cheer fell over ahint him; an' sez he, Naw, brother, I will call ye brother,' like that war powerful 'commodatin', 'I kin not sot my p-people ter do sech, arter yer words yistiddy. We kin lose no money by ye, the church air pore an' the cause air n-needy. I kin only pray fur the devil ter 1-loose his holt on ye, f-fur I perceive the devil in ye.' Waal, sir," continued Pete, drawing a plug of tobacco from his pocket, and gnawing on it with tugging persistence, "Christian perfesser ez I be, I felt sorter 'shamed o' Brother J-Jake Tobin, - he looked s-s-sech a skerry h-half-liver, 'feard o' losin' money! Shucks! I could sca'cely keep my hands off'n him. He looked so-so cur'ous, I wanted ter- ter" he remembered the reverence due to the cloth — “ ter trip him up," he concluded, temperate ly. "An' then, ez he war a-whurlin' his fat sides around ter pick up the cheer, Pa'son K-Kelsey, he hed t-turned plumb bleached, like a corpse, he stood up an' sez, 'The Lord hev fursaken me!' An' Brother Jake Tobin humps around, with the cheer in his hand, an' sez, Naw, brother, naw, ye hev fursook the Lord!'"

"Waal," said the man on the bag of corn, gazing meditatively at the dusty floor and at a great yellow cur who had ventured within, as a shelter from the midday heat, and lay at ungainly length asleep near the door, "I dunno ez I kin blame Brother Jake Tobin. 'T would hev made a mighty scandal ter keep Pa'son Kelsey in the church, arter what he said agin the faith. We'll hev ter turn him out; an' ez he air ter be turned out, I dunno ez the church members hev enny call ter go on his bond. He air none o' we-uns, nowadays."

"Leastwise none o' 'em war a-goin' t-ter do it," said Pete quietly. "They air all mindful o' Brother Jake Tobin's longest ear, ez kin hear a call from the church yander in Cade's Cove ev'y time he g-gits mad at 'em. But I tell ye,"

All

His blood had risen to his face. the instincts of justice within him revolted at the picture Pete had drawn, coarsely and crudely outlined, but touched with the vivid realities of nature. It was as a scene present before him : the falsely accused man borne away, crushed with shame, while the true criminal looked on with a lax conscience and an impersonal interest, and thriftily saved his observations to recount to his cronies at the mill. Amos James cared naught for the outraged majesty of the law. The rescue of the prisoner from its fierce talons seemed to him, instead, humane and beneficent. His sense of justice was touched only by the manifest cruelty when one man was forced to bear the consequences of another's act.

"You-uns mought hev done ez much," he said significantly.

"I reckon they would hev 'lowed ez we war n't wuth it," said Pete, quietly ruminant; "the still can't show up."

"Ye never tried it," said Amos.

"Waal, d-dad, he war n't thar, an' I could n't ondertake ter speak fur the rest. An' I ain't beholden no ways ter Pa'son Kelsey. I hev no call ter b-b-bail him ez I knows on. I hev no hand in his bein' arrested an' sech."

"Hev no hand in his bein' arrested!" retorted Amos, scornfully.

Pete was staring stolidly at him, and the other men assumed an intent, inquiring attitude. Amos James felt suddenly that he had gone too far. He had no wish to fasten this stigma upon the Cayces; he had every reason to avoid it. He did not know how far he had been accounted a confidant in the intimacies of the cave when Rick Tyler had found a refuge there. He could not disregard the trust reposed in him. And yet he could not recall his words.

Pete's blank gaze changed to an amazed comprehension. He spoke out bluntly the thought in the other's mind.

"Ye air a-thinkin', Amos Jeemes, ez 't war we-uns ez cut Rick Tyler a-loose o' the sher'ff!" he exclaimed.

Amos, confronted with his own suspicion, listened with a guilty air.

"Ye air surely the b-b-b-biggest f-f-f-fool" the words seemed very large with these additional consonants"in the shadder o' the B-b-b-Big S-s-s-smSmoky M-m-Mountings!" Pete spread them out with all the magnifying facilities of his infirmity.

threatened. His self-confidence, his arrogant affinity for authority, his pride, and his ambition keenly barbed the prescience of this abnormal flatness of failure. He was pierced by every careless glance; every casual word wounded him. He had a strange disturbing sense of a loss of identity. This anxious, browbeaten, humiliated creature, was this Micajah Green? He did not recognize himself; every throb within him had an alien impulse; he repudiated every cringing mental process. It was his first experience of the rigors of adversity: it did not quell him; he felt effaced.

He feebly sought to goad himself to answer the rough chaff of spurious sympathizers with his old bluff spirit; his retort was like the lisp of a child in defiance of the challenge of a bugle. He saw with faltering bewilderment how the interesting spectacle increased his audience; it resembled in some sort an experiment in vivisection, and where the writhings most suggested an appreci ated anguish, each curious scientist most longed to thrust the scalpel.

The coroner held the election, as the sheriff himself was a candidate, and

"Why, P-Pa'son Kelsey, I reckon."

XII.

That memorable arrest in the Big Smoky was the last official act of the sheriff, except the surrender of his books and papers and taking his successor's receipt for the prisoners in the county jail. The defeat had its odious aspects. The race had been amazingly unequal. Had the ground tottered beneath him, as he stood in the grass-fringed streets of Shaftesville, and heard the rumors of the returns from the civil districts, he could hardly have experienced a sensation of insecurity commensurate with this, for all his moral supports were

details excited increased comment. In the district of the county town he had a majority, but the unanimity against him in the outlying districts, especially in the Big Smoky and its widespread spurs and coves, was unprecedented in the annals of the county. He had hoped that the election of judge and attorneygeneral, taking place at the same time, might divert attention from the disas trous completeness of his failure. But their race involved no peculiar phase of popular interest, and the more impor tant results were subordinated, so far as the county was concerned, to the spectacle of 'Cajah Green, "flabber gasted an' flustrated like never war seen." New elements of gossip were added now and then, vivaciously can vassed among the knots of men perched

on barrels in the stores, or congregated in the post-office, or sitting on the steps of the court-house, and were ruthlessly detailed to the ex-sheriff, whose starts of rage, unthinking relapses into official speech, jerks of convulsive surprise, prolonged the amusement beyond its natural span.

It ceased suddenly. The adjustment to a new line of thought and a future under altered conditions was facilitated by the inception of an immediate definite intention and a sentiment coequal with the passion of despair. The idlers of the town might not have been able to accurately define the moment when the drama of defeat, with which he had prodigally entertained them, lost its interest. But there was a moment that differed from all the others of the lazy August hours; the minimum of time charged with disproportionate importance. It might be likened to a symbol of chemistry, which though the simplest alphabetical character, is significant of the chiefest principle of life, — perhaps of death. That moment the wind came freshly down from the mountains; the glare, of the morning sun rested on the empty, sandy street of the village; the weeds and grass that obscured the curbing of the pavement were still overhung by a glittering gossamer net of dew. A yellow butterfly flitted over it, followed by another so like that it could not be distinguished from its aerial counterpart. The fragrance of new-mown hay somewhere in the rural metropolis was sweet on the air. A blue-bottle, inside the window of the store hard by, droned against the glass, and seemed in some sort an echo to the monotonous drawl of a man who had lately been up in the Big Smoky, and who had gleaned fresh points concerning the recent election.

"What did ye ever do ter the Cayces, 'Cajah, or what did Bluff Peake ever do fur 'em?" he asked, as preliminary to detailing that the Cayces had turned out and pervaded the Great Smoky

Mountains, electioneering against the incumbent. "They rid hyar an' they rid thar,-up in the mountings an' down in the coves; an' some do say thar war one o' 'em in ev'y votin'-place in all the mounting deestric's the day the 'lection kem off, jes' a-stiffenin' up the Peake men, an' a-beggin', an' a-prayin', an' a-wraslin' in argymint with them ez hed gin out they war a-goin' ter vote fur you-uns. Bluff Peake say they fairly 'lected him, though he 'lowed 't war n't fur love o' him. I wonder ye done ez well ez ye did, 'Cajah, though ye could n't hev done much wuss, sure enough. All o' 'em war out, from old Groundhog down ter Sol, when they war 'lectioneerin', an' the whiskey ez war drunk round the Settlemint an' sech war 'sprisin'. Some say old Groundhog furnished it free."

The ex-sheriff made no reply. There was a look in his eye that gave his long, lean head, deeply sunken at the temples, less the aspect of that of a whipped hound than it had worn of late. One might have augured that he was a dangerous brute. And after that, the conversation with the recent election as a theme flagged, and died out gradually.

It was only a few days before he had occasion to go up into the Great Smoky Mountains, on matters, he averred, connected with closing unsettled business of the office which he had held. As he jogged along, he moodily watched the distant mountains, growing ever nearer, and engirdled here and there with belts of white mists, above whose shining silver densities sometimes would tower a gigantic gigantic "bald," with a suspended, isolated effect, like some wonderful aerial regions unknown to geography, foreign to humanity. The supreme dignity of their presence was familiar to him. Their awful silence, like the unspeakable impressiveness of some overpowering thought, affected him not. The vastness of the earth which they suggested, beneath the immensities of the

sky, which leaned upon them, found no responsive largeness in his emotions. Those barren domes of an intense blue, tinged with purple where the bold rocks jutted out, flushed where the yellow sunshine languished to a blush; those heavily wooded slopes below the balds, sombre and rich in green and bronze and all darkling shades, touched, too, here and there with a vivid crimson where the first fickle sumach flared; those coves in which shadows lurked and vague sentiments of color were abroad in visionary guise, in unexplained softness of grays and hardly realized blues, in dun browns and sedate yellows, vanishing before the plain prose of an approach, he had reduced all this to a scale of miles, and the splendors of the landscape were not more seemly or suggestive than the colors of a map on the wall. It was a mental scale of miles, for the law decreeing a sufficiency of mileposts seemed to weaken in the ruggedness of the advance, and when he was fairly among the coves and ravines they disappeared. He pushed his horse rather hard, as the time wore on, but sunset was on the mountains before he came upon the great silent company of dead trees towering above the Settlement in the reddening light, and tracing their undeciphered hieroglyphics across the valley beneath and the heights beyond. The ringing vibrations of the anvil were on the air; the measured alternations of the hand-hammer and the sledge resounded in a clear, metallic fugue; the flare from the forge fire streamed through the great door of the blacksmith's shop, giving fluctuating glimpses of the interior, but fainting and fading into impotent artificiality before the gold and scarlet fires ablaze in the western sky.

A wagon, broken down and upheld by a pole in lieu of one of the wheels, stood in front of the blacksmith's shop, and was evidently the reason of Gid Fletcher's industry at this late hour.

Its owner loitered desolately about; now looking, with the gloat of acquisition, at his purchases stowed away in the wagon, and now nervously at a little barefoot girl he had brought with him to behold the metropolitan glories of the Settlement. He occasionally asked her anxious questions. "Ain't you-uns 'most tired out, Euraliny?" he would say; or, "Don't ye feel wore in yer backbone, hevin' ter wait so long?" or, "Hed n't ye better lay down on the blanket in the wagin an' rest yer bones, bein' ez we-uns started 'fore daybreak?' But the sturdy Euralina shook her sunbonnet, with her head in it, in emphatic negation at every suggestion, and sat upright on the board laid across the rough, springless wagon, looking about her gravely, with a stalwart determination to see all there was in the famed Settlemint; thinking, perhaps, that her backbone would have leisure to humor its ails in the retirement of home. What an ideal traveler Euralina would be under a wider propitiousness of circumstance! And so the anxious parent could only stroll about as before, and contemplate his purchases, and pause at the door of the blacksmith's shop to say, "Ain't you-uns 'most done, Gid?" in a tone of harrowing insistence, for the fortieth time since the blacksmith's services were invoked.

Gid Fletcher looked up with a lowering brow as Micajah Green entered. The shadows of evening were dusky in the ill-lighted place; the fluctuations of the forge fire, now flaring, now fading, intensified the idea of gloom. The redhot iron that the blacksmith held on the anvil threw its lurid reflection into his swarthy face and, his eyes; his throat was bare; his athletic figure, girded out with his leather apron, demonstrated in its poses the picturesqueness of the simple craft; his sleeve was rolled tightly from his huge, corded hammer arm. His hand-hammer seemed endowed with some nice discriminating sense as it

tapped here and there with an imperative clink, and the great sledge in the striker's hands came crashing down to execute its sharp behests, while the flakes flew from the metal in jets of golden sparks.

A man is never so plastic to virtuous impulses as when he is doing well his chosen work. Labor was ordained to humanity as a curse; surely God repented him of the evil. What blessing has proved so beneficent!

The suggestions entering with the new-comer were at variance with this wholesome industrial mood. They recalled to the blacksmith his baffled avarice, his revenge, and the malice that had influenced his testimony at the committing trial. More than once, of late, while the anvil sang responsive to the hammer's sonorous clangor, and the sparks flew, emblazoning the twilight of the shop with arabesques of golden flakes, and the iron yielded like wax to fire and force, he had a sudden fear that he had not done well. True, he had sworn to nothing which he did not believe, either in the affidavit for the warrant or at the committing trial; but the widely chartered credulity of an angry man! He said to himself in extenuation that he would not have gone so far but for the sheriff.

He was not glad, with these recollections paramount, to see Micajah Green again. Some concession he made, how ever, to the dictates of hospitality.

"Hy 're, 'Cajah," he said, albeit gruffly, and the monotonous clinking of the hand-hammer and the clanking of the sledge went on as before.

Micajah Green's knowledge of life had not been wide, but there was space to evolve a cynical reflection that, being down in the world now, he must bite the dust, and he attributed this cavalier treatment to the perverse result of the election.

He had acquired something of the manner of bravado, from his recent exVOL. LV.NO. 332.

48

perience as a defeated candidate, and he swaggered a little about the dirt floor of the shop; glancing at the forge fire, slumberously glowing, at the smoky hood above it, at the window opening upon the purpling mountains and the fading west. He even paused, aud turned with his foot the clods of the cavity still yawning below the lowest log, where the escaped man had crawled through.

There was an altercation at this moment between the smith and his assistant; for the work was not so satisfactory as when Gid Fletcher's mind was exclusively bent upon it, and his striker officiated also as scapegoat, although that function was not specified as his duty in their agreement. Gid Fletcher had marked with furtive surprise and doubt every movement of the intruder, and this show of interest in the only trace of the escape by which was lost. his rich reward roused his ire.

"Even the dogs hev quit that, 'Cajah," he said, enigmatically, as he caught up the iron for a new skene and thrust it into the fire, while the striker fell to at the bellows. The long sighing burst forth; the fire flared to redness, to a white heat, every vivid coal edged by a fan of yellow shimmer. The blacksmith's fine stalwart figure was thrown backward; his face was lined with sharp white lights; he was looking over his shoulder, and laughing silently, but with a sneer.

"The dogs?" said Micajah Green, amazed. He did not sneer.

"The dogs tuk ter cropin' in an' outer that thar hole fur five or six days arter Rick Tyler got away," Gid Fletcher explained. "Peared ter be nosin' round fur him, too.. I dunno what notion tuk 'em, but I never would abide 'em in the shop, an' so I jes' kep' that fur 'em," he nodded at a leather strap hanging on the rod," an' larnt 'em ter stay out o' hyar. But even they hev gin it up now."