft, remembering that so short a time ago at this hour the sun was still high, and that the full-pulsed summer day throbbed to a climax of color and bloom and redundant life. Now, the scent of harvests was on the air; in the stubble of the sorghum patch she saw a quail's brood more than half-grown, now afoot, and again taking to wing with a loud whirring sound. The perfume of ripening muscadines came from the bank of the river. The papaws hung globular among the leaves of the bushes, and the persimmons were reddening. The vermilion sun was low in the sky above the purpling mountains; the stream had changed from a crystalline brown to red, to gold, and now it was beginning to be purple and silver. And this reminded her that the full-moon was up, and she turned to look at it--so pearly and luminous above the jagged ridge-pole of the dark little house on the rise. The sky about it was blue, refining into an exquisitely delicate and ethereal neutrality near the horizon. The baby had fallen asleep, with its bald head on the old dog's shoulder.

After the supper was over, the sorghum fire still burned beneath the great kettle, for the syrup was not yet made, and sorghum-boiling is an industry that cannot be intermitted. The fire in the midst of the gentle shadow and sheen of the night had a certain profane, discordant effect.

Pete's ill-defined figure slouching over it while he skimmed the syrup was grimly suggestive of the distillations of strange elixirs and unhallowed liquors, and his simple face, lighted by a sudden darting red flame, had unrecognizable significance and was of sinister intent. For Pete was detailed to attend to the boiling; the grinding was done, and the old white mare stood still in the midst of the sorghum stubble and the moonlight, as motionless and white as if she were carved in marble.

Job Grinnell sat and smoked on the porch.

Presently he got up suddenly, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and looked at it carefully before he stuck it into his pocket. He went, without a word, down the rocky slope, past the old drowsing mare, and across the foot-bridge. Two or three of the dogs, watching him as he reappeared on the opposite bank, affected a mistake in ident.i.ty. They growled, then barked outright, and at last ran down and climbed the fence and bounded about it, baying the vista where he had vanished, until the sleepy old mare turned her head and gazed in mild surprise at them.

Augusta sat alone on the step of the porch.

She had various regrets in her mind, incipient even before he had quite gone, and now defining themselves momently with added poignancy. A woman who, in her retirement at home, charges herself with the control of a man's conduct abroad, is never likely to be devoid of speculation upon probable disasters to ensue upon any abatement of the activities of her discretion. She was sorry that she had allowed so trifling a matter to mar the serenity of the family; her conscience upbraided her that she had not besought him to avoid the blacksmith's shop, where certain men of the neighborhood were wont to congregate and drink deep into the night. Above all, her mind went back to the enigmatical message, and she wondered that she could have been so forgetful as to fail to urge him to forbear angering Purdee, for this would have a c.u.mulative effect upon all the rancors of the old quarrels, and inaugurate perhaps a new series of reprisals.

"I ain't afeard o' no Purdee ez ever stepped," she said to herself, defining her position. "But I'm fur peace. An' ef the Purdees will leave we-uns be, I ain't a-goin' ter meddle along o' them."

She remembered an old barn-burning, in the days when she and her husband were newly married, at his father's house. She looked up at the barn hard by, on a line with the dwelling, with that tenderness which one feels for a thing, not because of its value, but for the sake of possession, for the kins.h.i.+p with the objects that belong to the home. A cat was sitting high in a crevice in the logs where the daubing had fallen out; the moon glittered in its great yellow eyes. A frog was leaping along the open s.p.a.ce about the rude step at Augusta's feet. A clump of mullein leaves, silvered by the light, spangled by the dew, hid him presently. What an elusive glistening gauze hung over the valley far below, where the sense of distance was limited by the sense of sight!--for it was here only that the night, though so brilliant, must attest the incomparable lucidity of daylight. She could not even distinguish, amidst those soft sheens of the moon and the dew, the Lombardy poplar that grew above the door of old Squire Grove's house down in the cove; in the daytime it was visible like a tiny finger pointing upward. How drowsy was the sound of the katydid, now loudening, now falling, now fainting away! And the tree-toad shrilled in the dog-wood tree. The frogs, too, by the river in iterative fugue sent forth a song as suggestive of the margins as the scent of the fern, and the mint, and the fragrant weeds.

A convulsive start! She did not know that she slept until she was again awake. The moon had travelled many a mile along the highways of the skies. It hung over the purple mountains, over the farthest valley. The cicada had grown dumb. The stars were few and faint. The air was chill.

She started to her feet; her garments were heavy with dew. The fire beneath the sorghum kettle had died to a coal, flaring or fading as the faint fluctuations of the wind might will. Near it Pete slumbered where he too had sat down to rest. And Job--Job had never returned.

He had found it a lightsome enough scene at the blacksmith's shop, where it was understood that the neighboring politicians collogued at times, or brethren in the church discussed matters of discipline or more spiritual affairs. In which of these interests a certain corpulent jug was most active it would be difficult perhaps to accurately judge. The great barn-like doors were flung wide open, and there was a group of men half within the shelter and half without; the shoeing-stool, a broken plough, an empty keg, a log, and a rickety chair sufficed to seat the company. The moonlight falling into the door showed the great slouching, darkling figures, the anvil, the fire of the forge (a dim ashy coal), and the shadowy hood merging indistinguishably into the deep duskiness of the interior. In contrast, the scene glimpsed through the low window at the back of the shop had a certain vivid illuminated effect. A spider web, revealing its geometric perfection, hung half across one corner of the rude cas.e.m.e.nt; the moonbeams without were individualized in fine filar delicacy, like the ravellings of a silver skein. The boughs of a tree which grew on a slope close below almost touched the lintel; the leaves seemed a translucent green; a bird slept on a twig, its head beneath its wing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BLACKSMITH'S SHOP]

Back of the cabin, which was situated on a limited terrace, the great alt.i.tudes of the mountain rose into the infinity of the night.

The drawling conversation was beset, as it were, by faint fleckings of sound, lightly drawn from a crazy old fiddle under the chin of a gaunt, yellow-haired young giant, one Ephraim Blinks, who lolled on a log, and who by these vague harmonies unconsciously gave to the talk of his comrades a certain theatrical effect.

Grinnell slouched up and sat down among them, responding with a nod to the unceremonious "Hy're, Job?" of the blacksmith, who seemed thus to do the abbreviated honors of the occasion. The others did not so formally notice his coming.

The subject of conversation was the same that had pervaded his own thoughts. He was irritated to observe how Purdee had usurped public attention, and yet he himself listened with keenest interest.

"Waal," said the ponderous blacksmith, "I kin onderstan' mighty well ez Moses would hev been mighty mad ter see them folks a-wors.h.i.+ppin' o' a calf--senseless critters they be! 'Twarn't no use flingin' down them rocks, though, an' gittin' 'em bruk. Sandstone ain't like metal; ye can't heat it an' draw it down an' weld it agin."

His round black head shone in the moonlight, glistening because of his habit of plunging it, by way of making his toilet, into the barrel of water where he tempered his steel. He crossed his huge folded bare arms over his breast, and leaned back against the door on two legs of the rickety chair.

"Naw, sir," another chimed in. "He mought hev knowed he'd jes hev ter go ter quarryin' agin."

"They air always a-crackin' up them folks in the Bible ez sech powerful wise men," said another, whose untrained mind evidently held the germs of advanced thinking. "'Pears ter me ez some of 'em conducted tha.r.s.elves ez foolish ez enny folks I know--this hyar very Moses one o' 'em.

Throwin' down them rocks 'minds me o' old man Pinner's tantrums. Sher'ff kem ter his house 'bout a jedgmint debt, an' levied on his c.r.a.ps. An'

arter he war gone old man tuk a axe an' gashed bodaciously inter the loom an' hacked it up. Ez ef that war goin' ter do enny good! His wife war the mos' outed woman I ever see. They 'ain't got nare nother loom nuther, an' hain't hearn no advices from the Lord."

The violinist paused in his playing. "They 'lowed Moses war a meek man too," he said. "He killed a man with a brick-badge an' buried him in the sand. Mighty meek ways"--with a satirical grimace.

The others, divining that this was urged in justification and precedent for devious modern ways that were not meek, did not pursue this branch of the subject.

"S'prised me some," remarked the advanced thinker, "ter hear ez them tables o' stone war up on the bald o' the mounting thar. I hed drawed the idee ez 'twar in some other kentry somewhar--I dunno--" He stopped blankly. He could not formulate his geographical ignorance. "An' I never knowed," he resumed, presently, "ez thar war enough gold in Tennessee ter make a gold calf; they fund gold hyar, but 'twar mighty leetle."

"Mebbe 'twar a mighty leetle calf," suggested the blacksmith.

"Mebbe so," a.s.sented the other.

"Mebbe 'twar a silver one," speculated a third; "plenty o' silver they 'low thar air in the mountings."

The violinist spoke up suddenly. "Git one o' them Injuns over yander ter Quallatown right seasonable drunk, an' he'll tell ye a power o' places whar the old folks said thar war silver." He bowed his chin once more upon the instrument, and again the slow drawling conversation proceeded to soft music.

"Ef ye'll b'lieve me," said the advanced thinker, "I never war so confl.u.s.ticated in my life ez I war when he stood up in meetin' an' told 'bout'n the tables o' the law bein' on the bald! I 'lowed 'twar somewhar 'mongst some sort'n people named 'Gyptians."

"Mebbe some o' them Injuns air named 'Gyptians," suggested Spears, the blacksmith.

"Naw, sir," spoke up the fiddler, who had been to Quallatown, and was the ethnographic authority of the meeting. "Tennessee Injuns be named Cher'kee, an' Chick'saw, an' Creeks."

There was a silence. The moonlight sifted through the dark little shanty of a shop; the fretting and foaming of a mountain stream arose from far down the steep slope, where there was a series of cascades, a fine water-power, utilized by a mill. The sudden raucous note of a night-hawk jarred upon the air, and a shadow on silent wings sped past. The road was dusty in front of the shop, and for a s.p.a.ce there was no shade.

Into the full radiance of the moonlight a rabbit bounded along, rising erect with a most human look of affright in its great s.h.i.+ning eyes as it tremulously gazed at the motionless figures. It too was motionless for a moment. The young musician made a lunge at it with his bow; it sprang away with a violent start--its elongated grotesque shadow bounding kangaroo-like beside it--into the soft gloom of the bushes. There was no other traveller along the road, and the talk was renewed without further interruption. "Waal, sir, ef 'twarn't fur the testimony o' the words he reads ez air graven on them rocks, I couldn't git my cornsent ter b'lieve ez Moses ever war in Tennessee," said the advanced thinker. "I ain't ondertakin' ter say what State he settled in, but I 'lowed 'twarn't hyar. It mus' hev been, though, 'count o' the scripture on them broken tables."

"I never knowed a meetin' woke ter sech a pint o' holiness. The saints jes rampaged around till it fairly sounded like the cavortin's o' the unG.o.dly," a retrospective voice chimed in.

"I raised thirty-two hyme chunes," said the musician, who had a great gift in quiring, and was the famed possessor of a robust tenor voice. "A leetle mo' gloryin' aroun' an' I'd hev kem ter the eend o' my row, an'

hev hed ter begin over agin." He spoke with acrimony, reviewing the jeopardy in which his _repertoire_ had been placed.