THE WINDFALL

A Novel

By CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK

Author of "The Bushwhackers," "The Prophet of the Great Smoky
Mountains," "The Amulet," "A Spectre of Power,"
"In the Stranger-People's Country," etc.

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1907

COPYRIGHT, 1907,
BY DUFFIELD & COMPANY

Published, March, 1907

Contents

THE WINDFALL

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 the rôle of 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."

"It is,—it is, 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 folks may come 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?—never in 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—no première danseuse that 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."

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.

CHAPTER II

Hilary Lloyd had never seen aught like this apartment. The beams of the low, unplastered ceiling, brown with smoke and age, were hung with strings of red peppers and bunches of herbs; the two beds, high and plump, were covered with gay patchwork quilts of marvellous design; the vast fireplace—he could hardly believe his eyes when he marked the clay-and-stick materials of its construction—looked as if it had been built by some big bird; the quaint pots, and ovens, and skillets, and trivets ranged in one corner he appraised as cooking utensils, but their like he had never before beheld; for a moment he did not recognise the use of a queer box-like cradle, which a faded young woman, with a snuff-brush in her mouth, was rocking with one foot, delegated to maternal duty, while she sat staring with lack-lustre eyes at the advent of the stranger with the daughter of the house.

"Hi!" he exclaimed delightedly. "Hello, Baby!" He did not wait to make sure of his welcome or for any formalities of introduction. He pounced down on the cradle, yanked out the infant from the coverlets, tossed it up to the ceiling, and then set it on the tall mantelpiece, holding it there with both hands to take a good look at it, while the members of the family stood around in wonder. Whether the child fancied that it had already met the showman and mistook his identity, whether this boisterous method of address accorded with its undeveloped sense of manners, whether the nap to which it had been consigned were compulsory and it rejoiced in its release, it responded genially to the demonstration in the spirit in which this was tendered. It was an attractive object as it sat on the high mantelpiece and flopped its very fat legs to and fro, frankly exhibited by its short pink calico skirt, and laughed widely with two pearly white teeth all agleam in a very red mouth. It had red hair, curling in very seductive ringlets about a fair brow, and its big blue eyes were as merry as a clown's. At every jocose movement of Lloyd's thumbs on its fat stomach, tickling it surreptitiously as he held the child on its perch, it burst into repeated peals of infantile laughter, and no one cared how hard the rain came down, or listened to the thunder roll.

"By George, you're a peach! you're a daisy!" cried Lloyd hilariously.

"Be you uns a family man, stranger?" a high vibratory voice queried, and Lloyd glancing down beheld at one side of the fire an ancient wrinkled face, surrounded by the crinkled ruffle of a great white cap, a venous hand, holding a pipe of strong tobacco at arm's length, and a thin bent figure attired in a blue and white checked homespun gown, with a little red plaid shoulder shawl.

"Good-evenin', madam," he said, snatching off his hat—one hand could hold the baby. "Family man?—nope!" he replied emphatically, and he shook his head sagely. "The kind of biz I'm in don't give a feller much chance at the domestic altar—winter and summer, night and day, on the go. As to the lydies—they ain't disposed to marry a man on the road."

He could not understand the appalled pallor that settled on her pinched high-featured face.

"Why n't ye git a better bizness?" she asked, with the plangent cadence of reproach.

He stared, again confronted with that sense of being at once uncomprehending and uncomprehended. "Do I speak the English langwitch, or not?" he said petulantly in his inner consciousness. For the situation fostered doubts.

The stress of the obvious misunderstanding placed a period to the carousal with the baby, and he handed the infant back to its mother as he took a tendered chair. The child had no mind to relinquish the gay company it had encountered, and clung to the showman, working both bare feet in the direction of its lackadaisical mother, with a very distinct intention of making her keep her distance, if kicks might suffice. Its strength did not match its resolution, however, and it was shortly consigned to its cradle, where it crawled up out of its coverings, whenever it was laid on its back, yelling vociferously and continuously, save when it paused once or twice to break into a laugh as Lloyd leaned over the back of his chair to snap his fingers at it.

"You have got a dandy place up here," he said by way of making his stay agreeable. "Fine orchard. Must have oodles of apples and peaches."

Again that doubt of the "English langwitch" assailed him. Surely he had said naught affrighting, but there was a look like terror in the old woman's eyes.

"Some o' the trees ain't good bearers," said the girl, speaking for the first time since their entrance. She had bestowed elsewhere her burden of grapes, and she was standing now on the broad hearthstone divested of those picturesque accessories to her costume. Lloyd was conscious of a curiosity concerning her beauty, thus devoid of embellishment, but as he turned to critically scan her appearance his attention was struck by a peculiarity that diverted his survey. She had just been out in the rain—yet how they had both run to reach the shelter before the bursting of the storm! She was evidently wet to the skin, and as she stood on the hot flagstones the water ran off her hair, her hands, her skirts in rills, and the heat of the fire sent the steam ascending from every drenched fold of her garments. Her errand had obviously been a matter of some importance toward which she had had little inclination, for she did not relish her dripping condition, as was manifested in the fact that she was immediately taking down a fresh gown from where it had hung on a nail on the back of a door, and rummaging in a chest for other dry gear. She did not leave the room, however, till a heavy step smote the puncheons of the porch, when she gathered up the fresh garments and climbing a ladder-like stairway to a room in the roof, disappeared in the attic.

She had gone to summon the master of the house on his account, Lloyd realised at length, and with a sentiment of expectant anxiety he turned toward the newcomer, although for his life he could not understand what should require the girl to face a tempest like this to bring the owner to reckon with a chance wayfarer, seeking shelter from a storm. The owner, nay, two, five, a half dozen stalwart men, heavily built, tall, bearded, clad in brown jeans, trooped in, their united tramp shaking the puncheons of the floor like the march of a detachment of infantry. They, too, dripped with the rain, but with more unconcern than the girl had manifested, for they ensconced themselves in chairs, two or three joining the group around the hearthstone, where winter and summer the mountaineer's fire is always aglow, its intensity governed by the temperature; the others leaned back against the wall, their splint-bottomed chairs tilted on the hind legs, all solemnly silent, all monotonously chewing their quids of tobacco, all stolidly eyeing the guest.

Only the eldest seemed to anticipate conversation. Not that he spoke himself, but he fixed his eyes so interrogatively, so coercively on Lloyd's face that the expression betokened a hundred eager questions. An account of himself was evidently in order—but why? Lloyd glanced out of the open door at the glittering, steely, serried ranks of the rainfall, thinking that as soon as they had marched past and down the valley he too would speedily evacuate the premises and see his queer entertainers never again—unless indeed they were minded to patronise the attractions of the great Lloyd & Haxon Street Fair now ready to exhibit in Colbury. The association of ideas allayed a sudden rush of anger which was rising in his consciousness, responsive to the uncertainty of his position, the peculiarity of their manner, the impossibility to compass an accord of comprehension in these simplicities of circumstance. It was stemmed in an instant by the instinct of the showman. Since he was expected by his uncouth host to inaugurate the conversation he would in the interest of the show waive ceremony and essay whatever topic came first to his tongue.

"Sudden storm, sir," he said. "I was out there admiring your fine orchards and it overtook me."

The host's jaw dropped. It was odd that his face could be so expressive, masked as it was by a bushy growth of red beard, evidently once of fiery tint, but now so veined with grey that the effect was quenched to a degree. Perhaps because all its indicia were of the conventional type their significance was easily discerned. His mouth, cavernous amidst the beard, stood open in readily interpreted dismay. His small brown eyes hung with a persistent appeal on the eyes of the stranger. His head bent forward stiffly, with an intent, expectant waiting. He uttered not a syllable.

"Great Scott! They all look as if they had seen a ghost!" thought the amazed Lloyd.

The next moment he felt a sudden touch on his knee, and turning sharply in his chair, perceived the old woman's tremulous claw bespeaking attention as she leaned forward toward him from her chimney corner. Her cap frills quivered in her agitation; her face was deathly pale. "Stranger," she said solemnly, "we make vinegar, an' sell it—an' not a thing else. Vinegar—vinegar—sell it to the stores in town."

Lloyd stared. He felt as if he were in a nightmare. Yet he could recall no nightmare that had ever exerted so great a strain on his mental endowments.

"Vinegar?" he said with a forced laugh. "Well, I don't take much stock in vinegar. I ain't one of the sour kind. Vinegar ain't good to drink. I couldn't pledge your health in that, lydy. With all of them fine fruits I should think you might make something better than vinegar."

The host spoke up acridly.

"Mam," he addressed the old dame, "you jes' hesh up." His voice was husky, as if he spoke with an effort—hasty, as if he scarcely knew what to say.

Lloyd turned upon him with a sudden flare of anger. "I don't want to call a man a cad in his own house," he flamed. "But the lydy will talk as she pleases while I'm aboard. I'd oodles rather talk to her than to you, sir."

The old woman had evidently lost her poise—she cast an amazed, affrighted glance upon her son. Then she clumsily sought to repair the damage that she fancied she had done. "Dried apples, stranger, an' dried peaches. We uns cut an' sell 'em ter the store—in town. Dried apples an' peach-leather."

"Very praiseworthy. But dried apples ain't the best thing that can come out of an orchard," Lloyd began, but the host cut him short.

"Mam," said the great, bearded giant, anticipating her reply—his face a very mask of terror—"ef you uns don't hesh up——"

"What will you do, eh? Nothing while I'm here," Lloyd blustered. "Why, man, you're a monstrosity. I've a mind to take you off with me!" There was a sudden stir behind Lloyd; he had a vague perception that the five other men were afoot with some intent, which he did not know, and for which he did not care. "I'll put you on exhibition in my show as the 'wild man of Persimmon Cove.' You ain't any more civilised than my big boa constrictor. You ought to draw a crowd all by your lonesome. What sort of behaviour is this for a son?"

"Oh," squealed the old woman savagely, "he is the best son that ever stepped—an' I'll mark the face o' the man who says the contrairy!" She held up her talons tremulously. "The best son that ever stepped."

"Mam," quavered the mountaineer, in despair, "you uns will ruin me bodaciously. Jes' hesh yer mouth an' hold yer tongue, ef so be ye know how."

Lloyd, still seated, looked up wonderingly at the group, now all afoot and gathered about him. He noted that the two younger men presently placed themselves by the door, as if he might make a break for liberty. He was aware, too, for the first time of the number of weapons on the walls. The rifle on deer antlers above the mantelpiece had caught his attention when he first entered, but now he took heed of others here and there sustained in place by pegs driven between the logs. This was not remarkable, perhaps, since there were several men in the family, but he was not used to seeing a living room unite its functions with that of an armoury. He could understand naught of the strange episode, and it had elements and suggestions infinitely distasteful to his predilections. "All I have got to say then is that bad is the best—if that is the best son," Lloyd persisted. "He has got no more feeling than the big snake in my show."

The word, mentioned for the second time, made a definite impression. There was a sudden absolute pause within. The wind outside rose and fell in sonorous gusts above the vast valley. The iterative beat of the rain on the roof was differentiated, in the myriad tentative touches of the drops, from the swirling splash of its aggregations from the eaves. The log on the andirons, long a-smoulder, broke in twain with a dull crash, its two ends falling apart on the piles of ashes in either corner, and sending up a shower of sparks and a cloud of pungent smoke. Even the padded footfalls of one of the dogs were discriminated in the silence as he trotted across the floor and stood at the door, gazing out at the rain for a moment, then with a blended yawn and whine stretched himself to unprecedented proportions and once more came back to lie on the warm hearth, where the group still stood motionless, towering expectantly over the visitor as Lloyd sat in his chair and stared blankly at them all.

"A show, stranger?" the husky voice of the master of the house ventured dubiously. "Be you uns got a show?"

"I have that," Lloyd declared promptly, "and don't you forget it. The Lloyd & Haxon Company. Greatest show on earth! Unrivalled attractions! Flying Lydy, Fat Lydy, Isaac, the snake-eater—eats 'em alive,—Captain Ollory, of the Royal Navy, greatest high-dive artist in the world—daily exhibition free,—finest Ferris Wheel ever seen, Merry-go-round with both saddles and chariots—great musical attractions—quartet of high-class singers, and daily recitals by Signor Allegro on the cornet—brass band concert before each performance—pyrotechnic exhibition at night, free ..." he reeled off this farrago with the utmost respect and seriousness while his host stared in astonishment.

"Stop—stop——" cried the showman suddenly. "I have got some pictorial paper here and other literachure of the company." He drew from his breast pockets some compactly folded posters which when opened out proved to be highly tinted illustrations of these unrivalled attractions. He sprang nimbly out of his chair and began good-naturedly to spread them out on the floor of the cabin at the feet of the old "lydy" who had threatened him with a passage at arms. The others stood around dumbly, doubtfully staring at the red and yellow daubs; even the dogs joined the circle, vaguely wagging their tails and now and then gazing up hopefully into their masters' faces, as if to demand when something in the nature of a banquet would ensue on so much show of interest. One of them, a pointer, suddenly impatient, walked across the paper, leaving on it the imprint of his toes damp from a recent excursion into the puddles of the porch. Lloyd caught him by the nose and lifted him off with one hand. "What d'ye mean by spoiling the portrait of the fat lydy," he said, and dropping on one knee he rectified the damage with his handkerchief.

"Where?—where, stranger?" demanded the old woman in a twitter of the keenest curiosity. "Waal, sir!" eyeing the picture, "she is bodaciously broad. Air that thar a speakin' likeness, sir?"

"Honest, she is fat," said Lloyd. "She has to ride in a cart by her lone. But she is a very nice lydy—high-toned. I feel sorry for her."

"Why?" asked the girl, unexpectedly.

Lloyd glanced up doubtfully at her from his lowly posture, then slowly rose to his feet.

"Well," he said, turning his head thoughtfully to one side, as if to scrutinise his impressions, "I always was sorry for freaks. They are always in demand, and they generally earn a handsome salary, but money ain't everything—money can't make people happy."

He stopped short, reflecting that a comparatively small amount would add very materially to his prospect of felicity.

Once more he had a shuddering sense of a venerable claw laid on his arm. The old woman was at his side. "Stranger," she said mysteriously, "ef anybody in town axes you ef we uns make money up hyar on the mounting you kin jes' sw'ar ez ye knows 'tain't true. We uns ain't got nuthin' ter make money with."

Lloyd gazed in amazement at her—then around at the humble place with every evidence of poverty, and to his mind, discomfort. But he could not with civility acquiesce in her statement and he hesitated.

"Mam," her son plained, "ye air wuss than pore, ye air plumb deranged. This hyar man air a showman."

"And I want you, sir, for a freak!" Lloyd declared rudely. "Allow me, lydy, to present you with some free tickets for the show, for yourself and these other two lydies. These will be good for any day and the whole biz, if you can come down to Colbury one day this week." He was shuffling the little blue and red cards in his hands, his instinct being to include the entire family, but a recollection of the acrid remonstrances of "Captain Ollory of the Royal Navy" on the occasion of similar generosities, stayed his hand.

"Naw, sir, naw sir! nare one," the head of the family had found his ordinary sonorous voice. "We may be pore, ez Mam says, but we pay ez we go. We kin tote our end of the log. We'll attend the show—but we ain't wantin' nobody ter gin us a treat."

"Shadrach,—Shadrach," quavered out the old woman in a twitter of anxiety, "whut ye talkin' 'bout. Ye know ye ain't got no money—an' you ain't got no way—no way—ter git no money."

"Hesh that up, Mam," the son admonished her, "else you'll go deestracted, and eend yer days with a gag in yer mouth an' tied ter the bedpost."

"Cheese it, I tell you!" Lloyd confronted him angrily. "You will stow your tongue while I'm here or I'll give you what for. I'd floor you anyhow for a nickel, but you are too old for me to touch."

"S'pose you uns try me!" one of the young mountaineers beside the door stepped forth.

He was like unto the sons of Anak, gigantic of build, every movement informed with elasticity and vigour, and the others broke into a great guffaw, so slight by contrast, so girlishly dapper did Lloyd appear, with so rose pink a flush in his cheek as he stood on the hearth. But his eyes flashed at the challenge, and as the muscular young mountaineer approached, carefully eyeing him, he threw off his coat and "bunched his fives" without a moment's hesitation.

The rural giant's lunge was something frightful in its weighty impetuosity. The stranger side-stepped with lightning-like swiftness; his arm flew out in a sudden counter-stroke that landed with an impact like the click of a solid shot; the little cabin shook on its foundations and rang with a clatter that discounted the tumults of the storm as the young mountaineer "went to grass" with a precipitancy that left hardly an available muscle in his whole big body.

There were some capacities for the enjoyment of sport and a sense of fair play in the applause of the others, for Tom Pinnott showed that he was not seriously hurt by ruefully gathering himself together and sitting where he had fallen on the floor, sheepishly laughing and rubbing his shoulder.

"How on yearth, stranger," demanded old Shadrach Pinnott, who seemed to bear no grudge for the several smart admonitions as to his filial conduct which the young showman had administered, "How on yearth did ye ever contrive ter throw Tawm."

"Oh, I have had experience in the ring," said Lloyd, pulling on his coat. "I trained with a good prospect for the light-weight championship, but I gave it up. I don't like to fight. I have got the sand all right, but I have got to get my mad up to fight with any spirit. Now, what I like in a public performance is to show some kind of merit, you know, of fine flavour. I mean something pleasing—that don't hurt nobody, nor leave nobody in the lurch, nor make much of one man to destroy another's prospects. Competitions ain't my lay at all. Now, if I could choose I'd like to exhibit a song-and-dance such as this lydy here was enjoying in the orchard. That would hit the taste of the public, too—to a charm—to a charm."

He wagged his head with the emphasis of conviction. An exquisite bit of rusticity, he felt it to be, as refined, as delicate, as free from the rough edges of common country life, idealised because of the girl's grace and beauty, yet as genuinely bucolic as a pastoral poem or painting. He had begun to ply her with insistence. If the "lydies" would come down he would arrange so that it shouldn't cost them a cent. By fair rights she ought to be paid for dancing and singing, and as she cried out in amazed ridicule of the idea he assured her that in the outside world this happened every day. Ladies received money, legal tender, actual currency, for nothing but singing and dancing. "And few of them can do a turn like you," he declared. But because of his partner—and he paused to disclose to them in a voice of mystery the exceedingly pertinent fact that Captain Ollory of the Royal Navy, whose real name was Haxon, was a partner in the enterprise, and without his consent he dared not offer her money till she had been tried and the public captured.

"Do you think you would be scared?" he asked, ready to reassure the delicate feminine sensibility.

"Skeered o' whut?" she demanded wonderingly.

If she could not instinctively prefigure shrinking from the crowds, from the strange situation, he determined that he would not suggest the poignant anguish of stage fright, and the thought occurred to him for the first time that this was a product of civilisation, the evil of self-consciousness, the prescience of carping criticism or ridicule. He made haste to say that the tent of Isaac, the snake-tamer, where he was wont to "eat 'em alive" was at the other end of the Square from the tent wherein she would sing and dance. True, the "Wild Man" was a close neighbour, but since she was to be in effect for a time a member of the company he would disclose in confidence the circumstance that Wick-Zoo, the Wild Man, was getting to be quite civilised, in fact—in fact—he burst out laughing,—Wick-Zoo was a pretty good fellow. She need have no fear of Wick-Zoo, the Wild Man.

Then he piped up with a very pretty tenor and sang the air which he had caught from hearing it in the orchard, and gave her some points as to the management of her voice to make more of it for the public behoof.

And while the old grandmother listened sharp-eyed and spellbound, the girl, proving docile and tractable, sought to apply his admonitions and criticism, and now and again his dulcet tenor tones rang out to illustrate some axiom. The group of mountain men lingered for a time, but presently drifted out to the rain-drenched porch, where drops still trickled from the eaves. The storm was over; as they gazed out down the valley they saw that it had become all of a luminous emerald green with vast clouds of pearl white vapours shimmering and glistening as the sun smote upon them, floating between the purple mountains near at hand and half veiling the distant azure ranges. A sudden rainbow sprung into the light, spanning the abysses from Chilhowee to the Great Smoky heights, and further down the valley, like a faint reflection of its glories, a duplicate arch was set in the mists beyond. With stolid unperceptive eyes they mechanically dwelt upon the scene—it was to them but the ordinary aspect of life. They appreciated naught of its splendours, its vastness, its pictorial values, its uplifting subtlety of suggestion. It meant to them that the rain was over and that sunset would soon emblazon the west. Cows were to be milked, the stock to be fed, the wood to be cut, and perhaps other duties pressed upon their recollection, for Tom presently said in a low voice to his father, "Granny mighty nigh let the cat out'n the bag."

Shadrach Pinnott warily nodded his head in assent.

Another of his sons spoke up after cautiously listening to be sure that the newcomer could hear naught but his own carolling, "'My Kate has many come to sue!'"

"Ef he hed been what Clotildy took him fur the whole secret would hev been out fur true."

The bare suggestion that this danger might have so nearly menaced them put the whole group out of countenance.

"Ye 'low ez ye be sure, dad, ez he air nuthin' but a showman like he say?" asked Daniel, the eldest of Shadrach's sons, a slow, sedate-looking man of thirty years. "Ye 'low he didn't sense nuthin' o' the facts from them words that Granny let fall?"

Shadrach Pinnott's shock head bent in his deep cogitation. "He hed the papers an' the tickets of a showman," he argued. "An' thar hev been word of a Street Fair comin', down in Colb'ry."

"An' he hev got the muscle an' the showin' of a reg'lar prize-fighter," said Tom, the athlete, bethinking himself to rub his shoulder.

"An' lis'n," said the crafty old moonshiner; "he sings like a plumb mocking-bird. In my opinion the whole Revenue Department ain't ekal ter sech quirin' ez that."

And once more the dulcet plaint "My Kate has many come to sue," challenged the echoes.

CHAPTER III

For a long time after Lloyd had quitted the place Clotilda Pinnott stood on the porch and listened to his retreating footsteps. An impressive silence had succeeded the turmoils of the storm. No more the echo repeated the sonorous proclamation of the imperious thunder. One could hardly realise how the trumpeting wind had blared through those narrow, deep, mute valleys with their yet more secluded, cup-like coves. The glancing lyrical notes of the rain, falling on the ear like myriads of uncomprehended words keyed to harmony in rhythmic measure, had left but now and again the patter of glittering silver drops from the low-hanging boughs of some moisture-weighted tree. In this quiescence of nature she could mark his progress, as silent, too, she leaned against the post of the rickety porch, her fresh gown of faint blue cotton still distinct in the fading light, so clarified was the air, so pervasive the reflection of the great expanse of the deeply yellow western sky, glowing like burnished copper above the dusky purple mountains that deployed against the horizon line, high above the emerald valleys below. Now she heard the impact of his foot on stone, and again it was the shifting of sand and gravel dislodged by his step that told her he had turned the curve of the road; now she knew he was almost immediately in a line with the house, but nearly a thousand feet below on the mountain side. She was apprised when he passed the chalybeate spring, not indeed by the sound of his tread, for the distance here was too great; some vague reverberations began to issue from the gigantic gneiss cliff hard by that rose austere, grey, columnar, nearly one thousand feet sheer, standing out in half relief from the main mountain mass like a flying buttress of some buried castle in the mythical days of the giants. Its niched and creviced summit was on a level with the cabin perched so high on the mountain side, and now and then a broken vibration betokened the sound of a step below; then came the echo of a voice faintly singing the orchard song. Then silence—a long lapse of time—and still silence.

"He's gone," she said. "He's gone!"

She sighed with a vague languor, an unappreciated pain, and shifted her posture. The tension of her vigilance was relaxed. She stretched up both her arms against the post and dully yawned. Then she looked out at the scene with the effect of observing it for the first time. For a long interval she gazed at the burnished translucent yellow glow of the west that despite its brilliance seemed to diffuse no light upon the world below. Shadows were mustering; the valley beneath could hardly be discerned now, but for the rising of the mists. Their white glimmer among the darker tree tops prolonged the visibility of the forests. Only the horizon line, sharply drawn against the saffron glamours of the heavens, preserved the contour of the mountains, otherwise lost in the dull purplish dusk.

No longer silence reigned. First she heard the tremulous trilling of a tree-toad; a pause ensued in the moist vacuity of the atmosphere, and then came a raucous tentative note of a frog, and presently there sounded a dozen like voices, and now the air rocked to and fro with the strophe and antistrophe of the batrachian tribe, all a-croak by the water courses, and the continuous shrilling of the cicada. All were loud in the calm twilight, so loud that an appreciated sense of silence seemed attendant on the evening star, pellucid, white, quivering in the yellow glow of the west, and the slow dropping of the crescent moon adown and adown the sky.

Clotilda appeared as if she were going to meet it, as she suddenly stepped into the bridle path and began to take her way up the steep ascent of the mountain. A pine tree showed high against the heavens, and as she looked the moon seemed for a time as if entangled amidst its fibrous boughs. Then, as the direction of the path veered, the mystic cresset once more swung against the rich daffodil sky, with opaline glimmers trailing after on all the sea of mist which now submerged valley and forest, still vibrant with the voices of the night; the mist rose above the precipices to the left and tossed its waves, spectre-like, detached, flickering amongst the dense jungle of the laurel growths through which the path had begun to stray. Its trend grew difficult to discern; now it was obliterated, then it reappeared, and again was altogether and finally lost to view. A darksome, dubious way to be sure, and lonelier than aught might express. Even Clotilda lingered, reluctant, perhaps, turning her white face toward the moon, its glamour full upon her pensive pallor. The darkness annulled all else save only this elfin face among the glossy leaves gazing on the magic bow of pearl and loath to quit the light. Suddenly she was gone.

The rhododendron jungle closed about her. If there were ever a path in its densities only memory might discern it, so thick and interlacing were the evergreen branches. Down and down she went, retracing her way, it might seem, and ever and anon parting the redundant dripping boughs to gaze upward at the moon. She evidently steered her course through this sea of leaves by its station in the sky. More than once she deviated from a direct line, but it was an oft-travelled route and she showed no signs of hesitation or doubt. When she reached a moss-covered rock, lying with a score of its unbroken kind in the density of the jungle she seated herself for an interval of rest after her long tramp, betraying not an instant's uncertainty of the landmark. She rose presently, passed between the great boulder and another, impossible to be distinguished from it even in the light of mid-day, stepped down into a crevice beneath them, and vanished from the world.

She had entered an underground passage so often traversed that the gruesome lonely way did not seem long to her, nor more beset with danger than a dark hall of one's familiar home. Her foot struck upon rock here and there where obviously there had been drilling and blasting to remove obstructions to free passage; now and again a wing passed her, and as with a woman's horror of a bat she shrank aside, the uncanny, mouse-like cry of the creature smote the silence with a nerve-thrilling shrillness and she set her teeth in endurance, though all on edge from the repetitious echo. Louder sounds soon caught her attention and these too the echo multiplied. She seemed to hear many voices in the infinitely lonely subterranean reaches of the mountain. At last a vague light began to glimmer dully at the end of a long descent. As she drew nearer and turned suddenly the cavern opened broadly before her and the flash in her eyes was almost overpowering for a moment. She stood still as she always did here, and put her face in her hands to gradually accustom her sight to the transition from intensest gloom to glare.

Yet it was not that the light in itself was so powerful. The glimmer of a tallow dip, however, was adequate to summon glittering coruscations from the great crystals of iridescent calc-spar that studded the ceiling, and the limestone walls reflected the light with myriad sparkles. Their gleaming whiteness was shared by the stalactites which hung down from the roof to meet the stalagmites uprising from the floor, and in the midst of this colonnade of the fantastic sculpture of the waters and the ages—even now she could hear the ceaseless trickle as drop by drop the mountain rill, charged with its solution of lime, wrought out the purpose of creation—the moonshiner had mounted his still. The great rotund copper, standing over the rude furnace of stone masonry, the slouching uncouth figures of the distillers, with their grotesque shadows following them amidst these columns of mystic whiteness, the coiling worm, the big ungainly mash-tubs, the reeking mass of refuse pomace at one side, were all as incongruous with the weird subterranean beauty of the place as some unseemly work of kitchening wrought in the halls of a palace.

And indeed even these uncultured louts could not be insensible of the unique splendours of these surroundings. Unlike the majesty of the mountain landscape, rendered stale by custom, since from birth they had known naught else, this expression of nature was rare and strange, and now and again their minds opened to its aspect.

"I jes' tell you uns, boys," Shadrach Pinnott sometimes remarked over his meditative pipe, "the looks o' this hyar spot air plumb splendugious. Even the parlour in the hotel at Colb'ry ain't ez fine a sight ez this place, fur I hev walked along the front porch thar, an' looked in the door an' viewed it."

The rare qualities of the place aided their appreciation, for though caves, vast and varied, were common in the mountains, and also "rock-houses," as limited grottoes of special geological deposits were called, they were generally of a different formation. This was not a limestone region, and only through some gigantic "fault" of the ranges, bringing diverse and alien strata into juxtaposition this calcareous cavern, these halls of white stone, with their stately colonnades and semblance of statuary and fantastic carvings, became possible. It was not, however, sufficiently rare to render it a curiosity or to lure hither the unwelcome explorer. Along the line of the range, perhaps within the purlieus of the same vast upheaval, a few limestone caves were known to the experience or the tradition of the mountaineers. But it was the only one of which the Pinnotts had knowledge, and they piqued themselves upon the fact that their discovery was not shared. Its existence, so far as Shadrach Pinnott was aware, was absolutely unsuspected save to a few woodsmen like himself whose prowlings amidst the primeval wildernesses of the Great Smoky had led them to these deep seclusions, and these were associated in the profit and the dangers of the illicit distillery. Thrice since the still had been in operation under the white splendours of the stalactitic roof had the marshal's men scoured this region in search of the manufacturers of moonshine whisky—thrice had they ridden away no wiser than they came. Old Shadrach began to fancy his stronghold impregnable, to look forward to a long lease of vinous prosperity. While it might be rumoured that he was concerned in the "wild-cat," he could not be tracked to his lair, and much immunity had made him daring and enterprising.

Even now the girl's entrance remained unnoticed in the vehemence of the remonstrance urged upon him, as he sat on one of the stalagmites that had risen only a few feet from the floor, the stalactite depending from above scarcely reaching the top of his old wool hat. He looked as immovable, as impervious to argument, as if his uncouth figure piecing out the column were of the same material.

"It's a resk—it's a turrible resk," one of the younger men was saying. He had an eager, ardent aspect, unlike the usual mountain type, the dull lack-lustre Pinnott men. He had large, excited brown eyes, and his chestnut hair hung in straight locks to the collar of his blue hickory shirt. His cheeks were red, and now that his blood was up it looked as if it might burst through them. He was tall and agile. He wore his boots drawn to the knees over his brown jeans trousers—there were spurs on the heels and his belt held a pistol. He stood in the flare of the tallow dip glimmering from a low stalagmite which was consigned to other table-like usage and held also a pone of bread, a box of tobacco, a pipe, and an old hat. The others had paused at their labours, the discussion evidently being a matter of special importance, and looked around without other change of posture. Tom Pinnott, stooping to lift a keg of "singlings" to the doubling still, his head lower than the vessel, seemed as if he might have been petrified in that attitude, so little did it seem possible to sustain it by mere muscle.

"It's a resk, to be sure," said Shadrach Pinnott, his face under his shock of red hair as devoid of animation as if it had been carved from a turnip. "But everything is a resk. Livin' is a resk—no man knows what he air goin' ter run up agin pernicious afore night,—but we uns all resk it."

"We uns don't all resk the revenuers though—fur nuthin'," Eugene Binley declared significantly.

It was a word seldom mentioned here—the old moonshiner elected to affect free agency and fear of naught. If he had been asked he would have averred that this place was selected because of its peculiar convenience in getting the gear easily down from the mountains. It had a great shaft-like opening only fifty feet above the valley, and by means of a "rope-and-tickle," as he called it, the kegs and barrels were lowered to a level space in a most secluded nook, whence they could be taken in the midst of the jungle of the laurel and rolled down the incline of a sandy slope, loaded into a waggon on the bank of the river and thence conveyed along the highway under cover of the night to the store of the merchants hardy enough to handle this extra-hazardous ware. Shadrach Pinnott would never have admitted in words the necessity to elude the raiders of the revenue force. He had so long enjoyed safety, ease, the pursuit unmolested of his chosen vocation, that he actually felt well within his rights, and that no interference with him was either justifiable or possible. This immunity had given his courage a tinge of fool-hardiness inconsistent with his age, his earlier devices of precaution, and the terrible and certain penalties of discovery. His character had taken on an arrogance unsuited to a man so obnoxious to the law. He knew, of course, that suspicions of moonshining had clung about his name, but never with aught of proof. The marshal's force came and went, and perhaps he was in their minds merely rated with others maligned by malice without a cause, for except that he was an unusually good farmer, and raised great crops of corn and orchards of fruit, no evidence of illicit distilling could be urged against him. For his crops and fruit, valueless on account of the distance from the rail and the impossibility of such cumbrous transportation with a profit, he could show great droves of well-fed hogs, and they, easily driven through the country, always found a market and brought fair prices. Therefore suspicion on this score was readily evaded, although his detractors significantly averred that hogs are always fattest when fed on distillery mash.

Dangers had grazed him close, however. Once his waggon had been stopped in the road with a barrel of "wild-cat" whisky under a load of goose-feathers. The driver at the approach of a body of mounted men had taken the alarm, cut the traces and fled with the team, and till it rotted the waggon had stood there unclaimed, its ownership unproved, and suspicion could not warrant even the arrest of a man with two good waggons in his shed and feather-beds on every couch in his house. These incidents and their discussion might well sharpen the eyes of the law, and to Eugene Binley it seemed actually opening the lion's jaws by main force to go to the Street Fair in the dry town of Colbury with a waggonload of the liquid product of the fiery still, under the flimsy disguise of baskets to sell. He had urged this to no avail.

"Them baskets?—why, me an' my industrious fambly hev been weavin' them splints all las' winter," and Shadrach gave a humorous snuffle intended to express the humble, frugal hopes of the worthy poor. Then he broke out into a satirical guffaw.

But the blunt mention of the "revenuers" was more distasteful. He could but feel his jeopardy when it was thus brought before him. Perhaps,—who knows?—now that he was old he regretted his course for the sake of his sons, to whom he must leave so desperate a vocation, so rash an example, so uncertain a fate. The delight of defying the law when the conscience can apprehend no wrong,—for Shadrach Pinnott could never be brought to perceive that he had not an inalienable prerogative to do as he chose with his own, his corn, his fruit, to feed them, to distil them, to export them, for were they not his, had he not wrested them from his own land by the sweat of his brow, the work of his hands,—better men have shared and resisted encroachments, and defied taxation, and risen in defence of claims that the law disallowed and made them law. Of late years he had more earnestly argued this position within himself, and now and again in full conclave as they all sat in the chill white cavern over the coiling toils of the worm, the younger men drinking in his prelections that had the native strength of apple brandy. He was an autocrat amongst them; it was an indignity, an affront, a disrespect to his grey hair and his pre-eminence in his station to confront him, even in warning, with so appalling and degrading a disaster. He retorted instantly.

"Waal, the resk ain't much ter be medjurin'," he said. "Folks that ain't so damned quick on the trigger ain't got no call ter be so powerful 'feared."

Eugene Binley winced palpably for a moment. Then his dark eyebrows met above his blazing eyes and the blood surged up from his cheeks to the roots of his hair. His breath came hard and fast. He turned from one to the other as two of the Pinnott sons, taking the word from their father, began alternately to bait him.

"Which air you uns mos' afeard of, Eujeemes—ter stay hyar by yer lone an' let the revenuers ketch ye?"

"Or ter go ter Colb'ry along o' we uns an' hev the sher'ff nab ye?" the other agreeably suggested.

Eugene Binley stood snorting like an angry horse, glancing first at the one with a bag of grain on his shoulder and then at the other with the keg of singlings, as both, half bent, leered up at him from under their shocks of frowsy light hair, their long tobacco-stained teeth all bared in their flouting laugh. His right hand was continually touching the butt of his pistol in his belt, and drawing back as if he found it scorching hot. The old man felt called upon to interfere.

"Leave Eujeemes be, boys," he said pacifically. "'Twon't do ter bait him like a b'ar. Mos' men in the mountings hev killed a man, fust or las', funnin' or fightin'. Eujeemes ain't the fust an' 'tain't likely ez he will be the las'."

"But 't war self-defence," the harassed creature cried out in a harsh, strained voice. He had made this plea often enough at the bar of conscience—his flight had precluded his arraignment at the bar of justice. "'T war self-defence—the world knows it, and the law allows it."

"Then why n't ye leave it ter men, Eujeemes?" Tom's strong back was still bent under the keg of singlings, and his face was still maliciously a-grin. Shadrach could not so easily call off his pack.

This problem of "leaving it to men," the rural synonym of a court of justice, had tortured the hunted fugitive day and night. With the limited mental development of a backwoodsman and the lack of urban or worldly experience he could not measure the unseen forces to which he might consign his fate and thus he resolved and then shrank back, and ventured forth to again run precipitately to cover. What the lawyers could prove and what they could not; how much their own codes constrained them and what they stretched here and let fall slack there; what powers the judge possessed; how grim was the jail; how fell and rancorous were the officers of the constabulary—he could not decide. And thus he lurked here innocent of the crime of which he dreaded to be accused, and by his lurking he became inculpated with the illicit distillery. Now he was doubly amenable to arrest—to escape on one score would convict him on another, and the suggestion that he should leave aught to men had become a nettling taunt. As he remained silent Ben flung at him in antistrophe—"Ef he be so willin' ter leave it ter men why do he shelter hyar with we uns?"

Once more Shadrach sought to interfere, beginning in an unctuous soothing voice—"Stop, boys, stop, boys," when suddenly Clotilda stepped forward into the white lustre of the sparkling walls and the glimmer of the tallow dip. Her presence ended logic. "Why, thar's daddy's leetle gal! How do, Baby. Been singin' an' chirpin' with the stranger man like a grasshopper in August weather."

Clotilda received this simile with a shrug of disdain. She had begun to think exceedingly well of her gifts of singing and dancing and scarcely cared that they should be so lightly and jocosely mentioned. Vanity of all the human traits is the most easily cultivated, and when Eugene Binley, gathering his composure, asked if she were going to Colbury, too, with the others, she replied with a duplicate of the shrug—"Why, 'course I be. They air all goin' jes' on account o' Me."

CHAPTER IV

An extreme surprise at the good fortune of another is an ungrateful sentiment and must needs be warily expressed. It tends to the suggestion that the reward exceeds the merits in the case, and Eugene Binley by no means commended himself by the astonishment with which he now heard for the first time the extraordinary fact, which Clotilda detailed to him, that her singing and dancing had so entranced the town-man that he had besought the Pinnott family to come to the Street Fair without money and without price, and that there she was to sing and dance for all the crowd to wonder at her gifts and grace.

"That ain't whut the Pinnott men-folks air goin' fur," he said bluntly; "they air goin' ter sell whisky in that thar dry town." And he pointed over his shoulder at a load of splint baskets which several were bringing out of a remote recess, and which were always unused and fresh, kept as a light disguise for a waggon otherwise laden. "It's mighty dangerous," he added. But she made no comment. Presumably she thought the men were able to take care of themselves.

He hesitated for a moment, then recurred to the subject important to none but himself and her.

"Singin' with the stranger-man! I wondered why you uns war so long a-comin' down."

He lifted one hand to that miracle of nature, the snowy stalagmite that expressed the marvels wrought by time, that aggregated drops of water, each with its charge of lime, falling and falling on the floor beneath till the great pillar stood complete. As he leaned thus he looked down reproachfully upon her.

It was hard for her to regain her wonted state of mind. So fluttered, so elated she had been.

"It ain't much later than common," she said absently, fingering a red bead necklace around her throat. He, who knew her simple gauds, was aware that she rarely wore it and accounted it a treasure. He divined that it had been donned to rejoice the eyes of an admiring stranger.

"I s'pose he war all streck of a heap?" he said craftily, his eyes narrowing as he looked intently at her.

"I dunno 'bout that," she laughed coquettishly.

"What sort o' appearin' man war he?" Eugene demanded, arrogating the prerogative of inquisition.

He was not altogether at ease amongst the men, and was sometimes conscious of a disadvantage with them, owing to the anomaly of his position, forced into a crime against the Federal law, of which he became guilty to evade trial for a crime against the State law of which he knew himself innocent. He had not demonstrated any great judgment or capacity in this course, and he knew it affected their estimate. Other men had done more heinous deeds who swaggered openly in the coves. It was in the first rush of terror, the first ill-considered impulse that he had come here, and once entrusted with the moonshiners' secret he could not, he would not draw back. Ill luck might befall them, and here indeed was a danger. The fate of the informer, real or suspected, was a more inevitable terror than all else that menaced him. But he felt all a man's ascendency over the feminine mind, and indeed she divined naught as she replied to his questions.

"Waal, he is just a pretty boy—plumb beautiful! Mighty nigh ez sweet-faced ez any gal."

"I say 'boy'!" he replied incredulously. "They tell me ez he laid Tawm out flat with one lick. Tawm hev been lame in the shoulder ever sence."

"Waal—he is surely strong, though only middle-sized, but mild-eyed—sorter babyfied."

"Shucks! I say babyfied. Waal—all you uns goin' ter the show, an' hyar I be 'feared ter stir,—hid up hyar in a hole in the rocks like a wolf or a painter an' ez ef thar war a bounty on my skelp."

"'Tain't but fur a week—less 'n a week," she urged.

"You uns don't keer—else ye wouldn't go," he said, dropping his voice, and all his heart was in his eyes as he looked down at her.

She had her moments of perspicacity. "Then I won't go," she said, with the facile self-abnegation of one who knows that the tendered sacrifice will not be accepted.

He suddenly came from his negligent posture to the perpendicular, tense and nervous. "Naw, naw—I don't want that nuther," he protested as she had expected.

"I 'lows ye don't rightly know whut 'tis ye do want!" she declared with an air of flouting impatience.

"Yes, I do too—but I couldn't abide ez ye should miss seein' the show—an' mebbe later in the week I'll slip down, too."

A genuinely serious look usurped the feignings of her face. "Better mind, Eujeemes," she admonished him, "ye mought meet the sher'ff face ter face in the street. He be well acquainted with you uns—ye hev tole me that!" She nodded her head with an expression of dreary foreboding.

"Waal," he said desperately, but evidently faint-hearted, "I could leave it ter men."

She looked at him in rising irritation, half minded to withhold the remonstrance that she knew he pined to hear. His own sense of prudence made him yearn for an urgency of caution. But she was yet vibrating with the unwonted excitements of the afternoon, yet aglow with the realisation of an admiration all unaccustomed in its expression and its subject. She was well aware that she had been considered a "powerful pretty gal" throughout the countryside, and though the small distorted surface of a cheap mirror afforded no adequate reflection of her beauty, it was well-pleasing to her untutored eye, and was called into frequent consultation. But this popular repute was an homage shared by a dozen other mountain nymphs, and in more than one instance she was surpassed in public esteem chiefly on account of the tint of her red hair and the tiny freckles here and there marring the exquisite fairness of her face, despite all that baths of buttermilk and May dew could compass.

The incense that the manager offered at her shrine had a new and intoxicating flavour. It was unique, for her alone. It was such as an artist might feel at the first view of some fine example of a great painter's work, or a virtuoso's joy in the discovery amongst refuse lumber of a genuine Cremona. She could not, of course, discriminate the quality of his feeling, but she had never seen a man's face kindle with that impersonal fervour of delight which illumined his when he looked at her dancing pose and listened to the tones of her voice. She had begun to feel very kindly toward one who made her feel so kindly toward herself. Since she had discovered that her father considered it impossible that he could be an emissary of the revenue force seeking the moonshiner's lair, for which she had mistaken him when she had so jealously guarded him to the house that he might render an account of himself to the head of the enterprise, she had given rein to her interest in his personality; she had realised with a sort of wondering pleasure the delicacy, the refinement of the beauty of his face; her heart warmed to the look in his eyes. She had now no doubts of him; that universal attraction which his candid nature seemed to exert on all the world had too its influence on her. She had begun to entertain a sort of veneration for him, his wide experience, his evident singular knowledge of many things beyond her ken—with how few words he had seemed to make her voice, even to her limited comprehension, a different endowment, infinitely sweeter, stronger, with added liberties of compass. She longed even now to try the phrases which he had inculcated, telling her to sing them at short intervals and with due care, to assume her natural beautiful dancing poses, which he had taught her to accent for the greater effect.

The unknown vast world from which he had come had evolved a sudden interest for her; heretofore she had not even bethought herself to be aware of its existence, save as it now and again spewed out the revenue force, with their sombre menace, to be presently lost again in its unimagined turmoils.

Her mind was full of speculations concerning him. He was her first illustration of the gradations of society; he seemed to her a person of vast importance; she had a sort of reverence for the splendours of his calling; he was a showman—a part owner of the great enterprise whose "pictorial paper" he had spread upon the cabin floor, and he had opened to her a world of wonders to contemplate. Her beautiful eyes grew soft and bright with the thought of him.

Her mind longed to follow the trend of these new reflections. She was tired all at once of Eugene Binley's woes. The injustice in his incarceration here in the moonshiner's den was itself like the penance of imprisonment for a crime of which he believed himself innocent. Yet in putting the question to the test he risked more than his liberty—his life itself was jeopardised. His hard case had appealed to her woman's sympathy—the future was dim, veiled, he might not divine the issue of a day. He had had a certain interest for her; he was of a more dashing personality than the duller men she had known. The impulsive temperament that had lured him to his doom had a quality that struck her fancy in dearth of other attractions. He was quick, keen, fiery, and he had a spark of imagination that imparted warmth to others, bare and cold of mental attributes. He had added to his more definite and obvious troubles the æsthetic grief of falling desperately in love, and in a cautious and dubious way she had responded. This was a sentimental result of the privilege of shelter which Shadrach Pinnott had not anticipated, and which he by no means favoured. He had secured for the bare boon of subsistence an additional stalwart worker at the still, and one whose secrecy was pledged for the best of reasons. That Eugene Binley could not venture freely forth like the others, that he was not subject, therefore, to disclose by inadvertence in casual conversation the secrets of the trade, since he saw no one not concerned in the illicit manufacture, gave him an added value to his employer which Shadrach was not slow to appreciate. More countenance than shelter and subsistence he had no mind to afford him. Shadrach had taken no steps, however, to balk the romance thus far. He had some knowledge, perhaps, of the inconstancy of the feminine heart, and relied on this to furnish in due time the solution of the problem, or perhaps like many other people he merely postponed to a more convenient season the guessing of the difficult riddle which circumstance had propounded. Hence, though he now and then glanced askance at the lovers as they stood half in the shadow of the stalagmite, and half in the thin white light of the tallow dip, he said naught to discourage the "fool chin-choppin'" as he denominated their talk, thinking it the course least calculated to do harm. "Lovyers let alone will quar'l enough tharselves ter fling 'em apart. A peaceable disposed person needn't 'sturb hisself ter start a contention jes' ter separate 'em," he argued within himself.

"Leave it ter men?" she was echoing Binley's words dully. "I'd hate powerful ter leave anythink ez I war took up with ter sech ez men."

She gazed speculatively about the place, suddenly illumined with a preternatural brilliancy as Daniel Pinnott flung open the furnace door. All the white colonnades were a-glister with myriads of sparkling points of light. Far, far down the shadowy reaches of the cave they were visible now, with stately arches marking the confines of other and further chambers, unexplored perhaps and of an undemonstrated vastness. The light brought into evidence that peculiar incrustation of the walls of limestone caverns which takes the semblance of flowers, the rough projections seeming roses, lilies wrought in the rock, the similitude being so exact that here and there a flower can be found as perfect of symmetry as if carved by the chisel of a cunning workman. Glimpsed through one of the lofty arches the depending stalactites in a heavy group might have suggested to a cultivated imagination a great chandelier of imposing proportions and thus have heightened the semblance to some stately hall, the audience chamber of a sovereign, the throne-room of the buried splendours of some forgotten magic monarchy. The limitations of Clotilda's experience and mental scope forbade the fancy, but the uncouth forms of the distillers with their slouching shadows, their big hats, their bent postures, their dull lack-lustre faces, their grotesque gestures, gnome-like at their work, seemed indeed at variance with this scene of weird beauty, and little suggestive of those higher attributes of justice, of acumen, of perspicacity. "I'd sure hate ter leave it ter men."

It was the subject in all the world of paramount importance to him, and he was eagerly ready for the discussion of its phases anew. Every point they had often canvassed together with the keenness of a vital mutual interest, and there was naught new to urge. But as he shifted his weight, though still leaning against the pillar, and brought his brows together in a dubitating frown and began, "Waal, now,"—she suddenly revolted from the theme. Her mind, her heart were elsewhere. She hastily interrupted—"Of course, though, it's jes' ez ye think. Mebbe it would be best, arter all, ter leave it ter men."

Adversity is said to be of vast moral value in the discipline of the heart; it is a whetstone to the wits as well. Eugene Binley caught all the sense of dismissal that was in her mind as it unconsciously, insistently reached out for the new thoughts that surged upon it. He was cut to the soul. All that he had was at stake, his liberty, his life, or—if this unavailing seclusion were gratuitous—his restoration to the free, independent, open walks of existence. A terrible doubt beset him. Did she indeed care no longer? Had she ever cared—or was it but an idle whim in default of more serious interest that had lured his heart from him? He could not judge. His head was in a whirl. But remonstrance might avail naught. It was the fact that impressed his mind. He had surprised the revolt of her sentiment—it had been a momentary illumination like that of the open furnace door, now clashed close again, leaving the cave to its dull shadow, the far reaches of dense blackness through distant arches, the dim pure white radiance of the tallow dip, the subdued scintillations of the stalagmitic colonnades, the dull rotund glister of the copper still, the vermicular suggestions of the worm coiled up in the condenser, the intense line of vivid white light that defined the lower edge of the furnace door, the metal fitting ill to the masonry, and thus giving a glimpse of the roaring fire within. Clotilda had turned her face upward toward Eugene Binley, as if waiting for him to speak, but there was within it no light of interest, only dull attention.

He tried the experiment deliberately. "Oh, we uns can't make no decision now, short off; we uns hev been along that road many a time; but we don't often hev news in the mountings. Tell me su'thin' more 'bout the show an' that thar showman."

Her face was suddenly irradiated.

"You uns never hearn the beat in all yer life," she said, her eyes dilated and her head nodding to one side, with pride and delight. "He sung sweeter than any mawkin' bird, but he said ter me, 'Lydy, ef ye'll permit me ter say it,'"—she imitated Lloyd's grave, circumspect manner, "'it's a monstious pity fur yer rare voice an' yer 'strodinary grace in dancin' ter be wasted hyar in this wilderness—would ye consider a proposition ter puffawm in public?'"

She bent forward in such a pretty reverential bow that Tom Pinnott, lying on a pile of sacks of grain,—his shoulder was still lame, and he rested it at close intervals,—called out to the others:

"Look-a-yander at Clotildy. She air mawkin' the stranger-man. It's the very moral o' the critter."

Binley had a vague realisation of the grinning of half a dozen sets of great tobacco-browned teeth among the group that sat around the furnace, perched on kegs or inverted baskets, or sacks of grain. His head was unsteady. His heart beat tumultuously. He hardly knew what was this obsession that had enthralled him. Jealousy he had felt ere this in minor matters, but he had so little conception of the strength of the passion that now, when it grappled with him, he did not recognise it.

"I went straight an' axed dad ef I mought," Clotilda resumed, a little thread of continuous laughter trickling through her words, like a rivulet that cannot stay its joyous course. "I tuk dad out on the porch 'cause he blates so loud whenst he talks—an' fust he said naw, and then when he 'membered 'bout sellin' whisky ter the crowd on the quiet in that dry town, and that folks would 'low ez the family war thar jes' ter view me sing an' dance an' not ter sell moonshine, it 'peared ter him a powerful good excuse ter go."

"Hop light, ladies," sang out Tom, who had a powerful organ in his own deep chest.

But Clotilda put her hands to her ears with a grimace of pain. "I never wants ter hear no other man sing—that stranger's voice was like—like honey. 'Twar so—sweet—soundin'."

Her pensive lids drooped above her great bright eyes and she gave a shuddering little sigh, as if the ecstatic remembrance were fraught with an appreciated pain.

Old Shadrach Pinnott had a sudden monition of business. "That's a fac', boys," he said, taking his pipe from his mouth, "every durned imp of ye mus' be at the tent ter hear Clotildy puffawm—'tis the reason folks mus' understand why we uns all waggon down ter Colb'ry. Mam'll go, an' A'minty an' the baby, all o' we uns will go, an' nobody on yearth would suspicion ez we uns kem fur ennything else than ter hear an' see Clotildy sing an' dance in a public puffawmance."

He puffed his pipe for a few minutes while the others gave varying growls of more or less reluctant acquiescence as they accorded or disagreed with his view of the importance of their appearance as spectators on the occasion. He possibly discriminated this note of dissent, for he remarked presently—"It air sure a powerful oncommon happening—I reckon Clotildy will be the fust mounting gal that ever sung an' danced in a show tent."

"An' she ought ter be the las'," said Daniel Pinnott sourly. He was the conservative one of the sons, a settled married man, and he had the married man's insistent convictions as to the propriety of demeanour and decorous home-abiding fitting for the female sex. He remembered, too, the reach of the long arm of the Revenue Department. Though a volcano may be silent, sleeping, the hot heart of the crater burns with an inextinguishable fire. He did not venture to openly oppose the determination of the paternal autocrat, but he had done his utmost to dissuade the enterprise.

The elder man made no direct rejoinder, but he nevertheless combated this spirit of negation. "Colb'ry hev been mighty dry—sence it's been a dry town," he said significantly, speaking with his pipe in the corner of his mouth. "I reckon folkses' throats thar air about ez dry ez a lime-burner's kiln."

The younger moonshiners eyed the dissentient Daniel with a degree of rancour. "I'll be bound they'll nose out our waggon powerful quick," said Tom. "We'll sell a deal o' liquor, else I'm mightily s'prised."

Old Shadrach nodded assentingly.

"It'll take a heap o' liquor ter git a prohibition town soaked through an' through. We uns hev got a week though ter finish the business. The Street Fair will show fur a week."

"An' I'm ter sing an' dance twict every day," cried Clotilda delightedly. She had listened to the colloquy of the group around the still with a very definite anxiety lest from Daniel's doubts and remonstrances a final abandonment of the project ensue. She now leaned her fluffy auburn head back against the great stalagmite and laughed with a renewal of zest and cheer as she cast up her eyes at Eugene Binley, who still stood beside her looking loweringly down at her.

There was something so aloof, so smitten, yet so menacing in his eyes that her elated spirits suddenly collapsed. It suggested the frightful pathos of a savage animal, sorely wounded and suffering, yet with an unabated ferocity. The very look numbed her joy.

"I be powerful sorry ez you uns can't be thar ter see me," she declared falteringly, suddenly drawn back from her soft conceits of anticipation to this sullen reality.

"Oh, I'll be thar," he protested with a forlorn lame joviality.

"Eujeemes will be afeared ez Clotildy will be gittin' merried ter some o' them town men whilst he be hid out in the mountings. I reckon other folks will be streck all of a heap with her puffawmin' jes the same ez that thar stranger-man," Tom observed as he lay at length.

Tom had but the primitive processes of mind and feeling. He possessed no cultivated sensibilities either for himself or for others, and even his perceptions of policy were rudimentary. The old man, the exemplar of all the distillers, by virtue of his age, his experience, his patriarchal position, struck in abruptly with a sharp reproof.

"Ain't you uns got no better sense an' showin', Tawmmy, than ter be settin' out so brash ter talk 'bout things that ye dunno nuthin' 'bout? Clotildy ain't goin' ter be allowed ter marry nobody till she's twenty, an' she hev now jes' turned eighteen."

"Twenty!" exclaimed Clotilda with a sudden revival of interest. "Why, I'll feel so old whenst I'm twenty that I reckon I'll hev ter walk with a stick by then."

"Like the stranger-man do now," cried Tom, the irrepressible. He sprang up and took a few erratic steps along the aisle of the arcade, twirling an imaginary cane, now flinging it jauntily up into the air, now striking it with emphasis on the ground, but a sudden twinge in his lame shoulder gave him pause. He stopped short, with a grimace of pain, seeking to put his hand to it, and then he came heavily enough back to the furnace and sank down on his improvised couch of sacks of grain. "He air a better man than you uns—he downed you uns, Tawmmy," Clotilda exclaimed with such obvious pleasure and pride in the stranger's prowess that Shadrach Pinnott was minded to take reluctant account of the cloud that lowered on the brow of Eugene Binley.

"Shucks," he said contemptuously, "that war jes' sleight o' hand. Them show folks hev l'arned tricks that take the eye. He ain't no spunky fighter sech ez—sech ez—waal, sech ez Eujeemes thar fur instance."

There was a momentary pause, broken only by the muffled roar of the flames of the furnace fire and the trickle of the doublings dropping down from the worm into the keg below.

"You boys mus' be powerful cautious," Shadrach Pinnott presently remarked with a serious thought. "You uns mus'n't talk foolish an' wild. Course Eujeemes ain't got no notion, sure enough, o' goin' ter Colb'ry ter see the show." He hesitated, then spoke plainly and to the point. "I don't want no man along o' me that the sher'ff air lookin' fur." He paused expectant of reassurance.

"I knows that," Eugene Binley answered with a lowering brow.

Shadrach Pinnott expected him to say more. His face, with the pallor that is the concomitant of red hair, bleached yet more by his indoor occupation, was turned with ghastly effect toward the young man who still stood with the girl beside the column. The moonshiner's eyebrows were insistently raised; his eyes had a pointed interrogation; his lips had fallen apart in the stress of immediate anticipation, his mouth showing like a dark hollow in the midst of his great red beard. The pause continued unbroken.

The sound of gentle purling was distinct in the silence. The dripping of the ardent spirits from the worm was hardly to be distinguished from the ripple of the rill of water in the troughs led down from one of the subterranean springs to its mission of utility in the condenser and the big burly mash-tubs, or the occasional irregular trickling from the roof of the drops with their solution of lime charged with the building of the fantastic architecture of the cavern.

"The sher'ff hain't got no call ter meddle with moonshine," Shadrach Pinnott was forced to resume at length. "But ef he war ter hev reason ter s'arch my outfit fur law-breakers agin the State he'd find the liquor an' word would be tuk ter the marshal."

Eugene had his own sullen grievances. He was still a free agent, but at that moment no vague intention of sharing the moonshiners' venture into Colbury had entered his mind. To him it seemed like putting his head into the lion's jaws. He had nevertheless winced from the perception of their carelessness as to his safety, when he had remonstrated against the risks of the expedition which might rebound upon him, and almost equally from their wanton taunts. Now he was indisposed to reassure them in their turn, to set their minds at rest as to the dangers which his presence in Colbury might bring down on them. He said naught, and for the nonce Shadrach Pinnott was at a loss.

By some filial intuition Clotilda divined the emergency, for she was hardly so versed in the exigencies of the hazardous law-breaking vocation as to appreciate it of her own initiative.

"I dunno whut you uns mean by sayin' ye would see me at the show," she said in a low voice. "Jes' now ye war tryin' ter torment me by talkin' 'bout being hid out like a wolf or su'thin' wild."

A casual conversation was in progress amongst the group beside the furnace. Binley lowered his voice to the key of her own. "Do that torment you uns, Honey-sweet?" he asked, lured anew.

She silently cast a glance of reproach at him. Her face was so beautiful with this expression of upbraiding protest—it needed but this touch of sentiment to lift it into the grade of the truly exquisite. He should have been touched by the embellishment which a thought of grief for him had wrought upon it. But he remembered in that moment the stranger's admiration. Doubtless as she looked at him she was conscious of its charm; she gauged its power upon his poor unstable melting heart. All the fascination of her youthful loveliness was no longer a sealed book to her. She had been apprised of its worth even for a public performance. She was now exerting it consciously to make and keep him subject, not to her whim alone, but to bend him to the iron rule of the crafty Shadrach. Eugene Binley loved her after his fashion, but it was not that high, sacrificial passion that annuls self, and fosters faith, and blinds sober reason. If, as he suspected, she loved him no longer; if so soon, so lightly he was supplanted in her heart; if no more his great and troublous trials absorbed her pity and her sympathy, the consciousness would work a metamorphosis in his sentiment. His tenderness would be replaced by revenge; his admiration would resolve itself into contumely; his mistaken faith would evolve deceit. Already on the mere suspicion he was meeting craft with craft. Her upbraiding eyes encountered a look as languishingly adoring as if no divination of her motive informed it, as if this restive, alert, exacting creature were wholly and hopelessly her own. "I 'lowed I'd see you uns—I never said nuthin' ez I knows on 'bout you uns seein' me."

He pushed his hat back on his long, chestnut hair and looked down at her with his large brown eyes luminously watchful as if to minutely descry the effect of his words.

The fascination of the new vista opening in her restricted life, so wide, so long, so variously flowered to one who knew naught heretofore but the wood-pile and the cow pen and the treadle of the loom, filled her every faculty. She longed to be still, to think; she could scarcely affect interest in the distinction he made in his speech—that he should see her but she should not see him—she was eager to have the preparations for the sortie to the cove fairly under way. Nevertheless with the realisation of furthering the moonshiner's plans she kept the wily fish in play.

"What be you uns talkin' 'bout? I reckon I could see you uns ef ye could see me?" she asked, pulling at the strings of dark red beads falling down over the bosom of her light blue cotton gown.

As he shook his head to and fro smiling enigmatically she was so weary of him and his mysteries that the listlessness of her effort at interest could not be kept from her face, and might in itself have intimated her state of mind had he not already suspected it. She bent her face downward as if to escape too close a scrutiny while still, fixedly smiling, he studied its contour.

"I 'lowed ef ye went off an' lef me 'twould plumb kill me, Puddin'-pie," he averred.

"Oh, shucks," she exclaimed, bending her head to pleat a fold of her gown with affected embarrassment.

"An' I 'lowed I'd follow ye, ef I war dead, ez I would of choice while alive; I'd follow ye—an' though ye wouldn't see me my ghost would see you uns."

Her fingers were suddenly still; she looked up at him with a sort of surprised repulsion. His smile was as if petrified on his face.

"Oh, don't," she cried with a chilly disgust. "Ef you uns war dead 'twould be the eend of all on yearth fur you uns."

"How so?—thar is more than we kin see right hyar in this cave."

He took a sort of perverse pleasure in her start of trepidation, in her shuddering doubtful glance over her shoulder down the dim unexplored recesses of the cavern. The furnace door was open now; the fire was to be let to die out, preliminary to the stoppage of the work incident on the trip to Colbury. The beds of live coals cast a wide suffusive light through the spacious, lofty hall wherein they stood; the troglodytic group of distillers still sat by the dwindling fire. Through several of the great arches she could see other vast apartments, all dimly white and with a subdued glister in the far-reaching light. Further still were vague spaces, shadowy and grey, and at the vanishing point of the perspective dusky corridors led to densely black recesses, harbouring who might know what, besides bats by millions and night birds that crept in through some crevice for shelter from the glare of the day. Even now a screech-owl was beginning to send forth its shrill cry ere it sought the outer air and the dim night, and the keen, quavering notes of ill-omen roused all the weird suggestions of the echoes.

"You needn't be afeared, Honey-sweet," he said absently, "Ye won't see me, but I'll see you uns."

There was a pause in which she hardly canvassed what to say—so doubtful, so ill at ease was she.

And in that interval a strange possibility had revealed itself to him which he canvassed swiftly with flying thoughts. His cheeks glowed; his wild, restless eyes were ablaze; his breath was quick; he still gazed steadfastly at her as she gazed half affrighted at the familiar subterranean environment dulling gradually as the coals faded and the ash gathered, dulling like the vanishing scene of a dream. He hardly saw her; his every faculty was enlisted in a new theme. It was only mechanically that he repeated thickly, slowly, like the ill-fashioned words of a somnambulist, "You uns needn't be feared. Ye won't see me, but I'll see you uns."

CHAPTER V

When Hilary Lloyd in a flutter of enthusiasm detailed to his partner the fact that he had found a charming new attraction Haxon lowered indifferent. He felt that the show was already good enough for all reasonable purposes.

"I had rather hear that you have found transportation," Haxon said sourly.

"It may help to the same thing," Lloyd argued, bent on keeping up his own and his confrère's spirits. "It may draw more of the country folks. There's a kind of interest in seein' one's own sort perform—if the thing is well done."

As Lloyd went about the square the next day, alert, ready, seeming so capable, so entirely at ease mentally, the flagging spirits of the members of the company were recruited by his cheerful presence, and their secret troublous fears of a desperate stranding in this out-of-the-way corner of the world were exorcised.

It was indeed an humble cause in which to wage so hard-fought a battle. The hopeless courage, the gallant temper, the ingenious expedients, the hearty strivings might have graced a higher plane of achievement. He kept his smiling face, his quiet, serene manner, his courteous suavity to strangers, his unruffled placidity with his employees as uninfluenced as if he did not behold in the immediate future the ghastly vision of the complete collapse and rout of his little force, overwhelmed by a pitiless and grotesque fate. It was ever with him, predominant in his mind. He could not even look at the boa constrictor, which he loathed, without the sardonic reflection how the possession of the reptile would embarrass the holders of the mortgage which their earlier disasters had placed on all the portable property of the show. He had a sensitively organised nature, and it was a positive grief to him that Haxon could not meet their mutual misfortunes in the spirit of good comradeship. Haxon had protested that he did not hold his partner accountable for their beclouded prospects in this last move; nevertheless his sullen disaffection, his lowering silence, his deep aversion to the place and people, his despair that he could formulate no plan of getting away, added a thousand fold to the normal difficulties of the situation, bereft Lloyd of advice and the sense of support, and magnified his fears by the reflection of another's. Lloyd was but a strolling showman, yet he braced his nerves like a soldier in the last charge of a forlorn hope. All smartly groomed as he was, he lent a hand to every need that became pressing as the morning wore on and the preparations for opening the Fair neared completion. He whisked a brisk brush in the lettering of an unfinished sign, while the painter who was one of the clowns in a pantomime "turn" must needs run to paint his face. He wielded a hammer in driving down a tent-peg which the straining of the wind in yesterday's storm had loosened in the ground. He personally supervised the unfurling of the flag and eyed it with a pose of glad satisfaction as it rose to the tip of the tall staff and floated out buoyantly to the soft breeze. He called the bandmaster to account while the instruments were in process of tuning, and himself made sure of a perfect accord, for he had a fine ear. When the first tones of the blaring melody issued upon the air as the military figures with their brazen instruments and tawdry uniforms marched out to make the circuit of the square no one could have divined—as he stood on the sidewalk and watched the pigmy effort at pageant,—the turmoil of emotion in his heart, his racking pity for them, for all the employees, for himself and his partner; his keen sense of responsibility that cut him like a knife; his bruised and desperate hope; his trampled and abased and writhing pride; his awful doubts of the future—oh, that the veil might be lifted one moment, whatever the Gorgon face revealed! Now and again he heard his name spoken as a magnate and celebrity, and was aware that he was pointed out by the denizens of the town to the country folk who had waggoned in to see the show. Certain of the citizens, who had affected to think slightingly of him and his enterprise, were not above sharing the prestige of his notoriety, and the distinction conferred by his acquaintance in the estimation of these rural wights.

These spectators were few, however, chiefly heavy, jeans-clad worthies with their sunbonneted helpmeets, and leading by the hand a goodly delegation of tow-headed olive branches. They all seemed disposed to circle, inquisitively staring, about the tents; not one had yet passed a ticket-seller's wicket. The very signs were alluring to their unaccustomed eyes—the picture of the boa constrictor had a horrifying fascination to a family group who had brought up motionless in front of it, the paterfamilias, chin-whiskered, loose-jointed, his jaws slowly working on his quid of tobacco, his shoulders bent, shortening the set of his brown coat in the back, his knees crooked, drawing the trousers to a generous display of wrinkled, blue yarn socks, a child of two years poised on his elbow, an elder one holding to his hand, two more clinging to his coat tails and the last acquisition, an infant, in its mother's arms.

"M'ria, M'ria," the man exclaimed wildly, "do you uns reckon fur sure that thar sarpient, whut's pictured thar, air actially inside that tent?"

His wife shifted her snuff-brush in her mouth to permit enunciation. "I hope ter the powers they hev got him tied," she rejoined.

Had the worthy couple monopolised the interest of speculation they might have remained indefinitely spellbound, exchanging sapient conjectures concerning the snake, but one of the children piped up suddenly with that juvenile proclivity for the unanswerable. "What be his name, dad?" and the rest instantly chorused—"What be his name?"

"Dunno—the pictur' don't say," the man replied slowly.

This omission might seem a fatal oversight on the part of the managers, but the show had journeyed half over the continent with no sense of aught lacking until a juvenile patron from Persimmon Cove pounced upon the void and would not be denied.

"What be his name?" he cried in the pangs of desperate curiosity, and the others demanded in shrill unison—"What be his name? What be his name?"

"Dunno—let's go in, M'ria, an' ax his name," the head of the family suggested with a frenzied gleam of temerity in his eyes, and, as the spieler at the door saw them approach, he lifted his horn and began to shrill, "Here's Isaac. Come in, come in. He eats 'em—he eats 'em alive," so close on the heels of the plump infant delegation, that it might have suggested cannibalistic tendencies to those uninitiated in the ways of street fairs.

The band, having finished its tour of the square, changed the march to a potpourri of popular airs, and then ensued an interval weighted with silence after the surcharge of sound, when the people began to gather expectantly along the sidewalks; the merchants and clerks left their wares, and stood in doorways or clustered at gaze in second-story windows; the porches and casements of the courthouse were crowded with feminine faces and pretty attire, the society element of Colbury having gathered to this point of vantage from the remoter residence portion of the town. All the air was a-tingle with a nervous sense of expectation.

Lloyd, the victim of suspense, stood on the sidewalk in front of the principal store. Now and then he took off his brown straw hat and fanned with it, his light-brown hair shining in the sun. The pink flush in his cheek had deepened; his long dark eyelashes occasionally rose and fell with a nervous quiver, but otherwise naught betokened the stress of excitement with which he laboured. He did not notice that he had become a mark for the gaze of the village belles on the courthouse balcony—so handsome a man necessarily attracted attention, and the special smartness of the cut of his fawn-tinted suit, his russet brown shoes, the brown four-in-hand tie, and a pink wild aster in his buttonhole differentiated him from the jeans-clad rural visitors, from the clerks of Colbury, and the sedate, black-coated, elderly merchants. The sunlight had that singularly burnished richness characteristic of the last days of summer; a yearning languor of dreams; a longing for repose. A sense of impending rest was in the atmosphere. The shadows were sharp and clearly defined. Far away he could see the blue mountains quiver through the heated air. Nearer at hand they were purple and bronze and deeply green, with here and there on their slopes the sombre shadow of a dazzlingly white cloud, floating high in the sky. He marked how radiant was the fact, how dark and gruesome the similitude to the eye looking only to the earth, and he was vaguely aware of dispensations in life that this resembled. The landscape was cleft in twain by the glittering line of the river, held in deep-channelled, clifty banks, and the circumference of the Ferris Wheel framed the whole, seen through its great circle.

Hardly a movement disturbed the eager expectancy of the crowd gathered in the square; the cries of the spielers were hushed; the peanut roasters, the candy-stands had ceased to vend their wares; the groups attracted by the pictures of the freaks no longer stood to stare; the merry-go-round was still—all waited in blank patience the great sensation of the day. When the band, grouped about the tall mast near the centre of the place, burst forth suddenly with the first sonorous measures of an inspiring melody there was a galvanic thrill as of panic or turmoil throughout the press. A young mule that was new to town and town ways, hitched to the courthouse fence, had borne much exacerbation of nerves that morning in sights hitherto undreamed of, in sounds terrifying and unexplained; he found in this blare of trumpets under his confiding nose the extremest limits of his endurance. He gave one tremendous bound, burst his halter, scattered the meeker palfreys about him, that snorted in scandalised dismay at his conduct, and struggled only to get out of his way, as he galloped through the crowds and across the square, knocking down several men as he passed, and set out at a breakneck speed on the road to the mountains. His owner gazed disconsolately after him, while the half-affrighted crowd recovered its composure in a guffaw at his expense; then, as he muttered philosophically, "Waal, at that gait he'll soon be home," he addressed himself anew to the waiting expectancy, regardless of the problem of transportation which his own dismounted condition presented.

The band, disregarding the commotion, still flung forth its brazen blare of melody, and suddenly a presence threaded the crowd, which every neck was craned to view. A man, bare-headed in the sun, clad showily in pink satin, slashed with dark red, and pink silk tights, with the deft tread of one shod elastically, was passing through the press. Only once Lloyd had a glimpse of the figure long familiar to him, though to have seen Haxon only in street clothes one could never have recognised Captain Ollory of the Royal Navy. As he began to climb the mast, stepping lightly, swiftly, surely, from one steel spike to another, he became visible to the whole assemblage, and, unused to the accepted methods of applause, a cry of gratulation that was half a guffaw of delight broke forth. The acrobat, without the immediate contrast with taller men, seemed of fair height, and the muscle that was suggestive of undue stoutness in his ordinary garb, showed now in full play and athletic symmetry in the thin, elastic silk covering of limbs and arms. He went speedily to the top, and stepped with a deft lightness upon the board that surmounted it, a pitiful square, not more than eighteen inches in compass. He stood for a moment at full height above the quivering and astonished crowd—higher than the tip of the Ferris wheel, higher than the courthouse tower. The band, playing resolutely on, smote keenly vibrant nerves with a sense of discordance. One of the amazed rural spectators, agonised with the strain of the sensation, called out sharply, "Hi, somebody, can't ye make them dad-burned hawns an' accordions quit blating?"

Lloyd glanced keenly about, but the voice could not be located in the crowd. He deprecated aught that might tend to shake Haxon's nerve, aught unexpected, disagreeable, jarring in the stress of the crisis. He knew how far removed from the actualities was the gallant aspect of that richly-bedight figure, the bonhomie of the smile and flourish of salutation from the frightful perch to the humming crowd below. He knew that the realisation of risking life and limb for a meagre stipend that meant bare subsistence was daunting enough to the bravest, but to court this jeopardy for naught, for the amusement of a scanty cluster of country bumpkins, was revolting to any sane man. He remembered anew the cynical saying that the spectators gather to see the acrobat killed, not to witness his triumph, and then came back to him Haxon's sullen complaint this morning that his "turn" was absolutely without compensation—he was convinced that not one-third of the rural crowd would pay their way into a tent. The external aspects and the "high dive," necessarily an outdoor performance and a free show, would satisfy their curiosity, without enriching the exchequer of the street fair company. This state of mind was a poor preparation for Haxon's difficult feat, for it was indeed extra-hazardous, and in several towns in which they had exhibited its repetition had been forbidden by the authorities.

Lloyd was made aware by the shudder, the sibilance of the shivering crowd that the acrobat had moved, and he glanced up wincingly from under his hat brim. Haxon had stooped; he was now in a sitting posture, his feet dangling over the depths below, and the little flat square of wood supporting his weight. He slowly drew from a pocket a large handkerchief, deliberately folded it, and bound it around his eyes, tying it hard and fast at the back of his head. Then, thus blindfolded, he sat on his precarious perch for a moment, dangling his shapely, muscular legs in their pink silk tights. As he started to rise from his posture, a feminine voice from the balcony of the courthouse cried out hysterically: "Oh, make him come down—don't let him be blindfolded!" and there ensued a twitter of derision and admonition among her companions, with gay raillery that she should show herself so "very green."

As Lloyd glanced back at the acrobat, he saw that what Haxon called the business of the "turn" was in progress, and, familiar with it though he was, affected, as he knew it to be, the sight of it made him wince now and sent cold thrills of terror down his spine. The acrobat, clumsily, uncertainly, with all the hesitant motions of the blind, slowly sought to rise, to get his feet once more on the square board on which he now sat. He lifted the ball of one heel to the verge, and sat there thus crouched in dubitation; then slowly, quakingly he achieved a stooping attitude and at last rose unsteadily to his feet, gropingly holding out his hands, now this way, now that, as if he were doubtful on which side of the mast was the reservoir of water below. There was no need of these feints to heighten the temerity of the feat, and Lloyd had always deprecated them. The realism of this affectation of fright, of uncertainty, of hesitation, was so great that its quiver seemed possible to be communicated to the nerves in serious earnest.

Suddenly the acrobat drew himself to his wonted erectness. He stood, for a moment, motionless. Then he leaped, or rather stepped out into the air, still conserving a standing posture; he turned on his back in the instant of descending, and, with an incredible precision of aim, fell into the centre of the tank of water, the impact sending up jets in every direction and spattering the cheering crowd.

All was laughter and good humour. As the round sleek head and the pink doublet, slashed with red, reappeared clambering over the sides of the reservoir half a dozen brawny arms were stretched forth to help the acrobat out. But he sprang lightly past, dripping like a seal, caught a water-proof overcoat from an attendant's hands, slipped it on, and walking with that peculiar deftness appertaining to light, elastic chaussure, his calves and ankles in their pink tights presenting a comical contrast to the overcoat as his feet protruded below, he took his way through the crowd, along the pavement, and in the direction of the village hotel.

Lloyd drew a long sigh of relief. This was well enough so far—but he had an awful premonition that for some reason some day Haxon's nerve would fail him. That accurate judgment of distances would prove at fault. He would miss his calculation by some inconsiderable fraction, and instead of dropping on the elastic surface of the buoyant water he would fall on the edge of the tank, on his back and break it, or on his skull and crush it. This was a life to lead, Lloyd said to himself, a life to lead, but God be thanked its chief trial was over for the day at all events. His consciousness was sore and bruised. He tried to pluck up heart of grace. The sound of the spielers' cries affected him like the commonplace consolations of awakening at the end of a dreadful dream. When he went down to the reservoir he found the groups near it discussing the narrow margin between success and a heart-rending disaster.

"Ef he hed jes' curved a mite to the right or the lef' his spine would hev been splinters," one voiced the opinion of all.

Lloyd was ordering some heavy planks to be laid across the huge trough, the water being some eight feet deep.

"Whut's that fur?" a surly wight demanded, being compelled to give place for the proceeding.

"Some of these underfoot children might come here when nobody is looking and drown themselves."

The man looked at him with a clearing brow. "Fur sech resky folks ez ye 'pear ter be ye air toler'ble fore-thoughted," he said approvingly.

Taking his way back to the sidewalk Lloyd was accosted by an elderly merchant. "The best of your show seems to be free," he said sourly. He had earlier taken occasion to gird at the fair; it was a hindrance rather than a help to trade; it was a novelty, a noisy intrusion, a foolish enterprise, a predestined failure, and he could make no compact of toleration with it. "You ought to remember that thanks are not profits."

"They have no market value, but they are mighty pleasant," returned Lloyd.

"This ain't a paying crowd," the merchant cast his eye disparagingly about. "If business don't improve you and your company won't more than make your keep here." He seemed bent on "rubbing it in."

"We would be glad to do that," said Lloyd in excellent temper. "We thought it was a bigger town—what there is of it seems to be dandy,—and we thought there would be a more populous vicinity. But because we have made a mistake there is no use in sitting down with our finger in our mouth. We are going to give every attraction straight along just as if we were playing to big money."

The sour old man looked hard at the manager; he would fain maintain his caustic admonitions, his disparaging criticism. He hated folly in all its forms; but commercially he felt it to be wicked. A man who wasted money, or fooled it away, he deemed a criminal, albeit not liable to the law. Nevertheless he was mollified in spite of himself.

"Gray," he said to his head clerk, "put up the shutters. All the clerks may go to the fair—and the porter, too—pay his way. We can't do business with this tom-fool street fair gyrating before the door, and we don't want all these hillbillies standing around the counters squirting tobacco juice all over the stock, between the times that they go out to stare-gaze the pictures on the signs. I won't house 'em. If they want to see the fair let 'em drop their nickel in the slot, and get the worth of their money."

The closing of this, the principal store in the town, was followed by the placing of other shutters in show windows and the fastening of doors. The chaffering at the counters thus ceasing, the idlers were turned into the street, and here the wiles of the spielers caught them, and soon the ticket takers were busy making change. The tent of "Isaac" was thronged; it is amazing the fascination that the repulsive exerts on the uncultivated mind. Old and young, men, women, and children, yearned with curiosity to see him "eat 'em alive," and a steady procession went in and came out in various stages of gratified disgust. When it was announced that the boa constrictor would be fed on chickens there was a rush for the horrid spectacle, and for a time the peanut roaster and candy stand were dreary and deserted. Wick-Zoo, the wild man, who was caged, half clad in skins, a repellent object of matted hair, and long teeth, and wild eyes, who ran a few steps hither and thither in the restricted limits of his bars, uttering low moans varied now again by a keen, shrill howl, was overwhelmed with visitors until an unlucky episode created a panic amongst them. A mountain woman, young, plump, black-eyed, and with bright rosy cheeks hardly discounted by her pink-checked cotton gown, put a white dimpled hand inadvertently within the bars as she held on to the cage to avoid the jostling of the crowd. It seemed unto Wick-Zoo good and meet to make a demonstration toward the tempting member, and he rubbed his muzzle against it with a jocosity hardly to be expected of a "wild man from Borneo." He was of limited mental endowment, as was natural, and had no prescience of the awful uproar that ensued when the woman screamed that he was snapping his terrible teeth at her, and as she fell back upon the crowd the tent of Wick-Zoo was nearly torn down upon his devoted head before his admirers could fairly extricate themselves. Lloyd, hearing the clamour, came hastily to the rescue, and as he entered the deserted precincts the poor "wild man" hailed him:

"Oh, Beaut, for the love of pity can't you gimme a beer? I'm nigh smothered with thirst."

The happy turn of the tide, the eager desire to make the best of every advantage, the prudent monition that one day is not a week and that the show must live up to its best possibilities, kept Hilary Lloyd a very busy man that morning.

The first check to his hopes came when he encountered Clotilda Pinnott, arrived with all her kith and kin in a big white-covered ox-waggon, to redeem her promise to do a song-and-dance "turn" at the Fair.

CHAPTER VI