“When on the dusky violet skyThe full flower of the moon blooms highThe stars turn pale and die!”
“When on the dusky violet skyThe full flower of the moon blooms highThe stars turn pale and die!”
“When on the dusky violet skyThe full flower of the moon blooms highThe stars turn pale and die!”
Just then Miss Moyne, dressed all in white, floated by on Peck’s arm, uttering a silvery gust of laughter in response to a cynical observation of the critic.
“What a lovely girl she is,” said Mrs. Bridges. “Mr. Peck shows fine critical acumen in being very fond of her.”
Crane was desperately silent. “He’s a handsome man, too, and I suspect it’s a genuine love affair,” Mrs. Bridges went on, fanning herself complacently. Back and forth, walking slowly and conversing in a soft minor key, save when now and then Miss Moyne laughed melodiously, the promenaders passed and repassed, Peck never deigning to glance toward Crane, who had forgotten both Sappho and the moon. Miss Moyne did, however, once or twice turn her eyes upon the silent poet.
“Oh,” went on Miss Crabb, filling Dufour’s ears with the hurried din of her words, “Oh, I’m going to write a novel about this place. I never saw a better chance for local color, real transcripts from life, original scenes and genuine romance all tumbled together. Don’t you think I might do it?”
“It does appear tempting,” said Dufour. “There’s Tolliver for instance, a genuine Chilhowee moonshiner.” He appeared to laugh inwardly as he spoke. Indeed he heard the plash of water and the dripping, shivering mountaineer stood forth in his memory down there in the gorge.
“A moonshiner!” gasped Miss Crabb, fluttering the leaves of her note-book and writing by moonlight with a celerity that amazed Dufour.
“Potentially, at least,” he replied evasively. “He looks like one and he don’t like water.”
“If hedoesturn out to be a real moonshiner,” Miss Crabb proceeded reflectively to say, “it will be just too delicious for anything. I don’t mind telling you, confidentially, Mr. Dufour, that I am to write some letters while here to theChicago Daily Lightning Express. So I’d take it as a great favor if you’d give me all the points you get.”
“That’s interesting,” he said, with a keen scrutiny of her face for a second. “I shall be glad to be of assistance to you.”
He made a movement to go, but lingered to say: “Pray give me all the points, too, will you?”
“Oh, are you a journalist too?” she inquired, breathlessly hanging over him. “What paper—”
“I’m not much of anything,” he hurriedly interposed, “but I like to know what is going on, that’s all.”
He walked away without further excuse and went up to his room.
“I’ve got to watch him,” soliloquized Miss Crabb, “or he’ll get the scoop of all the news. Give him points, indeed! Maybe so, but not till after I’ve sent them to theLightning Express! I’ll keep even with him, or know the reason why.”
It was a grand panorama that the climbing moon lighted up all around Mount Boab, a vast billowy sea of gloom and sheen. Here wereshining cliffs, there dusky gulches; yonder the pines glittered like steel-armed sentinels on the hill-tops, whilst lower down they appeared to skulk like cloaked assassins. Shadows came and went, now broad-winged and wavering, again slender and swift as the arrows of death. The hotel was bright within and without. Some one was at the grand piano in the hall making rich music—a fragment from Beethoven,—and a great horned owl down the ravine was booming an effective counterpoint.
Crane stood leaning on the railing of the veranda and scowling savagely as Peck and Miss Moyne continued to promenade and converse. He was, without doubt, considering sinister things. Mrs. Bridges, finding him entirely unsympathetic, went to join Miss Crabb, who was alone where she had been left by Dufour. Meantime, up in his room, with his chair tilted far back and his feet thrust out over the sill of an open window, Dufour was smoking a fragrant Cuban cigar, (fifty cents at retail) and alternating smiles with frowns as he contemplated his surroundings.
“Authors,” he thought, “are the silliest, the vainest, and the most impractical lot of human geese that ever were plucked for their valuable feathers. And newspaper people! Humph!” He chuckled till his chin shook upon his immaculate collar. “Just the idea, now, of that young woman asking me to furnish her with points!”
There was something almost jocund blent with his air of solid self-possession, and hesmoked the precious cigars one after another with prodigal indifference and yet with the perfect grace of him to the manner born.
“Hotel Helicon on Mt. Boab!” he repeated, and then betook himself to bed.
Somepeople are born to find things out—to overhear, to reach a place just at the moment in which an event comes to pass there—born indeed, with the news-gatherer’s instinct perfectly developed. Miss Crabb was one of these. How she chanced to over-hear some low-spoken but deadly sounding words that passed between Peck and Crane, it would be hard to say; still she overheard them, and her heart jumped almost into her mouth. It was a thrillingly dramatic passage, there under the heavy-topped oak by the west veranda in the gloom.
“Villain!” exclaimed Crane, in the hissing voice of a young tragedy-player at rehearsal,
“Villain! you shall not escape me. Defend yourself!”
“Nonsense,” said Peck, “you talk like a fool. I don’t want to fight! What’s that you’ve got in your hand?”
“A sword, you cowardly craven!”
“You call me a coward! If I had a good club I should soon show you what I could do, you sneaking assassin!”
More words and just as bitter followed, till at last a fight was agreed upon to take place immediately, at a certain point on the verge of acliff not far away. There were to be no seconds and the meeting was to end in the death of one or both of the combatants.
To Miss Crabb all this had a sound and an appearance as weird as anything in the wildest romance she ever had read. It was near mid-night; the hotel was quite soundless and the moon on high made the shadows short and black.
“Meet me promptly at the Eagle’s Nest in ten minutes,” said Crane, “I’ll fetch my other sword and give you choice.”
“All right, sir,” responded Peck, “but a club would do.”
The peculiar hollowness of their voices affected the listener as if the sounds had come from a tomb. She felt clammy. Doubtless there is a considerable element of humorous, almost ludicrous bravado in such a scene when coolly viewed; but Miss Crabb could not take a calm, critical attitude just then. At first she was impelled almost irresistibly toward interfering and preventing a bloody encounter; but her professional ambition swept the feeling aside. Still, being a woman, she was dreadfully nervous. “Ugh!” she shuddered, “it will be just awful, but I can’t afford to miss getting the full particulars for theLightning Express. A sure enough duel! It will make my fortune! Oh, if I were a man, now, just only for a few hours, what a comfort it would be! But all the same I must follow them—I must see the encounter,describe it as an eye-witness and send it by wire early in the morning.”
It occurred to her mind just then that the nearest telegraph station was twelve miles down the mountain, but she did not flinch or waver. The thought that she was required to do what a man might well have shrunk from gave an element of heroism to her pluck. She was conscious of this and went about her task with an elasticity and facility truly admirable.
Eagle’s Nest was the name of a small area on the top of a beetling cliff whose almost perpendicular wall was dotted with clumps of sturdy little cedar trees growing out of the chinks. It was a dizzy place at all times, but by night the effect of its airy height was very trying on any but the best nerves. Crane and Peck both were men of fine physique and were possessed of stubborn courage and great combativeness. They met on the spot and after choosing swords, coolly and promptly proceeded to the fight. On one hand, close to the cliff’s edge, was a thick mass of small oak bushes, on the other hand lay a broken wall of fragmentary stones. The footing-space was fairly good, though a few angular blocks of stone lay here and there, and some brushes of stiff wood-grass were scattered around.
Crane led with more caution than one would have expected of an irate Kentuckian, and Peck responded with the brilliant aplomb of an enthusiastic duelist.
The swords were neither rapiers nor broad-swords,being the ordinary dress-weapons worn by Confederate Infantry officers in the war time—weapons with a history, since they had been at the thigh of father and son, the bravest of Kentucky Cranes, through many a stormy battle.
Peck’s back was toward the precipice-brink at the commencement of the engagement, but neither had much the advantage, as the moon was almost directly overhead. As their weapons began to flash and clink, the slender keen echoes fell over into the yawning chasm and went rattling down the steep, ragged face of the precipice. They were vigorous and rather good fencers and it would have been evident to an onlooker of experience that the fight was to be a long one, notwithstanding the great weight of the swords they were using. They soon began to fight fiercely and grew more vehemently aggressive each second, their blows and thrusts and parries and counter-cuts following each other faster and faster until the sounds ran together and the sparks leaped and shone even in the bright moonlight. They mingled broad-sword exercise with legitimate rapier fencing and leaped about each other like boxers, their weapons whirling, darting, rising, falling, whilst their breathing became loud and heavy. It was a scene to have stirred the blood of men and women four hundred years ago, when love was worth fighting for and when men were quite able and willing to fight for it.
The combatants strained every point of theirstrength and skill, and not a drop of blood could either draw. Slash, thrust, whack, clink, clank, clack, click, cling! Round and round they labored, the fury of their efforts flaming out of their eyes and concentrating in the deep lines of their mouths. As if to listen, the breeze lay still in the trees and the great owl quit hooting in the ravine. Faster and faster fell the blows, swifter and keener leaped the thrusts, quicker and surer the parries were interposed. The swords were hacked and notched like hand-saws, the blades shook and hummed like lyre-cords. Now close to the cliff’s edge, now over by the heap of broken stones and then close beside the clump of oak bushes, the men, panting and sweating, their muscles knotted, their sinews leaping like bow-strings, their eyes standing out, as if starting from their sockets, pursued each other without a second’s rest or wavering.
At last, with an irresistible spurt of fury, Crane drove Peck right into the bushes with a great crash and would not let him out. The critic was not vanquished, however, for, despite the foliage and twigs, he continued to parry and thrust with dangerous accuracy and force.
Just at this point a strange thing happened. Right behind Peck there was a tearing, crashing sound and a cry, loud, keen, despairing, terrible, followed immediately by the noise of a body descending among the cedars growing along the face of the awful precipice.
It was a woman’s voice, shrieking in deadlyhorror that then came up out of the dizzy depth of space below!
The men let fall their swords and leaped to the edge of the cliff with the common thought that it was Miss Moyne who had fallen over. They reeled back giddy and sick, staggering as if drunken.
Far down they had seen something white fluttering and gleaming amid a tuft of cedars and a quavering voice had cried:
“Help, help, oh, help!”
And so the duel was at an end.
Hotel Heliconwas shaken out of its sleep by the startling rumor to the effect that Miss Moyne had fallen down the precipice at Eagle’s Nest.
Of all the rudely awakened and mightily frightened inmates, perhaps Miss Moyne herself was most excited by this waft of bad news. She had been sleeping very soundly in dreamless security and did not at first feel the absurdity of being told that she had just tumbled down the escarpment, which in fact she never yet had summoned the courage to approach, even when sustained by a strong masculine arm.
“O dear! how did it happen?” she demanded of her aunt, Mrs. Coleman Rhodes, who had rushed upon her dainty couch with the frightful announcement of her accident.
“Oh, Alice! you are here, you are not hurt at all! Oh!” Mrs. Rhodes went on, “and whatcanit all mean!”
Everybody rushed out, of course, as soon as hurried dressing would permit, and fell into the confusion that filled the halls and main veranda.
Crane was talking in a loud, but well modulated strain, explaining the accident:
“Mr. Peck and I,” he went on to say, “were enjoying a friendly turn at sword-play up here at Eagle’s Nest; couldn’t sleep, needed exercise, and went up there so as not to disturb any one. While we were fencing she came rushing past through those bushes and leaped right over with a great shriek. She—”
“Don’t stop to talk,” cried Mr. E. Hobbs Lucas, with a directness and clearness quite unusual in a historian. “Don’t stop to talk, let’s go do something!”
“Yes, come on,” quavered poor Peck, his face whiter than the moon and his beard quivering in sympathy with his voice.
“Oh, it’s dreadful, awful!” moaned little Mrs. Philpot, “poor, dear Miss Moyne, to think that she is gone!” and she leaned heavily on Miss Moyne’s shoulder as she spoke.
It was a strange scene, too confused for the best dramatic effect, but spectacular in the extreme. Servants swarmed out with lights that wavered fantastically in the moonshine, while the huddled guests swayed to and fro in a body. Every face was pinched with intense excitement and looked haggard under its crown of disheveled hair. Even the hotel windows stared in stupid horror, and the kindly countenances of the negro waiters took on a bewildered and meaninglessgrin set in a black scowl of superstition and terror.
When Dufour came upon the scene, he did not appear in the least flurried, and the first thing he did was to lay his hand on Miss Moyne’s shoulder and exclaim in a clear tenor strain:
“Why, here! it’s all a mistake! What are you talking about? Here’s Miss Moyne! Here she stands!”
“Mercy! where?” enquired little Mrs. Philpot, who was still leaning on her friend and shedding bitter tears.
Dufour, with a quiet: “Please don’t take offence,” put a hand on either side of Miss Moyne and lifted her so that she stood in a chair looking very sweetly down over the crowd of people.
Few indeed are they who can look beautiful under such circumstances, but Miss Moyne certainly did, especially in the eyes of Crane and Peck as they gazed up at her.
Forthwith the tragedy became a farce.
“That Kentuckian must romance, I suppose,” grumbled R. Hobbs Lucas. “Wonder what he’ll tell next.”
“I don’t see how I could be so mistaken,” said Peck, after quiet had been somewhat restored, “I would have willingly been sworn to—”
He was interrupted by a dozen voices hurling ironical phrases at him.
“It is every word truth,” exclaimed Cranetestily. “Do you suppose I would trifle with so—”
“Oh, don’t you absolutely know that we suppose just that very thing?” said Lucas.
With the return of self-consciousness the company began to scatter, the ladies especially scampering to their rooms with rustling celerity. The men grumbled not a little, as if being deprived of a shocking accident touched them with a sting.
“The grotesque idea!” ejaculated Dufour. “Such a practical joke—impractical joke, I might better say, could originate only between a poet and a critic.”
Everybody went back to bed, feeling more or less injured by Crane and Peck, who shared in their own breasts the common impression that they had made great fools of themselves. If these crest-fallen knights, so lately militant and self-confident, had any cause of quarrel now it was based upon a question as to which should feel the meaner and which should more deeply dread to meet Miss Moyne on the morrow.
As for Miss Moyne herself she was indignant although she tried to quiet her aunt, who was ready to shake the dust of Mt. Boab from her feet at once.
Next morning, however, when it was discovered that Miss Crabb was missing and that after all something tragic probably had happened, everybody felt relieved.
Mr. Wesley Tollivermight well have served the turn of romancer or realist, as he stood in the shadow of a cedar-clump with the mysterious stillness of midnight all around him. He was a very real and substantial looking personage, and yet his gun, his pistols, his fantastic mountain garb and the wild setting in which he was framed gave him the appearance of a strong sketch meant to illustrate a story by Craddock. Above him towered the cliff at Eagle’s Nest and near by was the mountain “Pocket” in which nestled the little distillery whose lurking-place had long been the elusive dream of utopian revenue officers. In a space of brilliant moonlight, Tolliver’s dog, a gaunt, brindle cur, sat in statuesque worthlessness, remembering no doubt the hares he never had caught and the meatless bones he had vainly buried during a long ignoble life.
The hotel and its inmates had rendered the distillery and its furtive operatives very uneasy of late, and now as Tolliver in his due turn stood guard by night he considered the probability of having to look for some better situation for his obscure manufactory with a species of sadness which it would be impossible to describe. He thought with deep bitterness of all the annoyance he had suffered at the hands of meddling government agents and from the outside world in general and he tried to understand how any person could pretend to see justice insuch persecution. What had he done to merit being hunted like a wild beast? Nothing but buy his neighbor’s apples at the fair price of twenty cents a bushel and distil them into apple brandy! Could this possibly be any injury to any government official, or to anybody else? He paid for his still, he paid for the apples, he paid fair wages to the men who worked for him, what more could be justly demanded of him?
It was while he was wholly absorbed in trying to solve this knotty problem that far above a strange clink and clatter began, which sounded to him as if it were falling from among the stars. Nothing within his knowledge or experience suggested an explanation of such a phenomenon. He felt a thrill of superstitious terror creep through his iron nerves as the aerial racket increased and seemed to whisk itself from place to place with lightning celerity. An eccentric echo due to the angles and projections of the cliff added weird effect to the sounds.
The dog uttered a low plaintive whine and crept close to his master, and even wedged himself with tremulous desperation between the knees of that wondering and startled sentinel.
The clinking and clanging soon became loud and continuous, falling in a cataract down the escarpment, accompanied now and again by small fragments of stone and soil.
At last Tolliver got control of himself sufficiently, and looked out from his shadowy stationand up towards the dizzy crown of Eagle’s Nest.
Just at that moment there was a crash and a scream. He saw a wide-winged, ghostly object come over the edge and swoop down. Another scream, another and another, a tearing sound, a crushing of cedar boughs, a shower of small stones and lumps of soil.
Tolliver, frightened as he never before had been, turned and fled, followed by his ecstatic dog.
A voice, keen, clear, high, beseeching pursued him and reached his ears.
“Help! help! Oh, help!”
Surely this was the “Harnt that walks Mt. Boab!” This syren of the mountains had lured many a hunter to his doom.
“Oh, me! Oh, my! Oh, mercy on me! Help! help!”
Tolliver ran all the faster, as the voice seemed to follow him, turn as he would. He bruised his shins on angular rocks, he ran against trees, he fell over logs, and at last found himself hopelessly entangled in a net of wild grape-vines, with his enthusiastic dog still faithfully wriggling between his knees.
The plaintive voice of the syren, now greatly modified by distance, assailed his ears with piteous persistence, as he vainly struggled to free himself. The spot was dark as Erebus, being in the bottom of a ravine, and the more he exerted himself the worse off he became.
It was his turn to call for help, but if any ofhis friends heard they did not heed his supplications, thinking them but baleful echoes of the Harnt’s deceitful voice.
It was at the gray of dawn when at last Tolliver got clear of the vines and made his way out of the ravine. By this time he had entirely overcome his fright, and with that stubbornness characteristic of all mountain men, he betook himself back to the exact spot whence he had so precipitately retreated. His dog, forlornly nonchalant, trotted behind him to the place and resumed the seat from which the Harnt had driven him a few hours ago. In this attitude, the animal drooped his nose and indifferently sniffed a curious object lying near.
“What’s thet ther’ thing, Mose?” inquired Tolliver, addressing the dog.
“Well I’ll ber dorg-goned!” he added, as he picked up a woman’s bonnet. “If this here don’t beat the worl’ an’ all camp meetin’! Hit air—well, I’ll ber dorged—hit air—I’m er ghost if hit aint Miss Sara’ Anna Crabb’s bonnet, by Ned!”
He held it up by one silk string and gazed at it with a ludicrously puzzled stare. The dog whined and wagged his tail in humble sympathy with his master’s bewilderment.
“Hit’s kinder interestin’, haint it, Mose?” Tolliver went on dryly. “We’ll hev ter look inter this here thing, won’t we, Mose?”
As for Mose, he was looking into it with all his eyes. Indeed he was beginning to showextreme interest, and his tail was pounding the ground with great rapidity.
Suddenly a thought leaped into Tolliver’s brain and with a start he glanced up the escarpment, his mouth open and his brown cheeks betraying strong emotion. Mose followed his master’s movements with kindling eyes, and whined dolefully, his wolfish nose lifted almost vertically.
“Is that you, Mr. Tolliver?” fell a voice out of a cedar clump a little way up the side of the cliff.
“Hit air me,” he responded, as he saw Miss Crabb perched among the thick branches. She had her little red note-book open and was writing vigorously. Her yellow hair was disheveled so that it appeared to surround her face with a flickering light which to Tolliver’s mind gave it a most beautiful and altogether lovely expression.
“Well, I’ll ber—” he checked himself and stood in picturesque suspense.
“Now, Mr. Tolliver, won’t you please help me down from here?” she demanded, closing her note-book and placing her pencil behind her ear. “I’m awfully cramped, sitting in this position so long.”
The chivalrous mountaineer did not wait to be appealed to a second time, but laying down his gun to which he had clung throughout the night, he clambered up the steep face of the rock, from projection to projection, until he reached the tree in which Miss Crabb sat.Meantime she watched him with admiring eyes and just as he was about to take her in his arms and descend with her she exclaimed:
“Wait a moment, I might lose the thought, I’ll just jot it down.”
She took her note-book and pencil again and hurriedly made the following entry:Sinewy, virile, lithe, hirsute, fearless, plucky, bronzed, vigorous, lank, Greek-eyed, Roman-nosed, prompt, large-eared, typical American. Good hero for dramatic, short, winning dialect story. The magazines never refuse dialect stories.
“Now, if you please, Mr. Tolliver, I will go with you.”
It was an Herculean labor, but Tolliver was a true hero. With one arm wound around her, after the fashion of the serpent in the group of the Laocoön, and with her long yellow hair streaming in crinkled jets over his shoulder, he slowly made his way down to the ground.
Meantime Mose, the dog, with true canine sympathy and helpfulness, had torn the bonnet into pathetic shreds, and was now lying half asleep under a tree with a bit of ribbon in his teeth.
“Well, I’ll jest ber—beg parding Miss Crabb, but thet ther dog hev et up yer head-gear,” said Tolliver as he viewed with dilating eyes the scattered fragments.
She comprehended her calamity with one swift glance, but she had caught a new dialect phrase at the same time.
“Head-gear, you call it, I believe?” she inquired, again producing book and pencil.
“Beg parding all over, Miss Crabb, I meant bonnet,” he hurried to say.
“Oh, it’s all right, I assure you,” she replied, writing rapidly, “it’s a delightfully fresh and artistic bit of special coloring.”
Miss Crabb’s clothes were badly torn and she looked as if she had spent the night wretchedly, but with the exception of a few slight scratches and bruises she was unhurt.
“Well jes’ look a there, will ye!” exclaimed Tolliver as he spied Mose. There was more of admiration than anger in his voice. “Ef thet ther ’fernal dog haint got yer chin-ribbon in his ole mouth, I’m er rooster!”
“Chin-ribbon,” repeated Miss Crabb, making a note, “I’m er rooster,” and she smiled with intense satisfaction. “You don’t know, Mr. Tolliver, how much I am indebted to you.”
“Not a tall, Miss Crabb, not a tall. Don’t mention of it,” he humbly said, “hit taint wo’th talkin’ erbout.”
The morning was in full blow now and the cat-birds were singing sweetly down the ravine. Overhead a patch of blue sky gleamed and burned with the true empyrean glow. Far away, down in the valley by the little river, a breakfast horn was blown with many a mellow flourish and a cool gentle breeze with dew on its wings fanned Miss Crabb’s sallow cheeks and rustled Tolliver’s tawny beard. At the sound of the horn Mose sprang to his feet andloped away with the bit of ribbon fluttering from his mouth.
Itwas late in the forenoon before it was discovered at Hotel Helicon that Miss Crabb was missing, and even then there arose so many doubts about the tragic side of the event that before any organized search for her had been begun, she returned, appearing upon the scene mounted behind Wesley Tolliver on a small, thin, wiry mountain mule.
Crane and Peck each drew a deep, swift sigh of relief upon seeing her, for the sense of guilt in their breasts had been horrible. They had by tacit conspiracy prevented any examination of Eagle’s Nest, for they dreaded what might be disclosed. Of course they did not mean to hide the awful fate of the poor girl, nor would they willingly have shifted the weight of their dreadful responsibility, but it was all so much like a vivid dream, so utterly strange and theatrical as it arose in their memories, that they could not fully believe in it.
Miss Crabb looked quite ludicrous perched behind the tall mountaineer on such a dwarfish mule. Especially comical was the effect of the sun-bonnet she wore. She had accepted this article of apparel from Tolliver’s mother, and it appeared to clutch her head in its stiff folds and to elongate her face by sheer compression.
Everybody laughed involuntarily, as muchfor joy at her safe return as in response to the demand of her melodramatic appearance.
“I’ve brung back yer runerway,” said Tolliver cheerily, as he helped the young woman to dismount. “She clim down the mounting by one pertic’ler trail an’ I jes’ fotch her up by t’other.”
Miss Crabb spoke not a word, but ran into the hotel and up to her room without glancing to the right or to the left. In her great haste the stiff old sun-bonnet fell from her head and tumbled upon the ground.
“Wush ye’d jes’ be erbligin’ enough ter han’ thet there head-gear up ter me, Mister,” said Tolliver addressing Crane, who was standing near. “My mammy’d raise er rumpage ef I’d go back ’thout thet ther bonnet.”
With evident reluctance and disgust Crane gingerly took up the fallen article and gave it to Tolliver, who thanked him so politely that all the onlooking company felt a glow of admiration for the uncouth and yet rather handsome cavalier.
“Thet gal,” he observed, glancing in the direction that Miss Crabb had gone, “she hev the winnin’est ways of any gal I ever seed in my life. Ye orter seen ’er up inter thet there bush a writin’ in ’er book! She’d jes’ tumbled kerwhummox down the clift an’ hed lodged ther’ in them cedars; but as she wer’ a writin’ when she started ter fall w’y she struck a writin’ an’ jes’ kep’ on at it same’s if nothin’ had happened. She’s game, thet ole gal air, I tellye! She don’t propose for any little thing like fallin’ off’n a clift, ter interfere with w’at she’s a doin’ at thet time, le’ me say ter ye. Lord but she wer’ hongry, though, settin’ up ther a writin’ all night, an’ it’d a done ye good to a seen ’er eat thet chicken and them cake-biscuits my mammy cooked for breakfast. She air a mos’ alarmin’ fine gal, for a fac’.”
At this point Dufour came out of the hotel, and when Tolliver saw him there was an instantaneous change in the expression of the mountaineer’s face.
“Well I’ll ber dorged!” he exclaimed with a smile of delight, “ef ther’ haint the same leetle John the Baptis’ what bapsonsed me down yer inter the branch! Give us yer baby-spanker, ole feller! How air ye!”
Dufour cordially shook hands with him, laughing in a jolly way.
“Fust an’ only man at ever ducked me, I’m here ter say ter ye,” Tolliver went on, in a cheery, half-bantering tone, and sitting sidewise on the mule. “Ye mus’ hev’ a sight o’ muscle onto them duck legs and bantam arms o’ your’n.”
He had the last word still in his mouth when the little beast suddenly put down its head and flung high its hind feet.
“Woirp!” they heard him cry, as he whirled over in the air and fell sprawling on the ground.
Dufour leaped forward to see if the man washurt, but Tolliver was upright in an instant and grinning sheepishly.
“Thet’s right, Bonus,” he said to the mule which stood quite still in its place, “thet’s right ole fel, try ter ac’ smart in comp’ny. Yer a beauty now, ain’t ye?”
He replaced his hat, which had fallen from his head, patted the mule caressingly on the neck, then lightly vaulting to the old saddle-tree, he waved his hand to the company and turning dashed at a gallop down the mountain road, his spurs jingling merrily as he went.
“What a delicious character!”
“What precious dialect!”
“How typically American!”
“A veritable hero!”
Everybody at Hotel Helicon appeared to have been captivated by this droll fellow.
“How like Tolstoi’s lovely Russians he is!” observed Miss Fidelia Arkwright, of Boston, a near-sighted maiden who did translations and who doted on virile literature.
“When I was in Russia, I visited Tolstoi at his shoe-shop—” began Crane, but nobody appeared to hear him, so busy were all in making notes for a dialect story.
“Tolstoi is the greatest fraud of the nineteenth century,” said Peck. “That shoe-making pretence of his is about on a par with his genius in genuineness and sincerity. His novels are great chunks of raw filth, rank, garlic garnished and hideous. We touch them only because theFrench critics have called them savory. If theRevue de Deux Mondesshould praise a Turkish novel we could not wait to read it before we joined in. Tolstoi is remarkable for two things: his coarseness and his vulgar disregard of decency and truth. His life and his writings are alike crammed with absurdities and contradictory puerilities which would be laughable but for their evil tendencies.”
“But, my dear sir, how then do you account for the many editions of Tolstoi’s books?” inquired the historian, R. Hobbs Lucas.
“Just as I account for the editions of Cowper and Montgomery and Wordsworth and even Shakespeare,” responded Peck. “You put a ten per cent. author’s royalty on all those dear classics and see how soon the publishers will quit uttering them! If Tolstoi’s Russian raw meat stories were put upon the market in a fair competition with American novels the latter would beat them all hollow in selling.”
“Oh, we ought to have international copyright,” plaintively exclaimed a dozen voices, and so the conversation ended.
Strangely enough, each one of the company in growing silent did so in order to weigh certain suggestions arising out of Peck’s assertions. It was as if a score of semi-annual statements of copyright accounts were fluttering in the breeze, and it was as if a score of wistful voices had whispered:
“How in the world do publishers grow rich when the books they publish never sell?”
Perhaps Gaspard Dufour should be mentioned as appearing to have little sympathy with Peck’s theory or with the inward mutterings it had engendered in the case of the rest of the company.
If there was any change in Dufour’s face it was expressed in a smile of intense self-satisfaction.
Itwas, of course, not long that the newspapers of our wide-awake country were kept from giving their readers very picturesque glimpses of what was going on among the dwellers on Mt. Boab. The humorists of the press, those charming fellows whose work is so enjoyable when performed upon one’s neighbor and so excruciating when turned against oneself, saw the vulnerable points of the situation and let go a broadside of ridicule that reverberated from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It became a matter of daily amusement among the inmates of Hotel Helicon to come together in little groups and discuss these humorous missiles fired upon them from California, Texas, Arkansas and Wisconsin, from Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Oil-City, Detroit and—, but from everywhere, indeed.
When it came to Miss Crabb’s adventure, every humorist excelled himself in descriptive smartness and in cunning turns of ironical phrasing. The head-line experts did telling work in the same connection. All this wasperfectly understood and enjoyed at home, but foreigners, especially the English, stubbornly insisted upon viewing it as the high-water mark of American refinement and culture.
When that genial periodical, the SmartsburghBulldozer, announced with due gravity that Miss Crabb, a Western journalist, had leaped from the top of Mt. Boab to the valley below, and had been caught in the arms of a stalwart moonshiner, where she safely reposed, etc., the LondonTimescopied the paragraph and made it a text for a heavy editorial upon the barbaric influences of Republican institutions, to which the American Minister felt bound to advert in a characteristic after-dinner speech at a London club. So humorous, however, were his remarks that he was understood to be vigorously in earnest, and the result was perfect confirmation of the old world’s opinion as to the rudimentary character of our national culture.
Meantime Hotel Helicon continued to be the scene of varied if not startling incidents. In their search for local color and picturesque material, the litterateurs invaded every nook and corner of the region upon and round about Mt. Boab, sketching, making notes, recording suggestions, studying dialect, and filling their minds with the uncouth peculiarities of the mountain folk.
“It has come to this,” grumbled Peck, “that American literature, its fiction I mean, is founded on dialect drivel and vulgar yawp. Look at our magazines; four-fifths of theirshort stories are full of negro talk, or cracker lingo, or mountain jibberish, or New England farm yawp, or Hoosier dialect. It is horribly humiliating. It actually makes foreigners think that we are a nation of green-horns. Why, a day or two ago I had occasion to consult the article on American literature in the Encyclopædia Britannica and therein I was told in one breath how great a writer and how truly American Mr. Lowell is, and in the next breath I was informed that a poem beginning with the verse, ‘Under the yaller pines I house’ is one of his master-pieces! Do you see? Do you catch the drift of the Englishman’s argument? To be truly great,as an American, one must be surpassingly vulgar, even in poetry!”
This off-hand shower of critical observation had as little effect upon the minds of Peck’s hearers as a summer rain has on the backs of a flock of ducks. They even grew more vehement in their pursuit of local color.
“When I was spending a month at Rockledge castle with Lord Knownaught,” said Crane, “his lordship frequently suggested that I should make a poem on the life of Jesse James.”
“Well, why didn’t you do it?” inquired Miss Crabb with a ring of impatience in her voice, “if you had you might have made a hit. You might have attracted some attention.”
Dufour laughed heartily, as if he had caught some occult humor from the young woman’s words.
“I did write it,” said Crane retrospectively, “and sent it to George Dunkirk & Co.”
“Well?” sighed Miss Crabb with intense interest.
“Well,” replied Crane, “they rejected the MS. without reading it.”
Again Dufour laughed, as if at a good joke.
“George Dunkirk & Co.!” cried Guilford Ferris, the romancer, “George Dunkirk & Co.! They are thieves. They have been making false reports on copyright to me for five years or more!”
Dufour chuckled as if his jaws would fall off, and finally with a red face and gleaming humorous eyes got up from the chair he was filling on the veranda, and went up to his room.
The rest of the company looked at one another inquiringly.
“Who is he, anyhow?” demanded Peck.
“That’s just my query,” said Ferris.
“Nobody in the house knows anything definite about him,” remarked R. Hobbs Lucas. “And yet he evidently is a distinguished person, and his name haunts me.”
“So it does me,” said Miss Moyne.
“I tell you he’s a newspaper reporter. His cheek proves that,” remarked Peck.
Miss Crabb made a note, her own cheek flaming. “I presume you call that humor,” she observed, “it’s about like New York’s best efforts. In the West reporters are respectable people.”
“I beg pardon,” Peck said hastily, “I did not mean to insinuate that anybody is not respectable. Everybody is eminently respectable if I speak of them. I never trouble myself with the other kind.”
“Well, I don’t believe that Mr. Dufour is a reporter at all,” replied Miss Crabb, with emphasis, “for he’s not inquisitive, he don’t make notes, and he don’t appear to be writing any.”
“In my opinion he’s a realist—a genuine analytical, motive-dissecting, commonplace-recording, international novelist in disguise,” said Ferris.
“Oh!”
“Ah!”
“Dear me!”
“But who?”
“It may be Arthur Selby himself, incog. Who knows?”
“Humph!” growled Crane with a lofty scrowl, “I should think I ought to know Selby. I drank wine with him at—”
His remark was cut short by the arrival of the mail and the general scramble that followed.
Upon this occasion the number of newspapers that fell to the hand of each guest was much greater than usual, and it was soon discovered that Miss Crabb’s latest letter had been forwarded to a “syndicate” and was appearing simultaneously in ninety odd different journals.
No piece of composition ever was more stunningly realistic or more impartially, nay, abjectly truthful than was that letter. It gavea minute account of the quarrel between Peck and Crane over their attentions to Miss Moyne, the fight, Miss Crabb’s fall, the subsequent adventures and all the hotel gossip of every sort. It was personal to the last degree, but it was not in the slightest libelous. No person could say that any untruth had been told, or even that any tinge of false-coloring had been laid upon the facts as recorded; and yet how merciless!
Of course Miss Crabb’s name did not appear with the article, save as one of its subjects, and she saw at once that she had better guard her secret.
That was a breeze which rustled through Hotel Helicon. Everybody was supremely indignant; but there was no clue to the traitor who had thus betrayed everybody’s secrets. It would be absurd to suppose that Miss Crabb was not suspected at once, on account of her constant and superfluous show of note-making, still there were others who might be guilty. Crane and Peck were indignant, the former especially ready to resent to the death any allusion to the details of the duel. Miss Moyne with the quick insight of a clever and gifted young woman, comprehended the situation in its general terms and was vexed as much as amused. The whole thing had to her mind the appearance of a melodramatic, broadly sensational sketch, in which she had played the part of the innocent, unconscious, but all-powerful heroine. Indeed the newspaper account placedher in this unpleasant attitude before a million readers.
“A lucky affair for you, Miss Moyne,” said Dufour to her, a few days later, “you cannot over-reckon the boom it will give to your latest book. You may expect a pretty round sum with your next copyright statement.”
He spoke with the voice and air of one who knew how to read the signs of the day.
“But the ridiculous idea of having all this stuff about me going the rounds of the newspapers!” she responded, her beautiful patrician face showing just a hint of color.
“Don’t care for it a moment,” said Dufour, “it will not hurt you.”
“The thought of having that hideous picture in all the patent inside pages of the cheap press, with my name under it,en toutes lettres, and—why it is horrible!” she went on, with trembling lips.
Dufour smiled upon her, as if indulgently, a curious, tender gleam in his eyes.
“Wait,” he said, “and don’t allow it to trouble you. The world discriminates pretty well, after all. It will not hurt you. It’s a mighty boom for you.”
She looked at him with a sudden flash in her cheeks and eyes, and exclaimed almost vehemently: “I will not permit it! They shall not do it. I cannot bear to be treated as if—as if I were a theatrical person—a variety actress!”
“My dear Miss Moyne,” he hurriedly said, his own face showing a tinge of embarrassment,“you are taking a wrong point of view, indeed you are. Wait till you see the out-come.” His tone was humble and apologetic as he continued—“My opinion is that this very thing will quadruple the sales of your book.”
“I don’t want them quadrupled,” she cried, “just look at that front hair and that nose!” She held up a newspaper for him to inspect a picture of herself, a miserable, distorted thing. “It is absolutely disgraceful. My dresses never fit like that, and who ever saw me with a man’s collar on!”
Tears were in her beautiful eyes.
Dufour consoled her as best he could, though he could not resist the temptation to suggest that even a caricature of her face was sure to have in it the fascination of genuine loveliness, a suggestion which was phrased with consummate art and received with an appearance of innocence that was beyond all art.
Summeron Mt. Boab was much like summer on any other mountain, and life at Hotel Helicon was very like life at any other mountain hotel, save that a certain specialization due to the influence of literature and art was apparent in the present instance, giving to the house, the landscape and the intercourse of the guests a peculiar tinge, so to say, of self-consciousness and artificiality. Not that these authors, thus drawn together by the grace of a man grown suddenly rich, were very different from men andwomen of other lines in life, the real peculiarity sprang out of the obligation by which every one felt bound to make the most, in a professional way, of the situation and the environment. Perhaps there was not a soul under the broad roof of Hotel Helicon, servants excepted, that did not secrete in its substance the material for a novel, a poem, or an essay which was to brim with the local life and flash with the local color of the region of Mt. Boab. Yes, there appeared to be one exception. Dufour constantly expressed a contempt for the mountaineers and their country.
“To be sure,” he conceded, “to be sure there is a demand for dialect stories, and I suppose that they must be written; but for my part I cannot see why we Americans must stultify ourselves in the eyes of all the world by flooding our magazines, newspapers and books with yawp instead of with a truly characteristic American literature of a high order. There is some excuse for a quasi-negro literature, and even the Creoles might have a niche set apart for them, but dialect, on the whole, is growing to be a literary bore.”
“But don’t you think,” said Miss Crabb, drawing her chin under, and projecting her upper teeth to such a degree that anything like realistic description would appear brutal, “don’t you think, Mr. Dufour, that Mr. Tolliver would make a great character in a mountain romance?”
“No. There is nothing great in a clown, assuch,” he promptly answered. “If Tolliver is great he would be great without his jargon.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “but the picturesqueness, the color, the contrast, you know, would be gone. Now Craddock—”
“Craddock is excellent, so long as there is but one Craddock, but when there are some dozens of him it is different,” said Dufour, “and it is the process of multiplication that I object to. There’s Cable, who is no longer a genius of one species. The writers of Creole stories are swarming by the score, and, poor old Uncle Remus! everybody writes negro dialect now. Literary claim-jumpers are utterly conscienceless. The book market will soon be utterly ruined.”
Miss Crabb puffed out her lean sallow cheeks and sighed heavily.
“I had hoped,” she said, “to get my novel on the market before this, but I have not yet found a publisher to suit me.”
She winced inwardly at this way of expressing the fact that every publisher, high and low, far and near, had declined her MS. out of hand; but she could not say the awful truth in its simpliest terms, while speaking to one so prosperous as Dufour. She felt that she must at all hazards preserve a reasonable show of literary independence. Crane came to her aid.
“One publisher is just as good as another,” he said almost savagely. “They are all thieves. They report every book a failure, save those they own outright, and yet they all get rich. I shall publish for myself my next volume.”
Dufour smiled grimly and turned away. It was rather monotonous, this iteration and reiteration of so grave a charge against the moral character of publishers, and this threat of Crane’s to become his own publisher was a bit of unconscious and therefore irresistible humor.
“It’s too pathetic to be laughed at,” Dufour thought, as he strolled along to where Miss Moyne sat under a tree, “but that Kentuckian actually thinks himself a poet!”
With all his good nature and kind heartedness, Dufour could be prejudiced, and he drew the line at what he called the “prevailing tendency toward boastful prevarication among Kentucky gentlemen.”
As he walked away he heard Crane saying:
“George Dunkirk & Co. have stolen at least twenty thousand dollars in royalties from me during the past three years.”
It was the voice of Ferris that made interrogative response:
“Is Dunkirk your publisher?”
“Yes, or rather my robber.”
“Glad of it, misery loves company.”
Dufour half turned about and cast a quick glance at the speakers. He did not say anything, however, but resumed his progress toward Miss Moyne, who had just been joined by Mrs. Nancy Jones Black, a stoutish and oldish woman very famous on account of having assumed much and done little. Mrs. Nancy Jones Black was from Boston. She was president of the Woman’s Antiquarian Club, of the Ladies’ GreekAssociation, of The Sappho Patriotic Club, of the Newport Fashionable Near-sighted Club for the study of Esoteric Transcendentalism, and it may not be catalogued how many more societies and clubs. She was a great poet who had never written any great poem, a great essayist whom publishers and editors avoided, whom critics regarded as below mediocrity, but of whom everybody stood in breathless awe, and she was an authority in many literary and philosophical fields of which she really knew absolutely nothing. She was a reformer and a person of influence who had made a large number of her kinsfolk famous as poets and novelists without any apparent relevancy between the fame and the literary work done. If your name were Jones and you could trace out your relationship to Mrs. Nancy Jones Black and could get Mrs. Nancy Jones Black interested in your behalf, you could write four novels a year with great profit ever afterward.
As Dufour approached he heard Miss Moyne say:
“I publish my poor little works with George Dunkirk & Co. and the firm has been very kind to me. I feel great encouragement, but I don’t see how I can bear this horrible newspaper familiarity and vulgarity.”
“My dear child,” said Mrs. Nancy Jones Black, placing her plump, motherly hand on the young woman’s arm, “you must not appear to notice it. Do as did my daughter Lois when they assailed her first little novel with sugar-plumpraise. Why, when it began to leak out that Lois was the author ofA Sea-Side Symphonythe poor girl was almost smothered with praise. Of course I had to take the matter in hand and under my advice Lois went abroad for six months. When she returned she found herself famous.”
“Talking shop?” inquired Dufour, accepting the offer of a place on the bench beside Mrs. Black.
“Yes,” said she, with a comprehensive wave of her hand, “I am taking Miss Moyne under my wing, so to say, and am offering her the comfort of my experience. She is a genius whom it doesn’t spoil to praise. She’s going to be the next sensation in the East.”
“I suggested as much to her,” said Dufour. “She is already on a strong wave, but she must try and avoid being refractory, you know.” He said this in a straightforward, business way, but his voice was touched with a certain sort of admirable tenderness.
Miss Moyne was looking out over the deep, hazy valley, her cheeks still warm with the thought of that newspaper portrait with its shabby clothes and towsled bangs. What was fame, bought at such a price! She bridled a little, but did not turn her head as she said.
“I am not refractory, I am indignant, and I have a right to be. They cannot justify the liberty they have taken, besides I will not accept notoriety—I—”
“There, now, dear, that is what Lois said, andMilton John Jones, my nephew, was at first bound that he wouldn’t let Tom, my brother, advertise him; but he soon saw his way clear, I assure you, and now he publishes four serials at once. Be prudent, dear, be prudent.”
“But the idea of picturing me with great barbaric rings in my ears and with a corkscrew curl on each side and—”
Dufour interrupted her with a laugh almost hearty enough to be called a guffaw, and Mrs. Black smiled indulgently as if at a clever child which must be led, not driven.
“Being conscious that you really are stylish and beautiful, you needn’t care for the picture,” said Dufour, in a tone of sturdy sincerity.
“There is nothing so effective as a foil,” added Mrs. Black.
Miss Moyne arose and with her pretty chin slightly elevated walked away.
“How beautiful she is!” exclaimed Dufour, gazing after her, “and I am delighted to know that you are taking an interest in her.”
Mrs. Black smiled complacently, and with a bland sidewise glance at him, remarked:
“She grows upon one.”
“Yes,” said he, with self-satisfied obtuseness, “yes, she is magnetic, she is a genuine genius.”
“Precisely, she stirs one’s heart strangely,” replied Mrs. Black.
“Yes, I have noted that; it’s very remarkable.”
“You should speak of it to her at the first opportunity.”
Dufour started a little, flushed and finally laughed as one does who discovers a bit of clever and harmless treachery.
“If I only dared,” he presently said, with something very like fervor in his tone. “If I only dared.”
Mrs. Black looked at him a moment, as if measuring in her mind his degree of worthiness, then with a wave of her hand she said:
“Never do you dare to dare. Mr. Crane stands right in your path.”
Dufour leaped to his feet with the nimbleness and dangerous celerity of a tiger.
“Crane!” he exclaimed with a world of contempt in his voice, “If he—” but he stopped short and laughed at himself.
Mrs. Black looked at him with a patronizing expression in her eyes.
“Leave it to me,” she said, in her most insinuating tone.
Cranetried not to show the bitterness he felt as he saw his hope of winning the favor of Miss Moyne fading rapidly out, but now and again a cloud of irresistible melancholy fell upon him.
At such times it was his habit to lean upon the new fence that circumscribed Hotel Helicon and dreamily smoke a cigar. He felt a blind desire to assassinate somebody, if he could only know who. Of course not Peck, for Peck, too,was disconsolate, but somebody, anybody who would claim the place of a successful rival.
One morning while he stood thus regaling himself with his tobacco and his misery, Tolliver rode up, on a handsome horse this time, and, lifting his broad hat, bowed picturesquely and said:
“Good mornin,’ Kyernel, how’re ye this mornin’?”
“Good morning,” growled Crane.
Tolliver looked off over the valley and up at the sky which was flecked with tags of fleece-cloud.
“Hit look like hit mought rain in er day er two,” he remarked.
“Yes, I don’t know, quite likely,” said Crane, gazing evasively in another direction.
“Ever’body’s well, I s’pose, up ther’ at the tavern?” inquired Tolliver.
“I believe so,” was the cold answer.
Tolliver leaned over the pommel of his saddle-tree and combed his horse’s mane with his sinewy fingers. Meantime the expression in his face was one of exceeding embarrassment blent with cunning.
“Kyernel, c’u’d ye do a feller a leetle yerrent what’s of importance?” he asked with peculiar faltering.
“Do what?” inquired Crane lifting his eye-brows and turning the cigar in his mouth.
“Jest a leetle frien’ly job o’ kindness,” said Tolliver, “jest ter please ask thet young leddy—thet Miss Crabb ’at I fotch up yer on er muletother day, ye know; well, jest ax her for me ef I moughtn’t come in an’ see ’er on pertic’lar an’ pressin’ business, ef ye please, sir.”
By this time the mountaineer’s embarrassment had become painfully apparent. Any good judge of human nature could have seen at once that he was almost overcome with the burden and worry of the matter in hand. His cheeks were pale and his eyes appeared to be fading into utter vacancy of expression. Crane told him that there was no need to be particularly formal, that if he would go in and ask for Miss Crabb she would see him in the parlor.
“But, Kyernel, hit’s er private, sort er confidential confab ’at I must hev wi’ ’er, an’——”
“Oh, well, that’s all right, you’ll not be interrupted in the parlor.”
“Air ye pine blank shore of it, Kyernel?”
“Certainly.”
“Dead shore?”
“Quite, I assure you.”
Crane had become interested in Tolliver’s affair, whatever it might be. He could not keep from sharing the man’s evident intensity of mood, and all the time he was wondering what the matter could be. Certainly no common-place subject could so affect a man of iron like Tolliver. The poet’s lively imagination was all aglow over the mystery, but it could not formulate any reasonable theory of explanation.
Miss Crabb appeared in the parlor promptly and met Tolliver with a cordiality that, insteadof reassuring him, threw him into another fit of embarrassment from which he at first made no effort to recover. His wide-brimmed hat, as he twirled it on his knees, quivered convulsively in accord with the ague of excitement with which his whole frame was shaking. He made certain soundless movements with his lips, as if muttering to himself.
Miss Crabb at first did not notice his confusion, and went on talking rapidly, reiterating thanks for the kindness he had shown her in her recent mishap, and managing to put into her voice some tones that to him sounded very tender and sweet.
“You don’t know—you can’t imagine, Mr. Tolliver, what I suffered during that awful night,” she said, turning her head to one side and drawing her chin under until it almost disappeared in the lace at her throat. “It was horrible.”
Tolliver looked at her helplessly, his mouth open, his eyes dull and sunken.
“How did you happen to discover me up there, anyway, Mr. Tolliver?” she demanded, leaning toward him and laughing a little.
“The dog he treed ye, an’ then I seed ye settin’ up ther’ er writin’ away,” he managed to say, a wave of relief passing over his face at the sound of his own voice.
“It was perfectly ridiculous, perfectly preposterous,” she exclaimed, “but I’m mighty thankful that I was not hurt.”
“Yes, well ye mought be, Miss Crabb,” hestammered out. “Wonder ye wasn’t scrunched inter pieces an’ scattered all eround ther’.”
She slipped out her book, took a pencil from over her ear and made a note.
Tolliver eyed her dolefully. “How do you spell scrunched, Mr. Tolliver, in your dialect?” she paused to inquire.
His jaw fell a little lower for a moment, then he made an effort:
“S—q—r—u—” he paused and shook his head, “S—q—k—no thet’s not hit—s—k—q—r—dorg ef I ken spell thet word—begging yer parding, hit air ’tirely too hard for me.” He settled so low in his chair that his knees appeared almost as high as his head.
“All right,” she cheerily exclaimed, “I can get it phonetically. It’s a new word. I don’t think either Craddock or Johnson uses it, it’s valuable.”
There was a silence during which Miss Crabb thoughtfully drummed on her projecting front teeth with the end of her pencil.
Tolliver nerved himself and said:
“Miss Crabb I—I, well, ye know, I—that is, begging yer parding, but I hev something’ I want er say ter ye, ef ye please.” He glanced furtively around, as if suspecting that some person lay secreted among the curtains of a bay window hard by. And indeed, Dufour was there, lightly indulging in a morning nap, while the mountain breeze flowed over him. He was in a deep bamboo chair behind those very curtains.
“Oh, certainly, certainly, Mr. Tolliver, go on, I shall be delighted, charmed indeed, to hear what you have to say,” Miss Crabb responded, turning a fresh leaf of her note-book and putting on a hopeful look.
“I hope ye’ll stick ter thet after I’ve done said it ter ye,” he proceeded to say, “but dorg on me ef I know how ter begin sayin’ it.”
“Oh, just go right on, it’s all right; I assure you, Mr. Tolliver, I am very anxious to hear.”
“Mebbe ye air, I don’t dispute yer word, but I feel mighty onery all the same.”
“Onery is a Western word,” mused Miss Crabb, making a note.
“Proceed, Mr. Tolliver,” she continued after a pause, “proceed, I am listening with great interest.”
“What I’m ergwine ter state ter ye mought mek ye mad, but hit can’t be holp, I jest hev ter say it—I air jest erbleeged ter say it.”
His voice was husky and he was assuming a tragic air. Miss Crabb felt a strange thrill creep throughout her frame as a sudden suspicion seemed to leap back and forth between her heart and her brain.
“No, I assure you that I could not be angry with you, Mr. Tolliver, under any circumstances,” she murmured, “you have been so very kind to me.”
“Hit air awful confusin’ an’ hit mek a feller feel smaller ’n a mouse ter speak it right out, but then hit air no foolishness, hit air pine blank business.”
“Of course,” said Miss Crabb pensively, “of course you feel some embarrassment.”
He hitched himself up in his chair and crossed his legs.
“Ef ye don’t like w’at I say, w’y I won’t blame ye a bit. I feel jest as if I wer a doin’ somethin’ ’at I hadn’t orter do, but my mammy she say I must, an’ that do everlastin’ly settle it.”
“Yes, your mother’s advice is always safe.”
“Safe, I shed say so! Hit’s mighty onsafe fer me not ter foller it, I kin tell ye. She’d thump my old gourd fer me in ermazin’ style ef I didn’t.”
“Thump my old gourd,” repeated Miss Crabb, making a note. “Go on, Mr. Tolliver, please.”
“S’pose I mought as well, seein’ ’at it has ter be said.” He paused, faltered, and then proceeded: “Well, beggin’ yer parding, Miss Crabb, but ever sence ye wer’ down ther’ ter we all’s cabin, hit’s been a worryin’ my mammy and me, an’ we hev’ talked it all over an’ over.”
“Yes,” sighed Miss Crabb.
“Hit’s not the cost of them beads, Miss Crabb, they air not wo’th much, but they was guv ter mammy by her aunt Mandy Ann Bobus, an’ she feel like she jest can’t give ’em up.”
Miss Crabb looked puzzled.
“Ef ye’ll jest erblige me an’ hand them beads over ter me, I’ll never say er wo’d ter nobody ner nothin.”
“Mr. Tolliver, what in the world do youmean?” cried Miss Crabb, rising and standing before him with a face that flamed with sudden anger.
“Ye mought er tuck ’em kinder accidentally, ye know,” he suggested in a conciliatory tone, rising also.