Clayton took aim quickly and fired. The huge bird sank as though hit, curved downward, and with one flap of his great wings sailed on.
"Well, ef I didn"t think ye had hit him!"said the old woman, in amazement. "You kin shoot, fer a fac"."
Easter"s attention was gained at last. For the first time she looked straight at him, and her little smile of derision had given way to a look of mingled curiosity and respect.
"I expected only to scare him," said Clayton.
The gun will carry twice that far."
Hit"s jest as well ye didn"t hit him," said the old woman. "Hit air five dollars fine to kill a buzzard around hyeh. I"d never thought that little thing could shoot."
"It shoots several times," said Clayton. "Hit does whut?"
Like a pistol," he explained, and, rising, he directed several shots in quick succession at a dead tree in the ploughed field. At each shot a puff of dust came almost from the same spot.
When he turned, Easter had risen to her feet in astonishment, and the mother was laughing long and loudly.
"Don"t ye wish ye had a gun like that, Easter? " she cried.
Clayton turned quickly to the girl, and began explaining the mechanism of the gun to her, without appearing to notice her embarra.s.sment, for she shrank perceptibly when he spoke to her.
"Won"t you let me see your gun? " he asked.
She brought out the old flint-lock, and handed it to him almost timidly.
This is very interesting," he said. " I never saw one like it before."
"Thar hain"t but one more jest like that in the mountains," said the old woman, " "n" Easter"s got that. My dad made "em both."
"How would you like to trade one for mine, if you have two?" said Clayton to the girl. "I"ll give you all my cartridges to boot."
The girl looked at her mother with hesitation. Clayton saw that both wondered what he could want with the gun, and he added:
"I"d like to have it to take home with me. It would be a great curiosity."
"Well," said the mother, "you kin hev one ef ye want hit, and think the trade"s fa"r."
Clayton insisted, and the trade was made. The old woman resumed spinning. The girl took her seat in the low chair, holding her new treasure in her lap, with her eyes fixed on it, and occasionally running one brown hand down its shining barrel. Clayton watched her. She had given no sign whatever that she had ever seen him before, and yet a curious change had come over her. Her imperious manner had yielded to a singular reserve and timidity. The peculiar beauty of the girl struck him now with unusual force. Her profile was remarkably regular and delicate; her mouth small, resolute, and sensitive; heavy, dark lashes shaded her downcast eyes; and her brow suggested a mentality that he felt a strong desire to test. Her feet were small, and so were her quick, nervous hands, which were still finely shaped, in spite of the hard usage that had left them brown and callous. He wondered if she was really as lovely as she seemed; if his standard might not have been affected by his long stay in the mountains; if her picturesque environment might not have influenced his judgment. He tried to imagine her daintily slippered, clad in white, with her loose hair gathered in a Psyche knot; or in evening dress, with arms and throat bare; but the pictures were difficult to make. He liked her best as she was, in perfect physical sympathy with the natural phases about her; as much a part of them as tree, plant, or flower, embodying the freedom, grace, and beauty of nature as well and as unconsciously as they. He questioned whether she hardly felt herself to be apart from them; and, of course, she as little knew her kinship to them.
She had lifted her eyes now, and had fixed them with tender thoughtfulness on the mountains. What did she see in the scene before her, he wondered: the deep valley, brilliant with early sunshine; the magnificent sweep of wooded slopes; Pine Mountain and the peak-like Narrows, where through it the river had worn its patient way; and the c.u.mberland Range, lying like a cloud against the horizon, and bluer and softer than the sky above it. He longed to know what her thoughts were; if in them there might be a hint of what he hoped to find. Probably she could not tell them, should he ask her, so unconscious was she of her mental life, whatever that might be. Indeed, she seemed scarcely to know of her own existence; there was about her a simplicity to which he had felt himself rise only in the presence of the spirit about some lonely mountain-top or in the heart of deep woods. Her gaze was not vacant, not listless, but the pensive look of a sensitive child, and Clayton let himself fancy that there was in it an unconscious love of the beauty before her, and of its spiritual suggestiveness a slumbering sense, perhaps easily awakened. Perhaps he might awaken it.
The drowsy hum of the spinning-wheel ceased suddenly, and his dream was shattered. He wondered how long they had sat there saying nothing, and how long the silence might continue. Easter, he believed, would never address him. Even the temporary intimacy that the barter of the gun had brought about was gone.
The girl seemed lost in unconsciousness. The mother had gone to her loom, and was humming softly to herself as she pa.s.sed the shuttle to and fro. Clayton turned for an instant to watch her, and the rude background, which he had forgotten, thrust every unwelcome detail upon his attention: the old cabin, built of hewn logs, held together by wooden pin and augur-hole, and shingled with rough boards; the dark, windowless room; the unplastered walls; the beds with old-fashioned high posts, mattresses of straw, and cords instead of slats; the home-made chairs with straight backs, tipped with carved k.n.o.bs; the mantel filled with utensils and overhung with bunches of drying herbs; a ladder with half a dozen smooth-worn steps leading to the loft; and a wide, deep fireplace-the only suggestion of cheer and comfort in the gloomy interior. An open porch connected the single room with the kitchen. Here, too, were suggestions of daily duties. The mother"s face told a tale of hardship and toil, and there was the plough in the furrow, and the girl"s calloused hands folded in her lap. With a thrill of compa.s.sion Clayton turned to her. What a pity! what a pity! Just now her face had the peace of a child"s; but when aroused, an electric fire burned from her calm eyes and showed the ardent temperament that really lay beneath. If she were quick and sympathetic-and she must be, he who could tell how rich the development possible for her?
"You hain"t seen much of this country, I reckon. You hain"t been here afore?
The mother had broken the silence at last.
No," said Clayton; "but I like it very much."
Do ye? " she asked, in surprise. " Why, I "lowed you folks from the settlemints thought hit was mighty scraggy down hyeh."
"Oh no. These mountains and woods are beautiful, and I never saw lovelier beech-trees. The coloring of their trunks is so exquisite, and the shade is so fine," he concluded, lamely, noticing a blank look on the old woman"s face. To his delight the girl, half turned toward him, was listening with puzzled interest.
Well," said the old woman, " beeches is beautiful to me when they has mast enough to feed the hogs."
Carried back to his train of speculations, Clayton started at this abrupt deliverance. There was a suspicion of humor in the old woman"s tone that showed an appreciation of their different standpoints. It was lost on Clayton, however, for his attention had been caught by the word "mast," which, by some accident, he I had never heard before.
" Mast," he asked, " what is that?
The girl looked toward him in amazement, and burst into a low, suppressed laugh. Her mother explained the word, and all laughed heartily.
Clayton soon saw that his confession of ignorance was a lucky accident. It brought Easter and himself nearer common ground.
She felt that there was something, after all, that she could teach him. She had been overpowered by his politeness and deference and his unusual language, and, not knowing what they meant, was overcome by a sense of her inferiority. The incident gave him the key to his future conduct. A moment later she looked up covertly, and, meeting his eyes, laughed again. The ice was broken. He began to wonder if she really had noticed him so little at their first meeting as not to recognize him, or if her indifference or reserve had prevented her from showing the recognition. He pulled out his note-book and began sketching rapidly, conscious that the girl was watching him. When be finished, he rose, picking up the old flint-lock.
"Won"t ye stay and hev some dinner?," asked the old woman.
"No, thank you."
Come ag"in," she said, cordially, adding the mountaineer"s farewell, "I wish ye well."
"Thank you, I will. Good-day."
As he pa.s.sed the girl he paused a moment and dropped the paper into her lap. It was a rude sketch of their first meeting, the bull coming at him like a tornado. The color came to her face, and when Clayton turned the corner of the house he heard her laughing.
"What you laughin" at, Easter?" asked the mother, stopping her work and looking around.
For answer the girl rose and walked into the house, hiding the paper in her bosom. The old woman watched her narrowly.
I never seed ye afeard of a man afore," she said to herself. "No, nur so tickled "bout one, nother. Well, he air as accommodatin" a feller as I ever see, ef he air a furriner. But he was a fool to swop his gun fer hem."
V
THEREAFTER Clayton saw the girl whenever possible. If she came to the camp, he walked up the mountain with her. No idle day pa.s.sed that he did not visit the cabin, and it was not long before he found himself strangely interested. Her beauty and fearlessness had drawn him at first; her indifference and stolidity had piqued him; and now the shyness that displaced these was inconsistent and puzzling. This he set himself deliberately at work to remove, and the conscious effort gave a peculiar piquancy to their intercourse. He had learned the secret of a.s.sociation with the mountaineers-to be as little unlike them as possible-and he put the knowledge into practice. He discarded coat and waistcoat, wore a slouched hat, and went unshaven for weeks. He avoided all conventionalities, and was as simple in manner and speech as possible. Often when talking with Easter, her face was blankly unresponsive, and a question would sometimes leave her in confused silence. He found it necessary to use the simplest Anglo-Saxon words, and he soon fell into many of the quaint expressions of the mountaineers and their odd, slow way of speech. This course was effective, and in time the shyness wore away and left between them a comradeship as pleasant as unique.
Sometimes they took long walks together on the mountains. This was contrary to mountain etiquette, but they were remote even from the rude conventionalities of the life below them. They even went hunting together, and Easter had the joy of a child when she discovered her superiority to Clayton in woodcraft and in the use of a rifle. If he could tell her the names of plants and flowers they found, and how they were akin, she could show him where they grew. If he could teach her a little more about animals and their habits than she already knew, he had always to follow her in the search for game. Their fellowship was, in consequence, never more complete than when they were roaming the woods. In them Easter was at home, and her ardent nature came to the surface like a poetic glow from her buoyant health and beauty. Then appeared all that was wayward and elfin-like in her character, and she would be as playful, wilful, evanescent as a wood-spirit. Sometimes, when they were separated, she would lead him into a ravine by imitating a squirrel or a wild-turkey, and, as he crept noiselessly along with bated breath and eyes peering eagerly through the tree-tops or the underbrush, she would step like a dryad from behind some tree at his side, with a ringing laugh at his discomfiture. Again, she might startle him by running lightly along the fallen trunk of a tree that lay across a torrent, or, in a freak of wilfulness, would let herself down the bare face of some steep cliff. If he scolded her, she laughed. If he grew angry, she was serious instantly, and once she fell to weeping and fled home.
He followed her, but she barricaded herself in her room in the loft, and would not be coaxed down. The next day she had forgotten that she was angry.
Her mother showed no surprise at any of her moods. Easter was not like other " gals," she said; she had always been" quar," and she reckoned would" al"ays be that way." She objected in no wise to Clayton"s intimacy with her. The furriner," she told Raines, was the only man who had ever been able to manage her, and if she wanted Easter to do anything " ag"in her will, she went to him fust "-a simple remark that threw the mountaineer into deep thoughtfulness.
Indeed, this sense of power that Clayton felt over the wilful, pa.s.sionate creature thrilled him with more pleasure than he would have been willing to admit; at the same time it suggested to him a certain responsibility. Why not make use of it, and a good use?
The girl was perhaps deplorably ignorant, could do but little more than read and write; but she was susceptible of development, and at times apparently conscious of the need of it and desirous for it.
Once he had carried her a handful of violets, and thereafter an old pitcher that stood on a shelf blossomed every day with wild-flowers. He had transplanted a vine from the woods and taught her to train it over the porch, and the first hint of tenderness he found in her nature was in the care of that plant. He had taken her a book full of pictures and fashion-plates, and he had noticed a quick and ingenious adoption of some of its hints in her dress.
One afternoon, as he lay on his bed in a darkened corner of his room, a woman"s shadow pa.s.sed across the wall, returned, and a moment later he saw Easter"s face at the window. He had lain quiet, and watched her while her wondering eyes roved from one object to another, until they were fastened with a long, intent look on a picture that stood upon a table near the window. He stirred, and her face melted away instantly. A few days later he was sitting with Easter and Raines at the cabin. The mother was at the other end of the porch, talking to a neighbor who had stopped to rest on his way across the mountains.
Easter air a-gettin" high notions," she was saying, " "n" she air a-spendin" her savin "s, "n" all mine she kin git hold of, to buy fixin"s at the commissary. She must hev white crockery, "n" towels, "n"