"When Pharaoh rode down to the ragin' Red Sea,Rode down to the ragin' Red Sea,He hollered to Moses, 'Just git on to me,A-ridin' along through the sea.'"An' Moses he answered to hollerin' Pharaoh,The same as you'd answer to me,'You'll have to have bladders tied on to your back,If you ever git out of the sea.'"
"When Pharaoh rode down to the ragin' Red Sea,Rode down to the ragin' Red Sea,He hollered to Moses, 'Just git on to me,A-ridin' along through the sea.'
"An' Moses he answered to hollerin' Pharaoh,The same as you'd answer to me,'You'll have to have bladders tied on to your back,If you ever git out of the sea.'"
Thus I learned that the man animal long ago knocked Young Gratitude on the head, heaved him overboard into a leaky gig, and left him behind to ogle the seagulls. He is a healthy pirate, this man animal, accustomed with great complacency to maroon the trustful stowaway when he comes to nose about the cargo of his brig, or thrusts his pleading in between the cutthroat and his pleasant sins.
As for me, I was desperately glad to be safe out of that pot of muddy water. I was ready like the apostle of old time to build here a tabernacle, or to go down on what Ump called my "marrow-bones." As it was, I dismounted and hugged El Mahdi, covering up in his wet mane a bit of trickling moisture strangely like those tears that kept getting in the way of my being a man.
I had tried to laugh, and it went string-halt. I had tried to take a hand in the passing gibes, and the part limped. I had to do something, and this was my most dignified emotional play. The blue laws of the Hills gave this licence. A fellow might palaver over his horse when he took a jolt in the bulwarks of his emotion. You, my younger brethren of the great towns, when you knock your heads against some corner of the world and go a-bawling to your mother's petticoat, will never know what deeps of consolation are to be gotten out of hugging a horse when one's heart is aching.
I wondered if it were all entirely true, or whether I should knock my elbow against something and wake up. We were on the north bank of the Valley River, with every head of those six hundred steers. Out there they were, strung along the road, shaking their wet coats like a lot of woolly dogs, and the afternoon sun wavering about on their shiny backs. And there was Ump with his thumbs against the fetlocks of the Bay Eagle, and Jud trying to get his copper skin into the half-dried shirt, and the hugged El Mahdi staring away at the brown hills as though he were everlastingly bored.
I climbed up into the saddle to keep from executing a fiddler's jig, and thereby proving that I suffered deeply from the curable disease of youth.
We started the drove across the hills toward Roy's tavern, Jud at his place in front of the steers, walking in the road with the Cardinal's bridle under his arm, and Ump behind, while El Mahdi strayed through the line of cattle to keep them moving. The steers trailed along the road between the rows of rail fence running in zigzag over the country to the north. I sat sidewise in my big saddle dangling my heels.
There were long shadows creeping eastward in the cool hollows when we came to the shop of old Christian the blacksmith. I was moving along in front of the drove, fingering El Mahdi's mane and whistling lustily, and I squared him in the crossroads to turn the plodding cattle down toward Roy's tavern. I noticed that the door of the smith's shop was closed and the smoke creeping in a thin line out of the mud top of the chimney, but I did not stop to inquire if the smith were about his work. I held no resentment against the man. He had doubtless cut the cable, as Ump had said, but his provocation had been great.
The settlement was now made fair, skin for skin, as the devil put it once upon a time. I whistled away and counted the bullocks as they went strolling by me, indicating each fellow with my finger. Presently Ump came at the tail of the drove and pulled up the Bay Eagle under the tall hickories.
"Well," he said, "the old shikepoke must be snoozin'."
"It's pretty late in the day," said I.
"He lost a lot of sleep last night," responded Ump. "When a feller travels with the devil in the night, he can't work with the Lord in the day."
"He hasn't been at it long," said I, pointing to the faint smoke hovering above the chimney; "or the fire would be out."
"Right," said Ump. "An, that's a horse of another colour. I think I shall take a look."
With that he swung down from his saddle, crossed to the shop, and flung open the door. Then he began to whistle softly.
"Hot nest," he said, "but no sign of the shikepoke."
"He may be hiding out until we pass," said I.
"Not he," responded the hunchback.
Then I took an inspiration. "Ump," I cried, "I'll bet the bit out of the bridle that he saw us coming and lit out to carry the word!"
The hunchback struck his fist against the door of the shop. "Quiller," he said, "you ought to have sideboards on your noggin. That's what he's done, sure as the Lord made little apples!"
Then he got on his horse and rode her through the hickories out to the brow of the hill. Presently I heard him call, and went to him with El Mahdi on a trot. He pointed his finger north across the country and, following the pointed finger, I saw the brown coat of a man disappearing behind a distant ridge. It was too far away to see who it was that travelled in that coat, but we knew as well as though the man's face had passed by our stirrups.
"Hoity-toity!" said Ump, "what doin's there'll be when he gits in with the news!"
"The air will be blue," said I.
"Streaked and striped," said he.
"I should like to see Woodford champing the bit," said I.
"I'd give a leg for the sight of it," replied the hunchback, "an' they could pick the leg."
I laughed at the hunchback's offer to the Eternal Powers. Of all the generation of rogues, he was least fitted to barter away his underpinning.
We rode back to the shop and down the hill after the cattle, Ump drumming on the pommel with his fingers and firing a cackle of fantastic monologue. "Quiller," he said, "do you think Miss Cynthia will be glad to see the drove comin' down the road?"
"Happy as a June bug," said I.
"Old Granny Lanham," continued the hunchback, "used to have a song that went like this:
"'God made man, an' man made money;God made bees, an' bees made honey;God made woman, an' went away to rest Him,An' along come the devil, an' showed her how to best Him.'"
"'God made man, an' man made money;God made bees, an' bees made honey;God made woman, an' went away to rest Him,An' along come the devil, an' showed her how to best Him.'"
"Meaning what?" said I.
"Meanin'," responded Ump, "that if you think you know what a woman's goin' to do, you're as badly fooled as if you burned your shirt."
"Ump," I said sharply, "what do you know about women?"
"Nothin' at all," said he, "nothin' at all. But I know about mares. An' when they lay back their ears, it don't always mean that they're goin' to kick you."
It was a hungry, bareheaded youngster that rode up at sundown to Roy's tavern. The yellow mud clinging to my clothes had dried in cakes, and as my hat was on the other side of the Valley River, my head, as described by Ump, was a "middlin' fair brush heap."
Adam Roy gaped in astonishment when I called him to the door to ask about a field for the cattle.
"Law! Quiller," he cried, "where in the name o' fathers have you been a-wallerin'?"
"We went swimming in the Valley," I answered.
"Mercy sakes!" said the tavern-keeper, "you must a mired down. You've got mud enough on you to daub a chimney, an' your head looks like a chaff-pen on a windy mornin'. What did you go swimmin' for?"
"Hobson's choice," said I.
"Was the ferry washed out?" he asked.
"It was out," I said. "How it got out is a heifer of another drove."
"An' did you swim the cattle?" The man leaned out of the door.
I pointed my finger to the drove coming down the road. "There they are," said I. "Do you see any wings on them?"
"Lord love me!" cried the tavern-keeper, "I'd never put cattle in the Valley when it was up, unless I wanted to see their tails a stickin' out o' the drift-wood. Why didn't you wait until they fixed the ferry? What was your hurry?"
"No matter about that hurry," said I. "Just now we have another hurry that is a trifle more urgent. We want a field for the cattle, and corn and clover hay and plenty of bedding for the horses, and something hot for supper. We are all as hungry as Job's turkey."
"One thing at a time, Quiller," said the man, spreading his hands. "Turn the cattle into the north boundary an' come along to the house."
I went back up the road, threw down the bars to the pasture, and counted the cattle as they went strolling in. The Polled-Angus muleys seemed none the worse for their long swim, and they began to crop the brown grass the moment they were out in the field.
Jud and the Cardinal came up after the first hundred, and took a place by El Mahdi.
I think I know now the joy of the miser counting his gold pieces at midnight in his cellar, looking at each yellow eagle lovingly, and passing his finger over the milled rim of each new-minted coin, while the tallow candle melts down on the bench beside him.
I could close my eyes and see a black mass going down in the yellow water, with here and there a bullock drifting exhausted in the eddy, or heaps of bloated bodies piled up on a sandbar of the Valley River. And there, with my eyes wide open, was the drove spreading out along the hillside as it passed in between the two chestnut bar-posts.
I was as happy as a man can be when his Armada sails in with its sunlit canvas; and yet, had that Armada gone to pieces on a coast, I think my tears over its wreckage had been the deeper emotion. Our conception of disaster outrides by far our conception of felicity.
It is a thing of striking significance that old, wise poets have on occasion written of hell so vividly that we hear the fire crackle and see the bodies of the lost sizzling; but not one of them, burning the candle of genius at both ends, has ever been able to line out a heaven that a man would live in if he were given the key to it.
Ump came along after the last of the cattle and burst into a great laugh. "Damme," he said, "you're as purty a pair of muskrats as ever chawed a root. Why don't you put up the bars instead of settin' gawkin' at the cattle! They're all there."
"Suppose they were not all there?" said I.
"Quiller," said he, "I'm not goin' back over any burnt bridges. When the devil throws a man in a sink hole an' the Lord comes along an' pulls him out, that man ought to go on about his business an' not hang around the place until the devil gits back."
Jud got down from his horse and began to lay up the bars. "But," said he, "suppose we hadn't split the bunch?"
"Jud," answered the hunchback, "hell's full of people who spent their lives a-'sposin'."
Jud jammed the top bar into the chestnut post. "Still," he persisted, "where would we a been now?"
"If you must know," said Ump, "we'd a been heels up in the slime of the Valley with the catfish playin' pussy-in-the-corner around the butt of our ears."
We trotted over to the tavern, flung the bridle-reins across the hitching post, and went bursting into the house. Roy was wiping his oak table. "Mother Hubbard," cried the hunchback, "set out your bones. We're as empty as bee gums."
The man stopped with his hands resting on the cloth. "God save us!" he said, "if you eat like you look, it'll take a barbecue bull to fill you. Draw up a chair an' we'll give you what we've got."
"Horses first," said Ump, taking up a split basket.
"Suit yourself," said Roy; "there's nobody holdin' you, an' there's corn in the crib, hay in the mow, an' oats in the entry."
Jud and I followed Ump out of the house, put the horses in the log stable, pulled off the bridles and saddles, and crammed the racks with the sweet-smelling clover hay. Then we brushed out the mangers and threw in the white corn. When we were done we went swaggering back to the house.
From threatened disaster we had come desperately ashore. Whence arises the strange pride of him who by sheer accident slips through the fingers of Destiny?
We ate our supper under the onslaughts of the tavern-keeper. Roy had a mind to know why we hurried. He scented some reason skulking in the background, and he beat across the field like a setter.
"You'll want to get out early," he said. "Men who swim cattle won't be lettin' grass grow under their feet."
"Bright an' early," replied Ump.
"It appears like," continued Roy, "you mightn't have time enough to get where you're goin'."
"Few of us have," replied Ump. "About the time a feller gits a good start, somethin' breaks in him an' they nail him up in quarter oak."
"Life is short," murmured the tavern-keeper, retiring behind a platitude as a skirmisher retires behind a stone.
Ump bent the prongs of the fork against his plate. "An' yit," he soliloquised, "there is time enough for most of us to do things that we ought to be hung for."
Roy withdrew to the fastnesses of the kitchen, re-formed his lines and approached from another quarter. "If I was Mr. Ward," he opened, jerking his thumb toward Ump, "I'd give it to you when you got in."
The hunchback poured out his coffee, held up the saucer with both hands and blew away the heat. "What for?" he grunted, between the puffings.
"What for?" said Roy. "Lordy! man, you're about the most reckless creature that ever set on hog leather."
"The devil you say!" said Ump.
"That's what I say," continued the tavern-keeper, waving his arm to add fury to his bad declamation. "That's what I say. Suppose you'd got little Quiller drownded?"
The hunchback seemed to consider this possibility with the gravity of one pointed suddenly to some defect in his life. He replaced the saucer on the table, locked his fingers and thrust his thumbs together.
"If had got little Quiller drownded," he began, "then the old women couldn't a said when he growed up, 'Eh, little Quiller didn't amount to much after all. I said he wouldn't come to no good when I used to see him goin' by runnin' his horse.' An' when he got whiskers to growin' on his jaw, flat-nose niggers fishin' along the creek couldn't a' cussed an' said, 'There goes old skinflint Quiller. I wish he couldn't swallow till he give me half his land.' An' when he got old an' wobbly on his legs, tow-headed brats a-waitin' for his money couldn't a-p'inted their fingers at him an' said, 'Ma, how old's grandpap?' An' when he died, nobody could a wrote on his tombstone, 'He robbed the poor an' he cheated the rich, an' he's gone to hell with the balance a' sich.'"
Routed in his second man[oe]uvre, Roy flung a final sally with a sort of servile abandon. "You're a queer lot," he said. "Marks an' that club-footed Malan comes along away before day an' wants their breakfast, an' gits it, an' lights out like the devil was a-follerin' 'em. An' when I asked 'em what they'd been doin', they up an' says they'd been fixin' lay-overs to ketch meddlers an' make fiddlers' wives ask questions. An' then along come you all a-lookin' like hell an' shyin' at questions."
We took the information with no sign, although it confirmed our theory about the ferry. Ump turned gravely to the tavern-keeper.
"I'll clear it all up for you slick as a whistle." Then he arose and pressed his fingers against the tavern-keeper's chest. "Roy," he said, "this is the marrow out of that bone. We're the meddlers that they didn't ketch, an' you're the fiddler's wife."
The laughter sent the tavern-keeper flying from the field. We borrowed some odd pieces of clothing, got the lantern, and went down to the stable to groom our horses.
A man might travel about quite as untidy as Nebuchadnezzar when events were jamming him, but his horse was rubbed and cleaned if the heavens tumbled. I held the lantern, an old iron frame with glass sides, while Jud and Ump curried the horses, rubbing the dust out of their hair, and washing their eyes and nostrils.
We were speculating on the mission of the blacksmith, and the destination of Parson Peppers, of whose singing I had told, when the talk came finally to Twiggs.
"I'd give a purty," said Ump, "to know what word that devil was carryin'."
"Quiller had a chance to find out," answered Jud, "an' he shied away from it."
"What's that?" cried the hunchback, coming out from under the Bay Eagle. He wore a long blue coat that dragged the ground, the sleeves rolled up above his wrists, a coat that Roy had fished out of a box in the loft of his tavern and hesitated over, because on an evening in his youthful heyday, he had gone in that coat to make a bride of a certain Mathilda, and the said Mathilda at the final moment did most stubbornly refuse. The coat had brass buttons, a plenteous pitting of moth-holes, and a braided collar.
Jud went on without noticing the interruption. "The letter that Twiggs brought was a-layin' on the mantelpiece, tore open. Quiller could a looked just as easy as not, an' a found out just what it said, but he edged off."
The hunchback turned around in his blue coat without disturbing the swallowtails lying against his legs. "Is Jud right?" he said.
I nodded my head.
"An' you didn't look?"
Again I nodded.
"Quiller," cried Ump, "do you know how that way of talkin' started? The devil was the daddy of it. He had his mouth crammed full of souls, an' when they asked him if he wanted any more, he begun a-bobbin' his head like that."
"It's every word the truth," said I. "There was the letter lying open, with Cynthia's monogram on the envelope, and I could have looked."
"Why didn't you?" said Ump.
"High frollickin' notions," responded Jud. "I told him a hog couldn't root with a silk nose."
The hunchback closed his hand and pressed his thumb up under his chin. "High frollickin' notions," he said, "are all mighty purty to make meetin'-house talk, but they're short horses when you try to ride 'em. It all depends on where you're at. If you're settin' up to the Lord's table, you must dip with your spoon, but if you're suppin' with the devil, you can eat with your fingers."
I cast about for an excuse, like a lad under the smarting charge of having said his prayers. "It wasn't any notion," said I; "Mr. Marsh came back too quick."
"Why didn't you yank the paper, an' we'd a had it," said he.
"We have got it," said I, putting my hand in my breeches pocket and drawing forth the letter. I stood deep in the oak leaves of the horses' bedding. The light of the candle squeezing through the dirty glass sides brought every log of the old stable into shadow.
Jud came out of El Mahdi's stall like something out of a hole. He wore a rubber coat that had gone many years about the world, up and down, and finally passed in its decay to Roy.
"You've got that letter?" he said.
I told him that I had the very letter, that it had got wet in the river; I had dried it in the sun, and here it was.
"How did you get it?" he asked.
I told him all the conversation with Marsh, and how I was to give it to Cynthia and the message that went along with it.
The two men came over to me and took the lantern and the letter from my hands, Jud holding the light and Ump turning the envelope around in his fingers, peering curiously. They might have been some guardians of a twilight country examining a mysterious passport signed right but writ in cipher, and one that from some hidden angle might be clear enough.
Presently they handed the letter gravely back to me and set the lantern down in the leaves. Jud was silent, like a man embarrassed, and Ump stood for a moment fingering the buttons on his blue coat.
Finally he spoke. "What's in it?" he said.
"I don't know," I answered. I was sure that the man's face brightened, but it might have been a fancy. Loud in the hooting of a principle, we sometimes change mightily when it comes to breaking that principle bare-handed.
"Are you goin' to look?" he said.
The letter was lying in my hand. I had but to plunge my fingers into the open envelope, but something took me by the shoulder. "No," I answered, and thrust the envelope in my pocket.
I take no airs for that decision. There was something here that these men did not like to handle, and, in plain terms, I was afraid.
We slept that night in the front room of Roy's tavern, and it seemed to me that I had just closed my eyes when I opened them again. Ump was standing by the side of the bed with a candle. The door was ajar and the night air blowing the flame, which he was screening with his hand. For a moment, with sleep thick in my eyes, I did not know who it was in the blue coat. "Wake up, Quiller," he said, "an' git into your duds."
"What's the matter?" I asked.
"There's devilment hatchin', I'm afraid," he answered. "Wait till I wake Jud."
He aroused the man from his snoring in the chimney corner, and I got into my clothes. It was about three o'clock and grey dark. I looked over the room as I pulled on the roundabout borrowed of Roy. Ump's bed had not been slept in, and there was about him the warm smell of a horse.
Jud noticed the empty bed. "Ump," he said, "you ain't been asleep at all."
"I got uneasy about the cattle," answered the hunchback, "an I've been up there with 'em, an' it was dam' lucky. I was settin' on the Bay Eagle in a little holler, when somebody come along an' begun to take down the bars. I lit out for him, an' he run like a whitehead, jumped the fence on the lower side of the road an' went splashin' through the creek, but he left some feathers in the bushes when he jumped, an' I got 'em."
He put his hand into the bosom of his coat and drew out a leather cap. "Christian," I cried, pointing to the seared spots on the leather.
Jud crushed the cap in his fingers. "He's got back," he said. "Was he ridin' a horse?"
"Footin' it," answered Ump, "an' by himself. That's what makes me leary. Them others are up to somethin' or they'd a come with him. He's had just about time to make the trip on Shank's mare by takin' short cuts. They've put him up to turn out the cattle an' drive 'em back while we snoozed."
"Maybe they did come with him," said Jud, "an' they're waitin' somewhere. It would be like 'em to come sneakin' back an' try to drive the cattle over, an' put 'em in the river in the night, so it would look like they had got out an' gone away themselves."
Ump's forehead wrinkled like an accordion. "That's fittin' to the size of 'em," he said, "an' about what they're up to. But old Christian was surely by himself, an' I don't understand that. If they'd a come with him, I'd a seen 'em, or a heard the horses."
"I don't believe they came with him," said I.
"Why not?" said Jud.
"Because," I answered, "if they came with him they would have put Christian on a horse, and they would have stopped here to locate us. They could tell by looking in the stable. They'd never wait until they got to the field. They're a foxy set, and there's something back that we don't know."
"What could they do?" put in Jud. "There's no more ferries."
"But there's a bridge," said I.
Ump, standing stock still in the floor, stumbled like a horse struck over the knees. Jud bolted out of the house on a dead run. We followed him to the stable, Ump galloping like a great rabbit.
We flung open the stable door, thrust the bits into the horses' mouths, and slapped on our saddles. It was murky, but we needed no light for business like this. We knew every part of the horse as a man knows his face, and we knew every strap and buckle.
Ump sat on his mare, waiting until we should be ready, kicking his stirrups with impatience, but his tongue, strangely enough, quiet. He turned his mare across the road before us when we were in our saddles.
"Jud," he said, "don't go off half-cocked. An' if there's hell raised, look out for Quiller. I'll stay here an' bring up the cattle as soon as it's light." Then he pulled his mare out of the way. El Mahdi was on his hind legs while Ump was speaking. When the Bay Eagle turned out, he came down with a great jump and began to run.
I bent over and clamped my knees to the horse and let him go. He was like some engine whose throttle is thrown open. In the first few plunges he seemed to rock with energy, as though he might be thrown off his legs by the pent-up driving-power. He and one other horse, the Black Abbot, started like this when they were mad. And, clinging in the saddle, one felt for a moment that the horse under him would rise out of the road or go crashing into the fence.
You will not understand this, my masters, if you have ridden only trained running horses or light hunters. They go about the business of a race with eagerness enough, but still as a servant goes about his task. Imagine, if you please, how a horse would run with you in the night if he was seventeen hands high and a barbarian!
We passed the tavern in a dozen plunges. I saw the candle which Ump had flung down, flickering by the horse-block, a little patch of light. Then the Cardinal's shoe crushed it out.
My coat sleeves cracked like sails. The wind seemed to whistle along my ribs. The horse's shoulders felt like pistons working under a cloth. I was a part of that horse. I fitted my body to him. I adjusted myself to the drive of his legs, to the rise and fall of his shoulders, to the play of every muscle. I rode when his back rocked, like a sort of loose hump fastened on it. His mane blew over my face and went streaming back. My nostrils were filled with the steam from his sweating skin.
Jud rode after the same manner, reducing the area of wind resistance to the smallest space. One watching the horses pass would have seen no rider at all. He might have marked a heavy outline as though something were bound across the saddle or clung flat to it.
You, my masters, who are accustomed to the horse as a slave, cannot know him as a freeman. That docked thing standing by the curb is a long bred-out degenerate. In the Hills a horse was born and bred up to be a freeman. When the time came, he yielded to a sort of human suzerainty, but he yielded as a cadet of a noble house yields to the discipline of a commandant, with the spirit in him and as one who condescended.
There were certain traditions which these horses seemed to hold. The Bay Eagle would never wear harness, nor would any of her blood, to the last one. The Black Abbot would never carry a woman's saddle, nor would his father nor his father's father. I have seen them fight like barbarian kings, great, tawny, desperate savages, bursting the straps and buckles as Samson burst the withes of the Philistines, fighting to kill, fighting to tear in pieces and destroy, fighting as a man fights when his standards are all down and he has lost a kingdom.
The earth was grey, with a few stars above it. The moon had gone over the mountains to make it day in the mystic city of Zeus, and the sun was still lagging along the other side of the world.
We thundered by the old weaver's little house squatting by the roadside, shut up tight like a sleeping eye. Then we swung down into the sandy strip of bottom leading to the bridge. The river was not a quarter of a mile away.
I began to pull on the bridle-reins. El Mahdi held the bit clamped in his teeth. I shifted a rein into each hand and tried to saw the bit loose, but I could not do it. Then, lying down on the saddle, I wound the slack of the reins around my wrists, caught out as far as I could, braced myself against the horn, and jerked with all the strength of my arms.
I jammed the tree of the saddle up on the horse's withers, but the bit held in his jaws. I knew then that the horse was running away. The devil seemed to be in him. He started in a fury, and he had run with a sort of rocking that ought to have warned me. I twisted my head around to look for Jud.
He had begun to pull up the Cardinal and had fallen a little behind, but he understood at once, shook out his reins, and leaned over in his saddle. The nose of the Cardinal came almost to my knee and hung there. Jud caught at my bridle, but he could not reach it. I wedged my knees against the leather pads of the saddle skirts, caught one side of the bridle-rein with both hands, and tried to throw the horse into the fence. I felt the leather of the rein stretch.
Then I knew that it was no use to try any further. Even if Jud could reach my bridle, he would merely tear it off at the bit-rings, and not stop the horse.
In a dozen seconds we would reach the stone abutment and go over into the river. I had no doubt that the bridge was down, or, if not, that its flooring was torn up.
I realised suddenly that it was my turn to go out of the world. I had seen people going out as though their turn came in a curious order, not unlike games which children play. But somehow I never thought that my turn would come. I was not really in that game. I was looking on when my name was called out.
El Mahdi struck the stone abutment and the bridge loomed. I dropped the reins and clung to the saddle, expecting the horse to fall with his legs broken, drive me against the sleepers and crash through.
We went on to the bridge like a rattle of musketry and thundered across. Horses, resembling women, as I have heard it said, are sometimes diverted from their purpose by the removal of every jot of opposition. With the reins on his neck, El Mahdi stopped at the top of the hill and I climbed down to the ground. My legs felt weak and I held on to the stirrup leather.
Jud dismounted, seized my bit, and ran his hand over El Mahdi's face. "I can't make head nor tail of that runnin'," he said. "He ain't scared nor he ain't mad."
"You couldn't tell with him," I answered.
"There never was a scared horse," responded Jud, "that wasn't nervous, an' there never was a mad one that wasn't hot. But this feller feels like a suckin' calf. It must have been devilment, an' he ought to be whaled."
"It wouldn't do any good," said I; "he'd only fight you and try to kill you."
"He's a dam' curious whelp," said Jud. "He must a knowed that the bridge was all right."
"How could he have known?" said I.
"They say," replied Jud, "that horses an' cattle sees things that folks don't see, an' that they know about what's goin' to happen. It's powerful curious about the things they do know."
We slipped the reins over the horses' heads and walked back to the bridge. Jud went on with his talking.
"Now, you can't get a horse on to a dangerous bridge, to save your life, an' you can't get him on ice that ain't strong enough to hold him, an' you can't get him to eat anything that'll hurt him, an' you can't get him lost. An' old Clabe says there's Bible for it that a horse can see spooks. I tell you, Quiller, El Mahdi knowed about that bridge."
Deep in my youthful bosom I was convinced that El Mahdi knew. But I put it wholly on the ground that he was a genius.
We crossed the river, led the horses down to the end of the abutment, and tied them to a fence. Then we went back and examined the bridge as well as we could in the dark. It stood over the river as the early men and Dwarfs had built it,—solid as a wall.
Woodford had given the thing up, and the road was open to the north country.
We sat down on the corner of the abutment near the horses, to wait for the daylight, Jud wearing old Christian's cap, and I bareheaded. We sat for a long time, listening to the choke and snarl of the water as it crowded along under the bridge.
Then we fell to a sort of whispering talk.
"Quiller," he began, "do you believe that story about the Dwarfs buildin' the bridge?"
"Ump don't," I answered. "Ump says it's a cock-and-bull story, and there never were any Dwarfs except once in a while a bad job like him."
"You can't take Ump for it," said he. "Ump won't believe anything he can't put his finger on, if it's swore to on a stack of Bibles. Quiller, I've seen them holes in the mountains where the Dwarfs lived, with the marks on the rocks like's on them logs, an' I've seen the rigamajigs that they cut in the sandstone. They could a built the bridge, if they took a notion, just by sayin' words."
He was quiet a while, and then he added, "An' I've seen the path where they used to come down to the river, an' it has places wore in the solid rock like you'd make with your big toe."
Jud stopped, and I moved up a little closer to him. I could see the ugly, crooked men crawl out of their caves and come sneaking down from the mountains to strangle the sleeping and burn the roof. I could see their twisted bare feet, their huge, slack mouths, and their long hands that hung below their knees when they walked. And then, on the hill beyond the Valley River, I heard a sound.
I seized my companion by the arm. "Jud," I said under my breath, "did you hear that?"
He leaned over me and listened. The sound was a sort of echo.
"They're comin'," he whispered.
"The Dwarfs?" said I.
"Lem Marks," said he.
The sound reached the summit of the hill, and then we heard it clearly,—the ringing of horseshoes on the hard road. They came in a long trot, clattering into the little hollow at the foot of the abutment to the bridge. We heard men dismounting, horses being tied to the fence, and a humming of low talk. We listened, lying flat beside El Mahdi and the Cardinal.
It was difficult to determine how many were in the hollow, but all were now afoot but one. We could hear his horse tramping, and hear him speaking to the others from the saddle above them.
A man with his back toward us lighted a lantern. When he turned to lead the way up the abutment into the bridge, we caught a flickering picture of the group. I could make out Lem Marks as the man with the lantern, and Malan behind him, and I could see the brown shoulder of the horse and the legs of the rider, but the man's face was above the reach of the light. It was perhaps Parson Peppers.
They stopped at the sill of the bridge, and the man with the lantern began to examine the flooring and the ends of the logs set into the stone of the abutment.
He moved about slowly, holding the lantern close to the ground. Malan stopped by the horse. I could see the dingy light now moving in the bridge, now held over the edge of the abutment, now creeping along the borders of the sill.
Once it passed close to the horse, and I saw his hoofs clearly and his brown legs, and the club feet of Malan, and the gleam of an axe. They were on the far side of the river, and the howling of the water tumbled their voices into a sort of jumble. The man on the horse seemed to give some directions which were carried out by the one with the lantern. Then they gathered in a little group and put the thing under discussion.
Lem Marks talked for some minutes, and once Malan pointed with the axe. I could see the light slip along its edge. Then they all went into the bridge together.
The tallow candle struggling through the dingy windows of the lantern lighted the bridge as a dying fire lights a forest, in a little space, half-heartedly, with all the world blacker beyond that space. They stopped at the bridge-mouth on our side of the river, and Marks carried the lantern over the lower end of the abutment. Then he called Malan. The clubfoot got down on his knees and held the light over by the log sleeper of the bridge.
I could see where the bark had been burned along the log. I heard Marks say that this was the place to cut. Then the man on the horse rode out close to Malan and bent over to look. The clubfoot raised his lantern, and the rider's face came into the play of the light. My heart lifted trembling into my throat. It was Woodford!
I grabbed for Jud, and my fingers caught the knee of his breeches. He was squatted down in the road with a stone in his hand.
Woodford nodded his head, gave some order which I could not hear, and moved his horse back from the edge of the abutment. Malan arose and picked up his axe. Marks took the lantern, trying to find some place where the light could be thrown on the face of the log. He shifted to several positions and finally took a place at the corner of the bridge, holding the light over the side.
Malan stood with his club feet planted wide on the log, leaned over, and began to hack the bark off where he wished to take out his great chip.
I could hear the little pieces of charred bark go rattling down into the river. Malan notched the borders of his chip, then shifted his weight a little to his right leg and swung the axe back over his shoulder. It came down gleaming true, it seemed to me, but the blade, turning as it descended, dealt the log a glancing blow and wrenched the handle out of the man's hand. I saw the axe glitter as it passed the smoked glass of the lantern. Then it struck the side of the bridge with a great ripping bang, and dropped into the river.
I jumped up with a cry of "the Dwarfs!"
The swing of the axe carried Malan forward. He lost his balance, threw up his hands and began to topple. I saw the shadow of the horse fall swiftly across the light. Malan was seized by the collar and flung violently backward. Then Woodford caught the lantern from Marks and came on down the abutment toward us.
He rode slowly with the lantern against his knee. The horse, blinded by the light, did not see us until he was almost upon us. Then he jumped back with a snort. Woodford raised the lantern above his head and looked down.
Bareheaded, in Roy's roundabout, I was a queer looking youngster. Jud, with old Christian's leather cap pulled on his head and a stone in his fist, might have been brother to any cutthroat. Stumbled upon in the dark we must have looked pretty wild.
Woodford regarded us with very apparent unconcern. "Quiller," he said, as one might have announced a guest of indifferent welcome. Then he set the lantern down on his saddle horn. "Well," he said, "this is a piece of luck."
I was struck dumb by the man's friendly voice and my resolution went to pieces. I began to stammer like a novice taken in a wrong. Then Woodford did a cunning thing.
He assumed that I was not embarrassed, but that I was amused at his queer words.
"Upon my life, Quiller," he said, "I don't wonder that you laugh. It was a queer thing to go blurting out, you moving the very devil to get your cattle over the Valley, and I using every influence I may have with that gentleman to prevent it. Now, that was a funny speech."
I got my voice then. "I don't see the luck of it," I said.
"And that," said he, "is just what I am about to explain. In the meantime Jud might toss that rock into the river." There was a smile playing on the man's face.
"If it's the same to you," said Jud, "I'll just hold on to the rock."
"As you please," replied Woodford, still smiling down at me. "I'd like a word with you, Quiller. Shall we go out on the road a little?"
"Not a foot," said I.
On my life, the man sighed deeply and passed his hand over his face. "If I had such men," he said, "I wouldn't be here pulling down a bridge. Your brother, Quiller, is in great luck. With such men, I could twist the cattle business around my finger. But when one has to depend upon a lot of numbskulls, he can expect to come out at the little end of the horn."
I began to see that this Woodford, under some lights, might be a very sensible and a very pleasant man. He got down from his saddle, held up the lantern and looked me over. Then he set the light on the ground and put his hands behind his back. "Quiller," he began, as one speaks into a sympathetic ear, "there is no cement that will hold a man to you unless it is blood wetted. You can buy men by the acre, but they are eye servants to the last one. A brother sticks, right or wrong, and perhaps a son sticks, but the devil take the others. I never had a brother, and, therefore, Providence put me into the fight one arm short."
He began to walk up and down behind the lantern, taking a few long strides and then turning sharply. "Doing things for one's self," he went on, "comes to be tiresome business. A man must have someone to work for, or he gets to the place where he doesn't care." He stopped before me with his face full in the light. "Quiller," he said, and the voice seemed to ring true, "I meant to prevent your getting north with these cattle. I hoped to stop you without being compelled to destroy this bridge, but you force me to make this move, and I shall make it. Still, on my life, I care so little that I would let the whole thing go on the spin of a coin."
His face brightened as though the idea offered some easy escape from an unpleasant duty. "Upon my word," he laughed, "I was not intending to be so fair. But the offer is out, and I will stand by it."
He put his hand in his pocket and took out a silver dollar. "You may toss, Quiller, heads or tails as you choose."
I refused, and the man pitched the coin into the air, caught it in his hand and returned it to his pocket.
"Perhaps you think you will be able to stop me," he said in a voice that came ringing over something in his throat. "We're three, and Malan is a better man than Jud."
"He is not a better man," said I.
"There is a way to tell," said he.
"And it can't begin too quick," said I.
"Done," said he. "At it they go, right here in the road, and the devil take me if Malan does not dust your man's back for you."
He spun around, caught up the lantern, and we all went up to the level floor of the abutment at the bridge sill. Lem Marks and the clubfoot were waiting. Woodford turned to them.
"Malan," he said, "I've heard a great deal of talk out of you about a wrestle with Jud at Roy's tavern. Now I'm going to see if there's any stomach behind that talk."
I thrust in. "It must be fair," I said.
"Fair it shall be," said he; "catch-as-catch-can or back-holds?" And he turned to Malan.
"Back-holds," said the clubfoot, "if that suits Jud."
"Anything suits me," answered Jud.
The two men stripped. Jud asked for the lantern and examined the ground. It was the width of the abutment, perhaps thirty feet, practically level, and covered with a loose sand dust. There was no railing to this abutment, not even a coping along its borders.
I followed Jud as he went over every foot of the place. I wanted to ask him what he thought, but I was afraid. Presently he came back to the bridge, set down the lantern, and announced that he was ready.
There was not a breath of air moving. The door of the lantern stood open, and the smoke from the half-burned tallow candle streamed straight up and squeezed out at the peaked top.
The two men took their places, leaned over, and each put his big arms around the other. Malan had torn the sleeves out of his shirt, and Jud had rolled his above the elbow.
Woodford picked up the lantern, nodded to me to follow him, and we went around the men to see if the positions they had taken were fair. Each was entitled to one underhold, that is, the right arm around the body and under the left arm of his opponent, the left arm over the opponent's right, and the hands gripped. It is the position of the grizzly, hopeless for the weaker man.
The two had taken practically the same hold, except that Malan locked his fingers, while Jud gripped his left wrist with his right hand. Jud was perhaps four inches taller, but Malan was heavier by at least twenty pounds.
We came back and stood by the floor of the bridge, Woodford holding the lantern with Lem Marks and I beside him. Malan said that the light was in his eyes, and Woodford shifted the lantern until the men's faces were in the dark. Then he gave the word.
For fully a minute, it seemed to me, the two men stood, like a big bronze. Then I could see the muscles of their shoulders contracting under a powerful tension as though each were striving to lift some heavy thing up out of the earth. It seemed, too, that Malan squeezed as he lifted, and that Jud's shoulder turned a little, as though he wished to brace it against the clubfoot's breast, or was troubled by the squeezing.
Malan bent slowly backward, and Jud's heels began to rise out of the dust. Then, as though a crushing weight descended suddenly through his shoulder, Jud threw himself heavily against Malan, and the two fell. I ran forward, the men were down sidewise in the road.
"Dog fall," said Woodford; "get up."
But the blood of the two was now heated. They hugged, panted, and rolled over. Woodford thrust the lantern into their faces and began to kick Malan. "Get up, you dog," he said.
They finally unlocked their arms and got slowly on their legs. Both were breathing deeply and the sweat was trickling over their faces.
Woodford looked at the infuriated men and seemed to reflect. Presently he turned to me, as the host turns to the honourable guest. "Quiller," he said, "these savages want to kill each other. We shall have to close the Olympic games. Let us say that you have won, and no tales told. Is it fair?"
I stammered that it was fair. Then he came over and linked his arm through mine. He asked me if I would walk to the horses with him. I could not get away, and so I walked with him.
He pointed to the daylight breaking along the edges of the hills, and to the frost glistening on the bridge roof. He said it reminded him how, when he was little, he would stand before the frosted window panes trying to understand what the etched pictures meant, and how sure he was that he had once known about this business, but had somehow forgotten. And how he tried and tried to recall the lost secret. How sometimes he seemed about to get it, and then it slipped away, and how one day he realised that he should never remember, and what a blow it was.
Then he said a lot of things that I did not understand. He said that when one grew out of childhood, he lost his sympathy with events, and when that sympathy was lost, it was possible to live in the world only as an adventurer with everything in one's hand.
He said a sentinel watched to see if a man set his heart on a thing, and if he did the sentinel gave some sign, whereupon the devil's imps swarmed up to break that thing in pieces. He said that sometimes a man beat off the devils and saved the thing, but it was rare, and meant a life of tireless watching. From every point of view, indifference was better.
Still, he said, it was a mistake for a man to allow events to browbeat him. He ought to fight back, hitting where he could. An event, once in a while, was strangely a coward. Besides that, if Destiny found a man always ready to strip, she came after a while to accord to him the courtesies of a duellist, and if he were a stout fellow, she sometimes hesitated before she provoked a fight. Of course the man could not finally beat her off, but she would set him to one side, as a person with whom she was going to have trouble, and give him all the time she could.
He said a man ought to have the courage to strike out for what he wanted; that the ship-wrecked who got desperately ashore was a better man than the hanger-back; that a great misfortune was a great compliment. It measured the resistance of the man. Destiny would not send artillery against a weakling. It was sometimes finer to fight when the lights were all out; I would not understand that, men never did until they were about through with life. But, above everything else, he said, a man ought to go to his ruin with a sort of princely indifference. God Almighty could not hurt the man who did not care.
Then he gave me a friendly direction about the cattle, to put them in his boundary on our road home, bade me remember our contract of no tales told, and got into his saddle.
I watched him cross the bridge, and ride away through the Hills with his men, humming some song about the devil and a dainty maid, and I wished that I might grow up to have such splendid courage. His big galleon had gone down on the high seas with a treasure in her hold that I could not reckon, and he went singing like one who finds a kingdom.
Then Jud called to me to get out of the road, and a muley steer went by at my elbow.
I sat in the saddle of El Mahdi on the hill-top beyond the bridge, and watched the day coming through the gateway of the world. It was a work of huge enchantment, as when, for the pleasure of some ancient caliph, or at the taunting of some wanton queen, a withered magus turned the ugly world into a kingdom of the fairy, and the lolling hangers-on started up on their elbows to see a green field spreading through the dirty city and great trees rising above the vanished temples, and wild roses and the sweet dew-drenched brier trailing where the camel's track had just faded out, and autumn leaves strewn along pathways of a wood, and hills behind it all where the sunlight flooded.
It was like the mornings that came up from the sea by the Wood Wonderful, or those that broke smiling when the world was newly minted,—mornings that trouble the blood of the old shipwreck sunning by the door, and move the stay-at-home to sail out for the Cloud Islands. Full of the joy of life was this October land.
I could almost hear the sunlight running with a shout as it plunged in among the hickory trees and went tumbling to the thickets of the hollow. The mist hanging over the low meadows was a golden web, stretched by enchanted fingers across some exquisite country into which a man might come only through his dreams.
I waited while the drove went by, counting the cattle to see that none had been overlooked in the night. The Aberdeen-Angus still held his place in the front, and the big muley bull marched by like a king's governor, keeping his space of clear road at the peril of a Homeric struggle.
I knew every one of the six hundred, and I could have hugged each great black fellow as he trudged past.
Jud and the Cardinal went by in the middle of the long line and passed out of sight behind a turn of the hill below. The giant rode slowly, lolling in his saddle and swinging his big legs free of the stirrups.
Then the lagging rear of the drove trailed up, and the hunchback followed on the Bay Eagle. He was buttoned to the chin in Roy's blue coat and looked for all the world like some shrivelled old marshal of the empire, a hundred days out of Paris, covering the retreat of the imperial army.
El Mahdi stood on the high bank by the roadside, in among the dead blackberry briers, and I sat with the rein under my legs and my hands in my pockets.
The hunchback stopped his horse in the road below me, squared himself in his saddle, and looked up with a great supercilious grin.
"Well," he said, "I'll be damn!"
"What's the trouble?" said I.
"Humph!" he snorted, "are them britches I see on your legs?"
"That's what they call them," said I.
"Well," said he, "when you git home, take 'em off, an' hand 'em over to old Liza, an' ask her to bring your kilts down out of the garret. For you're as innocent a little codger as ever sucked his hide full of milk."
"What are you driving at?" I asked.
Ump shook out his long arms and folded them around the bosom of his blue coat. "Jud told me," he said; "an' the pair of you ought to be put in a cradle with a rock-a-by-baby. Woodford was done when that axe fell in the river, an' he knowed it. He was ridin' out when he saw you an' Jud, an' he said to himself, 'God's good to you, Rufus, my boy; here's a pair of little babies a long way from their ma, an' it ought to count you one.' Then he lit off an' offered to wrastle you, heads I win an' tails you lose, for the cake in your pocket, an' then he chucked you under the chin, an' you promised not to tell."
The hunchback set his two fingers against his teeth and whistled like a hawk, a long, shrill, hissing whistle that startled the little partridges on the sloping hillside and sent them scurrying under the dead grass, and brought the drumming pheasant to his feathered legs.
Then he threw his chin into the air and squinted. "Quiller," he piped, with the long echo still whining in his throat, "that whistle fooled you an' it fooled Jud, but it wouldn't fool a Bob White with the shell on its back. When the old bird hears it, she don't wait to see the long shadow travellin' on the grass, but she hollers, 'Into the weeds, boys, if you want to save your bacon.' An' you ought to see the little codgers scatter. Let it be a lesson to you, Quiller, my laddiebuck; when you hear that whistle, light out for the tall timber. When you're a fightin' the devil, half the winnin' 's in the runnin'."
Then he opened his great cavernous mouth and began to bellow,