CHAPTER I
Despite his buoyant optimism Hilary Lloyd could but quail as he looked about him. The vast uninhabited heights of the encompassing Great Smoky Mountains, green, purple and bronze, seeming to his theatrical sense magnificently posed against the turquoise background of further ranges, glimpsed through clifty defiles and almost touching the differing translucent blue of the sapphire sky; the river, crag-bound, crystal-clear, with an arrowy swiftness; the forest, dense beyond any computation, gigantic of growths, redundantly rich of foliage, and gorgeous with autumnal tints—all were as revelations to his half-stunned mind. He had never dreamed of the natural wealth, the splendid extent, the picturesque values of this region. His imagination flagged, failed. He was sensible of the strain upon his receptivity to compass the transcendent reality. But whence, amidst these primeval splendours, should materialise the patrons of his little street fair? Its flimsy booths were already rising about the stony expanse of the public square of the town of Colbury, not, in stereotyped phrase, like magic, but with all the laborious accompaniments of hammers and saws, the straining of muscles and patience, the expenditure of profanity and perspiration, and the sound of loud, raucous voices. The tents reluctantly spread their mushroom-like contour, now and again suddenly collapsing from awkward handling or inadequate aid. The manager looked at the few humble toilers with a prescient pang. To be stranded here, on the uttermost confines of civilisation, seemed a disaster indeed of direful menace. He realised his friend's impressions and could have voiced in unison the exact phrase as a heavy fellow of medium height, arrayed in a ready-made suit of a loud plaid, slouched up with his hands in his pockets, and chewing a straw.
"Well, partner, we've done it again!" he said, not without the accents of reproach.
Lloyd obviously flinched at the tone, and his face flushed. It was of a singularly perfect contour and chiselling, according to the canons of art, and in its large nobility of expression it might have served, and possibly had, as a model for an artist's realisation of some high ideal. But there was a most mundane anxiety in his luminous eyes, darkly blue and long-lashed, and the alertness with which they eagerly surveyed the meagre festival preparations gave an accent of the ludicrous to his fine facial suggestions. He was like a man playing therôleof a prince, unstaged, on the bare sidewalk, and his utter unconsciousness and indifference to the effect of his remarkable appearance added to its impressiveness. His hair was fine and light brown in tint, and it shone like silk as he lifted his straw hat and wearily mopped his brow with his handkerchief. He was young, twenty-five perhaps, and very fair of complexion, and the delicate texture of his skin allowed the fluctuating flush of annoyance visibly to come and go in his cheek. He was something more than of medium height, although not notably tall; he was very symmetrically put together, and, while slight and elegant, his movements showed intimations of muscular strength and a swift deftness that implied some special athletic training.
He presently gathered his faculties together and with a desperate courage affected to see naught amiss. "Why, we knew that it was only a country town, Haxon," he remonstrated.
Haxon pushed his wide-brimmed imitation Panama hat on the back of his head, showing in full relief his round red face, beaded with perspiration. He lifted one plump hand with an accusatory gesture toward the infinite stretch of the lonely mountains, and then turned melancholy eyes toward Lloyd.
"Why," Lloyd responded, "what is the matter with the mountains, Hax? I haven't got anything against 'em."
Haxon shook his head dolorously, "A good old country to walk in," he observed, tragically.
Lloyd affected surprise. "Cheese it!" he cried, contemptuously. "With a week to show—we're not stranded yet!"
Haxon's round head wagged to and fro unconvinced. "That railroad agent got us good, Hil'ry," he opined didactically. "We have got time enough to show all right—but nothing to show to."
In truth the prospect was not alluring from a utilitarian point of view. The little brick courthouse, the most considerable edifice in the town, stood in a plot of blue grass, surrounded by a fence of palings, and beyond the paved square without were enough small two-story shops to suggest the intent of the future when the intervals should be built in and the quadrangle complete. To the west the scattered dwellings straggled away along the hilly main street, with here and there a few cottages built on intersecting roadways, which should hereafter develop into cross-streets. But the temple of justice, the stores and the residences were none of them new, and barring a gleam of fresh paint now and again from some cottage out on the hilly reaches of the thoroughfare the town was much as it had been for years, and would be for years to come. There was a wonderful lack of foliage. A few ancient oaks stood in the courthouse yard, and the trellises of vines and low boughs in gardens betokened fruit culture, but along the streets the idea of improvement seemed to find its earliest municipal exposition in laying the axe to the root of every forest tree that had spread its boughs for centuries above the lush spaces now shorn close to give the town room to expand. The landscape, steeped in splendid colour, of infinite vastness, of loftiest heroic suggestion and most poetic appeal, had wrought a surfeit of beauty in the sordid little town, and here, held in the heart of a most majestic expression of nature, there was naught to intimate the contiguity of the heights and the forests save the rare pure air and the fragrance of the balsam fir.
The tranquillity of the sunshine, the bland, suave atmosphere, the benignant breath of woods and waters seemed to impart their languorous lethargy to the inhabitants as well. There was not the frenzied interest in a new project of whatever sort that is the concomitant of enterprise in a live town. The merchants, the clerks, the few lawyers, and the officials of the courthouse noticed with only an episodical attention the preparations to get under way the first street fair which had ever shown its attractions to the denizens of Colbury.
This attitude piqued the curiosity of Lloyd. It nettled and unnerved him. As it fell under his observation in different ways it partook of the nature of those who manifested it. Now it intimated a sort of quizzical contempt, for there is a class of rural wights, who preserve the bucolic species still, always permeated with a disdain of progress, and a distrust of whatever is new to their limited experience. Now it was the outspoken prophecy of disaster.
"Some fools may leave thar harvests ter waggon down from the coves ter see yer show," a citizen suggested. "But a quarter of an eye will do the business, accordin' ter my way o' thinkin'. Ye air goin' ter bide hyar a week, they tell me. Why, man, the bigges' circus I ever see jes' showed fur one evenin', then tucked up its tent an' marched."
"Well, that ain't the style for street fairs," Lloyd explained. "This is a different sort of thing."
"Itis,—itis, for sure, stranger."
Though enigmatically expressed, the acquiescence was distinctly uncomplimentary, and Lloyd dropped the topic. He had not come here to exhibit skill in debate, he said to himself, but to conduct a street fair. This, it was evident, would tax his powers. The manager was beginning to realise that he had been victimised in a certain sort by the wily representations of a railroad agent and the summer "cut-rates" in coming to this remote section. The merchants' evident lack of expectation of reaping the golden reward of a "big crowd in town" had a damping effect on the already drooping spirits of the showman. By way of steadying his nerve Lloyd sought reassurance in verifying some of the lures which had led him hither. In the office of the county court clerk, a brick-paved, white-washed apartment in the courthouse, he paid the State and county privilege tax on the show, and after he had taken out his license to exhibit, he courteously presented the officials with free passes to all the attractions.
"I hope you will do well," said the clerk in a tone of condolence.
"I hope so, indeed," returned Lloyd, thinking of the sum named in the tax-receipt. "We expect a good crowd. We have been well advertised throughout the country."
The clerk felt that he had no call to seem optimistic in other men's affairs to the jeopardy of his own soul. He left lying to more amiable wights, and preserved a dispiriting but veracious silence.
"The crops are all laid by," said a pleasant-spoken bystander. "Some folksmaycome down out'n the coves."
"I hear there is a mining camp some miles down the river," said Lloyd hopefully. "We lay considerable on that."
"Convict camp," said the clerk sepulchrally, and the amiable bystander burst out laughing.
"Them fellers have season tickets whar they be, stranger," he said. And then he winked hilariously at the clerk, whose funereal aspect brightened dimly at the dreary jest.
The small boy, ubiquitous expression of humanity, was out in force, and underfoot as usual. Every screw that went into the adjustment of the merry-go-round, the wooden head of every dummy horse, the great frame of the Ferris wheel, slowly rounding its circumference high into the air above the house tops and showing the solemn, austere, purpling mountain landscape, suffused with burnished, golden light, grotesquely framed by its towering circle—every detail passed under the personal supervision of the juvenile element of the town, and if the elders lacked interest it was more than atoned for by the frenzy of enthusiasm which possessed the juniors. The rearing of the tall mast, from the summit of which the noted "Captain Ollory of the Royal Navy," according to the florid announcement of the posters—videlicet Haxon, himself, and of what royal navy remains forever unexplained—was to spring into the air and plunge into a reservoir of water below, marked the accession of adult curiosity. This increased to open comment when Haxon himself appeared, cautiously superintending its solid adjustment in the ground, the stretching of the guy wires, the placing in position, at the correct distance, of the great trough of water which was to break the force of his leap from the giddy height of the summit.
The gratuitous advice, freely proffered, and the expressions of wonderment on all sides changed to injurious doubt, as the magnitude and risk of the proposed feat percolated through the densities of the uninformed rural mind. "Jump off'n that thar pole?—neverin this worl'!" said one of the bystanders. "Onpossible!" commented another. Others opined, "Takes more'n the Street Fair ter fool we uns."
"Time come, an' the Cap'n will be tooken with the chicken pip, or the bilious colic, or some disabling complaint an' the defrauded public will be jes' settin' with its finger in its mouth."
If Haxon heard aught of these disaffected remarks he manifested no heed. Silent, surly, he doggedly gave his whole attention to the details on which his life depended. He was well aware that however sparse the attendance at the Street Fair, however disastrous the enterprise financially, the exhibition of his "high dive" must be given, for it was of necessity performed in the open air, and therefore was a free show in the nature of an advertisement.
Lloyd had often heard the cynical remark that the spectators of a hazardous acrobatic feat crowd to see the performer killed, not to witness his triumph, and he was reminded of this as he watched the unsympathetic citizens of the little town and heard their comments and speculations concerning his partner's feat, for Haxon was a half owner of the enterprise. Lloyd deprecated infinitely Haxon's mood of surly disaffection. He knew that it tended to impair the acrobat's nerve and to render his terrible feat doubly dangerous. Haxon, of all men, should cultivate composure, a cheerful and equable state of mind. Lloyd was subtly aware that his partner secretly upbraided him for this unfortunate move, the culminating disaster of an unsuccessful season. For the company to go to pieces at last in the remote wildernesses of the Great Smoky Mountains was indeed the extremest spite of fate, and even speculation shrunk back appalled from the utter blank of the possibilities beyond. The exchequer was almost empty; it was "up to them," as they had said dolorously to each other, to make their transportation back to New York, and they would have been glad of this, even with empty hands as the guerdon of their summer's hard work. And in fact this meant no inconsiderable sum, for in addition to the concessionaries who sold and mended umbrellas, parasols and fans, dismayed inexpressibly by their sudden projection into this primitive community, the owners of the candy-stands and peanut-roasters, the company carried perforce a goodly number of individuals. While there were performers who did double duty in various wise, the "stunts" of the specialists could not be delegated, and this swelled the bulk of the expense accounts. True, Haxon, when his great diurnal feat had been exploited, was wont to array himself in correct evening dress and perform with great spirit on the cornet as the noted soloist, Signor Allegro. The "Flying Lady," when not ethereally a-wing, developed into a ticket-seller of no mean abilities. Even the noted juggler of the company found time to sing tenor in the quartette of the "high-class concert." But for the most part the duties of the others were continuous, and they were restricted to their several stations. Naturally, the freaks—a "Fat Lady," a "Wild Man," and a "Living Skeleton"—dared not court gratuitously the gaze of the public who ought to pay for the privilege of a shock to the nerves, and sedulously secluded themselves in their tents; the kinetoscope must needs shift its scenes unceasingly, and the wild west play which it exhibited reached a conclusion only to begin its active agonies anew; the merry-go-round and the Ferris Wheel were ready to solve the problem of perpetual motion, and throughout all the brass band brayed, in tune by happy accident, or, deliriously indifferent to the laws of harmony, vociferously off the key. But for this microcosm, this bizarre little world to revolve at all, must be attainable the essential motive power, the admittance fee in goodly quantity.
The prospect here had seemed so promising, so reasonable. The company had struggled against the unvarying luck of superior counter-attractions wherever they had gone; to give their show in a locality unused to all diversion, with not a rival in prospect nor even in reminiscence, was a lure not to be disregarded. The lack of an audience in so sparsely settled a community did not readily occur to them; a town, even a little town, implies normally a tributary region of suburbs and farms. The vast uninhabited mountain wildernesses faced them like the land of doom.
Lloyd had had no Scriptural tuition that could remind him of the Scapegoat of the Hebraic ritual, loaded with the sins and the curses of the people and driven into the desert to lose itself in those aridities and die; but could the creature have possessed any sense of its doom and its direful burden, Lloyd might have realised its sentiments, as he gazed appalled upon the infinite stretching of those austere and lofty mountains, which even in the days of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country were called "The Endless." It was not his fault, he said bitterly to himself, his eyes hot as he gazed. The subject had been fully discussed, and all had agreed on the experiment. Haxon, though a part owner of the precarious and ephemeral property, had not made a protest—nay, he had been an earnest advocate of "fresh fields and pastures new." Now Lloyd abruptly reminded him of this, as with a sudden lurch and an exclamation of impatience Haxon snatched the hammer of a workman and with two or three well-directed blows drove home the steel spike that held down one of the guy wires. He looked up, still in his bent posture, from under his frowning dark eyebrows; his round, florid face, that was wont to be so jovial, was all lowering and sullen. His small dark eyes flashed with antagonism and vexation. "Who's sayin' as I didn't agree—eh? Well," as Lloyd made an intimation of negation, "what's gnawin' on ye, then?"
This was evidently no time nor mood for the discussion of the matter, and indeed discussion was futile, a mere waste of words. The die was cast. The Street Fair had met its fate. If the company had been wrecked on a desert island its case could not be more desperate.
Lloyd turned away, looking dully about him. There was scant supervision now necessary—the old routine, practised week after week since the early spring, had grown so familiar to the workmen that the most ingenious blunderer could hardly find a pretext for his activities, and little by little Lloyd's meditative steps took him slowly along the smooth red clay road till presently he found himself on the outskirts of the town and nearing the river. He shook his head gloomily when he stood on the high rocks of the bank and gazing down perceived the course that the road followed through a clifty defile to reach the verge and the ford—there was not even a bridge in this benighted spot, and yet this was a county town! The water was swift, evidently deep—he marked the distance down the stream where the road once more resumed its course on the opposite bank. It obviously took a devious route along the bed of the river, picked its steps so to speak; there must be deep holes, quicksands, pitfalls on either side of the comparatively safe footing of the ford, he reflected. Suddenly he noticed the footbridge; this followed a direct line across the torrent—a trifling, primitive structure, consisting of a couple of logs with a shaking hand-rail, and with the deep, turbulent swift flow of a rocky mountain stream beneath. Once more he dolorously shook his head. Hither must come the patrons of the Street Fair, even now spreading its attractions on the public square to welcome them—not yet a canvas-covered wagon in sight, no horseman, no foot-passenger to tempt the instabilities of the little bridge.
He laid his hand on the rail and as he crossed felt the elastic structure sway beneath every step, while the waters swirled far below. But as he reached the opposite bank and paused for a moment his anxieties were calmed in spite of himself by the sweet peace of the dark, cool solitude; he listened to the ripples eddying about the jagged base of the crags—a sound distinct from the swift rush of the tumultuous currents. It had a secondary tone, seeming keyed higher, a clear metallic tintinnabulation like elfin minstrelsy, barely heard, yet not discriminated by the senses. And oh, the sylvan balm of the air!—it touched so caressingly the forlorn wight's cheek, his hair as he took off his hat, his hot, tired eyes, that he had half a mind to fall a-sobbing on the vague breast of this insensate sympathy. He was comforted in some sort. His lungs, filled and weighted with the soot and smoke and dust of a dozen sordid towns, expanded, drinking in with deep draughts this fragrant elixir that was but the diffusive air. He looked up into the dark green boughs of the giant oaks and beeches, and down again into depths as green, where the crystal-clear water reflected the verdure, leaf by leaf and branch by branch—only on the opposite side of the stream a brilliant section of vividly blue sky was duplicated, flaring out with a flake of cloud dazzlingly white.
So revivifying were these influences that he had a mind for solitude for the nonce. A long quiet walk he thought would restore his composure and steady his nerves. He would compass thus a surcease of the anxiety that harassed him, and by inaction recruit his energies better to cope with his problems. He had a deft, steady, sure step as he took his way along the country road, covering the ground with surprising rapidity, for he was a strong, athletic pedestrian; not that he had ever walked either as a pastime or a profession, but he had done various acrobatic "turns" in his time, and his muscles had served him well. Now and again as he went he lifted his head and looked off through gaps in the foliage at the encompassing mountains, critically surveying them, it might seem, his head discriminatingly askew, his bright eyes narrowing, and it was characteristic of his experience and his limitations that he appraised the value of the landscape, not as scenery nor geographically, nor agriculturally, nor botanically, but simply as it struck the eye for stage-settings. Occasionally as the road swerved he caught a new aspect, and turned himself to face the prospect, holding up both arms to cut off irrelevant details, and bound the picture to the limits of the most effective.
"Gee,—what a flat!" he said once, and sometimes he waved his hands in the air, detaching bits here and there of cliff, or cataract, or bosky dells which he considered appropriate for "wings" or "flies." These erratic attitudinisings might have suggested a doubt of his sanity had there been aught to observe him as he climbed with wondrous activity the steep ascent of a mountain road, hardly more indeed than a bridle path, now about seven miles from Colbury. He saw no living object, save once, high, high in the air above the ranges, a majestically circling bird, whose strength and grace he paused to admire, unaware that it was the distance which so commended the foul mountain vulture; and once, when the laurel pressed close into the road and he heard a step within the dense covert; the next instant a deer bounded out into the path, caught sight of him, fixed his brilliant eyes upon him, and stood petrified with terror for an inappreciable second, holding one forefoot uplifted. Then stamping with all four feet together and poising his antlered head backward in a splendid pose the buck sprang down the declivity, and with an incredible lightness and swiftness disappeared in the densities of the deep woods.
The showman stood in stunned amaze. He had before seen deer—in a disemboweled state and dead as Ariovistus, hanging at the door of a certain restaurant of Gotham that thus advertised its venison, and in the close confines of the zoological display in city parks, but in its natural state, in its native woods it was another creature. He had no dream that a deer was like this.
"Gee," he exclaimed, "I'm paralysed if he ain't the whole show!"
He could have cried out with delight when suddenly the river sought anew his companionship. Down deep in a ravine now it flowed, for he had been steadily climbing, although the zigzags of the mountain road had minimised the slant of the ascent. How darkly cool in its abysmal cliff-bound channel it looked, how melodiously chanting it was as it went. He wondered if he were to cross it again—not at this height, he hoped. But as he progressed ever higher and higher the stream seemed to sink, ever deeper and deeper, and presently the woods intervened to screen it from sight, and soon its voice grew faint as it wandered away till he could barely hear it, still singing, singing as it went, and then he was not sure if the sound were of murmurous waters or the sibilance of the wind.
For the wind was rising, and all the leaves were astir. A thousand voices seemed suddenly to invade the stillness. He wondered to hear a mocking-bird break out in jubilantly brilliant melody—he had thought the species silent at this time of the year; he was acquainted with them as they flourished in cages in barber shops. The trees of the dense woods were as if endowed with language, for he discriminated the difference in the rustling of the varieties of foliage as he passed—a keen sense he had. A tree-toad was shrilling hard by for rain. He could not see the creature; he had no idea to what the voice belonged, so limited was his woodland experience. He only noted the clamorous appeal. He was beginning to be tired. He wondered how far he had come at this brisk pace. Suddenly he fixed the terminus of his jaunt. The road forked at a little distance in advance, and he determined that he would not trust himself to unknown divergences of the main thoroughfare. He slackened his gait as he approached the parting of the ways. On one side the woods grew sparse, showing a deep declivity, a section of valley far, far below, and beyond a panorama of mountain ranges that took his breath away, one above another, one beyond another, tier after tier to the limits of vision. Infinity, that the mind cannot grasp, was here expressed to the eye. The amethystine tints imparted by the western light were upon them, and he knew, therefore, that they lay to the east, but despite the smile of the parting sun a great mass of darkly purple clouds lowered above them, raising a fictitious horizon line almost to the zenith. The wind was a-surge in these clouds and they visibly careened, and collapsed, and filled out anew as if they were sails spread to the fury of a gale, but no token of motion was in the densely wooded mountains beneath them, and only a gentle breeze ruffled the tree tops of the valleys, a silver wake following its invisible passage. On the other side of the road he noted how the timber had been cut away; a cornfield was yellowing in the sun, and at the summit of the slant he perceived, lazily adrift in the air, a whorl of smoke that issued from the crooked and dilapidated stick-and-clay chimney of a little log cabin, almost invisible, embowered amongst the boughs of an ample orchard of thrifty apple trees. Nearer at hand these gave way to peach trees planted in regular avenues and great numbers. In the dearth of manufacturing energies in the region and evidences of any agricultural industry, except of the simplest limits, he was surprised by these suggestions of enterprise and labour. The grassy glades between the rows of peach trees were alluring to the eye; some cereal had been sown and harvested, and in the aisles a lush growth of crab-grass had sprung up, new and thick and green as moss. The peaches had all been gathered, but the graceful lanceolate leaves were still dense upon the boughs, and the somnolent afternoon sunshine here and there flickered through, and lay in long, burnished golden shafts adown the green glooms.
And suddenly he was conscious of motion in their midst. He could not be sure how he had failed to see the figure earlier—or, indeed, had it just come within his range of vision. A girl was standing half in the golden glow, and half in the emerald gloom of the shadow, gazing up wistfully at a bough gently swaying just beyond her reach. As the breeze tossed it, he saw the prize that lured her—a great Indian peach, the last of the season, with all the sweetness of the summer suns, with all the freshness of the summer rains stored within the luscious darkly-red globe. She raised her hand, and made a sudden leap toward it with the lightness, the grace, the agile strength of a deer. The wind brushed the bough beyond her reach, and once more she bounded toward it elastically.
The indescribable grace of her attitudes appealed to the man whose education, and interest, and business in life were pose. Nothing more ethereally dainty was ever exploited before the footlights. He caught his breath, as, realising that she had not perceived him standing in the road, he gave himself up to staring at her, with a vague sense of a discovery growing upon him. Her dress, rustic though it was, impressed him as crudely picturesque. It was of the coarsest yellow calico, and she held up the skirt in front full of clusters of purple grapes, so overladen that the rich bunches and tendrils of vine trailed down upon her petticoat thus revealed, which was of a dark red cotton. A short petticoat it was, and showed her feet and ankles; her chaussure was of the flimsiest,—a pair of old rubber sandals, that, laced with thongs across her red hose, with only a utilitarian intent of retaining them in place, had contrived to achieve a classic effect; these members were so active, so swift and certain, so deftly used, so elastic of muscle as she skipped and leaped, that the idea of the boards was suggested anew—nopremière danseusethat he had ever seen could do a "turn" more daintily. She had all the sportive innocence of a fawn.
A certain difficulty encumbered her. She carried on her head a basket or a piggin, hardly visible so filled it was with grapes, the tendrils and clusters falling partly outside till they touched her thick auburn hair, coiled in a great curling mass at the back of her head. She now steadied this pail with one upheld hand, the arm bare to the elbow, and again she caught at the peach, her fair up-turned face smiling, her brown eyes alight with fun and yet all a-gloat, her full red lips parted over her perfect teeth, and as she danced she sang, or rather panted out, a stanza of a song that seemed inapposite save for the first line, which, perhaps, suggested it to her mind:
"Oh, shell I git my heart's desire,Kind shepherd, tell me true,That I may quit before I tire,My Kate has many come to sue.""Once you fail—'tis talking,Twice you fail—'tis mocking,Thrice you fail—'tis shocking,But a fool will ever play with fire."
"Oh, shell I git my heart's desire,Kind shepherd, tell me true,That I may quit before I tire,My Kate has many come to sue.""Once you fail—'tis talking,Twice you fail—'tis mocking,Thrice you fail—'tis shocking,But a fool will ever play with fire."
"Oh, shell I git my heart's desire,Kind shepherd, tell me true,That I may quit before I tire,My Kate has many come to sue.""Once you fail—'tis talking,Twice you fail—'tis mocking,Thrice you fail—'tis shocking,But a fool will ever play with fire."
"Oh, shell I git my heart's desire,
Kind shepherd, tell me true,
That I may quit before I tire,
My Kate has many come to sue."
"Once you fail—'tis talking,
Twice you fail—'tis mocking,
Thrice you fail—'tis shocking,
But a fool will ever play with fire."
Her voice was crudely loud, but so clear. Every tone was so justly true. The enunciation was faulty beyond any power of description, and at first it made him wince, albeit his own capacities for declamation were of no high order. Then her singing struck him as characteristic—good of its kind, but of a kind never classified. He had an instinct for novelty. The second time she sang the stanza, giving herself up with a sort of joyous abandon to the dance, for now she seemed hardly to hope to reach the peach, he was entranced with the picture she presented, the exquisite grace of her attitudes, the incomparable lightness and strength of her dancing, her beautiful, symmetrical form, and the strong sweet melody of her voice as it floated out so richly. He noted the contrast of her slender waist and limbs with the full throat—revealed by the bodice of the orange-tinted calico, the edges of which were turned in at the top for added coolness—the deep chest. With the vocal endowments the build assured the singer.
His interest was as impersonal as if she were indeed a feature of some Thespian exhibition. He had not thought how the scene must end—that if he moved she must descry him standing so near at hand in the road. And in fact he did not move—he was still motionless, spellbound, when a wider circuit of the tree brought him suddenly within her range of vision. She paused so abruptly as to jeopardise the equilibrium of the pail on her head and she lifted her hand to steady its profuse wealth of grape clusters, and thus she stood at gaze, her lips parted, her eyes dilated with astonishment.
He divined her sentiments at the moment of discovery, but he could not understand the facial expression that ensued. Her eyes narrowed with an inimical suggestion, watchful, expectant. Her red lips closed firmly. He had not before noticed how strong of contour was her chin, intimating resolution. He lifted his hat courteously, and waited for her to speak. She remained silent, and there was a moment of vacuum.
Then a sudden sound smote the stillness. A tremendous peal of thunder came from the mass of darkly purple clouds suspended above the mountains across the valley. As he instinctively turned his head, they were rent by a swift zigzag gleam of a sinister whiteness, and again the thunder pealed. The turmoils that had earlier convulsed the clouds had now taken definite direction. The wind was driving them hitherward across the valley, and for the first time in his life he heard the raindrops pattering down upon tree tops two thousand feet below him, while he stood high in the sunshine. One of the sudden mountain storms impended. In another moment, as he perceived, the torrents would be loosed upon them. He was arrayed to simulate prosperity; "out-at-elbows," even in a showman, is a confession of disaster. Had business been good he would have gone far less smart. He had a prudential consideration of shelter.
"Gee! There comes a corker!" he exclaimed. "Could I go to the house, lydy?"
He realised the incongruity of the address with this untutored peasant, but a sense of policy blended with his extravagant courtesy in its application. The "lady" gazed at him with that countenance of severe monition which he hardly understood.
"I was thinkin' ez ye mought ez well," she replied. Her answer was not so ungracious as irrelevant. He was a man of keen intuitions, and he was realising that their thoughts did not meet. She spoke of somewhat else than the storm. He was not a well-bred man in any sense. The impersonations of the stage comprised his tuition of conduct and courtesy, but he had the veneer which even the observation of the customs of gentility afford, the manners of the street, the trains, the theatre, and, as she threw down the bars of the fence and came into the road, he lifted his hat again, and prepared to walk by her side, and proposed to carry her pail. She said nothing. She only gave him a wide, uncomprehending stare, then fell into the road several paces behind him. For his life he could not avoid turning, and slackening his gait, that she might come up alongside.
"Keep right ahead," she said severely, and thus admonished he took up his line of march for the cabin on the hill.
She herded him along as a canine guardian of a flock might regulate the progress of a stray sheep. Once he again stepped instinctively to one side of the path in the expectation that she would join him, but she instantly crossed to the same side, and kept the distance the same between them, some two paces, even when the drops began to fall, and he quickened his gait to a speedy run. Only a short interval elapsed before they were at the bars of the pasture fence, which were already on the ground, and traversing the absolutely bare and hard-trodden dooryard to a log cabin of a most uninviting aspect.
He had scant opportunity to mark its details till he was on the rickety little porch where, looking over his shoulder, he had a cursory glimpse of its stereotyped features—strange enough to him; the wood-pile, situated on a sea of chips; the bee-gums, ranged along the fence; the grindstone; the ash-hopper; the rooting pigs in a corner; the cow, standing in a shed at one side waiting to be milked; a good strong waggon also under that shelter; a bevy of poultry, big and little, pecking about the door; a dozen curs of low degree noisily yelping around him, with so spurious an affectation of fierceness that it could not impose even on a stranger's fears; and a big bulldog, of a most ferocious silence, slowly dragging a block and chain from under the house. Infinitely incongruous the whole seemed with the imperial, august aspect of the purple, storm-dominated mountains beyond and the smiling serenity of the far sunlit valleys, their variant tones of green enriched by the burnished golden afternoon glamours, and by the silver glintings of the river coursing through the coves in the distance. The next moment the clouds fell like a curtain before them all. The thunder pealed; the torrents descended; the dooryard was a network of puddles, and the clamorous beat of the rain on the roof made the room into which he was ushered resound like a drum.