The disappointment which Amos James experienced found expression in much the same manner as that of many men of higher culture. He went down to his home in Eskaqua Cove, moody and morose. He replied to his chirping mother in discouraging monosyllables. In taciturn disaffection he sat on the step of the little porch, and watched absently a spider weaving her glittering gossamer maze about an overhanging mass of purple grapes, with great green leaves that were already edged with a rusty red and mottled with brown. A mocking-bird boldly perched among them, ever and anon, the airy grace of his pose hardly giving, in its exquisite lightness, the effect of a pause. The bird swallowed the grapes whole with a mighty gulp, and presently flew away with one in his bill for the refreshment of his family, whose vibratory clamour in an althea bush hard by mingled with the drone of the grasshoppers in the wet grass, louder than ever since the rain, and the persistent strophe and antistrophe of the frogs down on the bank of the mill-pond.

'Did they git enny shower up in the mounting, Amos?' demanded his mother, as she sat knitting on the porch—a thin little woman, with a nervous, uncertain eye and a drawling, high-pitched voice.

'Naw'm,' said Amos, 'not ez I knows on.'

'I reckon ye'd hev knowed ef ye hed got wet,' she said, with asperity. 'Ye hain't got much feelin', no ways—yer manners shows it—but I 'low ye would feel the rain ef it kem down right smart, or ef ye war streck by lightnin'.'

There was no retort, and from the subtle disappointment in the little woman's eye it might have seemed that to inaugurate a controversy would have been more filial, so bereft of conversational opportunity was her lonely life, where only a 'gang o' men loped 'round the mill.'

She knitted on with a sharp clicking of the needles for a time, carrying the thread on a gnarled fourth finger, which seemed unnaturally active for that member, and somehow officious.

'I'll be bound ye went ter Cayce's house,' she said aggressively.

There was another long pause. The empty dwelling behind them was so still that one could hear the footsteps of an intruding rooster, as he furtively entered at the back door.

'Shoo!' she said, shaking her needles at him, as she bent forward and saw him standing in the slant of the sunshine, all his red and yellow feathers burnished. He had one foot poised motionless, and looked at her with a reproving side-glance, as if he could not believe he had caught the drift of her remarks. Another gesture, more pronounced than the first, and he went scuttling out, his wings half spread and his toe-nails clattering on the puncheon floor. 'Ye went ter Cayce's, I'll be bound, and hyar ye be, with nuthin' ter tell. Ef I war free ter jounce 'round the mounting same ez the idle, shif'less men-folks, who hev got nuthin' ter do but eye a mill ez the water works, I'd hev so much ter tell whenst I got home that ye'd hev ter tie me in a cheer ter keep me from talkin' myself away, like somebody happy with religion. An' hyar ye be, actin' like ye hed no mo' gift o' speech'n the rooster. Shoo! Shoo! Whar did ye go, ennyhow, when ye war on the mounting?'

'A-huntin',' said Amos.

'Huntin' D'rindy Cayce, I reckon. An' ye never got her, ter jedge from yer looks. An' I ain't got the heart ter blame the gal. Sech a lonesome, say-nuthin' husband ye'd make!'

The sharp click of her knitting-needles filled the pause. But her countenance had relaxed. She was in a measure enjoying the conversation, since the spice of her own share atoned for the lack of news or satisfactory response.

'Air old Mis' Cayce's gyarden-truck suff'rin' fur rain?'

There was a gleam of hopeful expectation behind her spectacles. With her reeking 'gyarden-spot' dripping with raindrops, and the smell of thyme and sage and the damp mould on the air, she could afford some pity as an added flavour for her pride.

'Never looked ter see,' murmured her son, between two long whiffs from his pipe.

His mother laid her knitting on her lap.

'I'll be bound, Amos Jeemes, ez ye never tole her how 'special our'n war a-thrivin' this season.'

'Naw'm,' said Amos, a trifle more promptly than usual, 'I never. 'Fore I'd go a-crowin' over old Mis' Cayce 'bout'n our gyarden-truck I'd see it withered in a night, like Jonah's gourd.'

'It's the Lord's han',' said his mother quickly, in self-justification. 'I ain't been prayin' fur no drought in Mis' Cayce's gyarden-spot.'

Another long pause ensued. The sun shining through a bunch of grapes made them seem pellucid globes of gold and amber and crimson among others darkly purple in the shadow. The mocking-bird came once more a-foraging. A yellow and red butterfly flickered around in the air, as if one of the tiger-lilies there by the porch had taken wings and was wantoning about in the wind. On the towering bald of the mountain a cloud rested, obscuring the dome—a cloud of dazzling whiteness—and it seemed as if the mountain had been admitted to some close communion with the heavens. Below, the colour was intense, so deeply green were the trees, so clear and sharp a grey were the crags, so blue were the shadows in the ravines. Amos was looking upward. He looked upward much of the time.

'See old Groundhog?' inquired his mother, suddenly.

'Whar?' he demanded with a start, breaking from his reverie.

'Laws-a-massy, boy!' she exclaimed, in exasperation. 'Whenst ye war up ter the Cayces', this mornin'.'

'Naw'm,' said Amos. He had never admitted, save by indirection, that he had been to the Cayces'.

'War he gone ter the still?'

'I never axed.'

'I s'pose not, bein' ez ye never drinks nuthin' but buttermilk, do ye?'—this with a scathing inflection.

She presently sighed deeply.

'Waal, waal. The millinium an' the revenue will git thar rights one of these days, I hopes an' prays. I'm a favorin' of ennythink ez'll storp sin an' a-swillin' o' liquor. Tax 'em all, I say! Tax the sinners!'

She had assumed a pious aspect, and spoke in a tone of drawling solemnity, with a vague idea that the whisky tax was in the interest of temperance, and the revenue department was a religious institution. The delusions of ignorance!

'Thar ain't ez much drunk nohow now ez thar useter war. I 'members when I war a gal whisky war so cheap that up to the store at the Settlemint they'd hev a bucket set full o' whisky an' a gourd, free fur all comers, an' another bucket alongside with water ter season it. An' the way that thar water lasted war surprisin'—that it war! Nowadays ye ain't goin' to find liquor so plenty nowhar, 'cept mebbe at old Groundhog's still.'

Amos made no reply. His eyes were fixed on the road. A man on an old white horse had emerged from the woods, and was slowly ambling toward the mill. The crazy old structure was like a caricature; it seemed that only by a lapse of all the rules of interdependent timbers did it hang together, with such oblique disregard of rectangles. Its doors and windows were rhomboidal; its supports tottered in the water. The gate was shut. The whir was hushed. A sleep lay upon the pond, save where the water fell like a silver veil over the dam. Even this motion was dreamy and somnambulistic.

On the other side of the stream the great sandstone walls of the channel showed the water-marks of flood and fall of past years, cut in sharp levels and registered in the rock. They beetled here and there, and the verdure on the summits looked over and gave the deep waters below the grace of a dense and shady reflection. Above the dark old roof on every hand the majestic encompassing mountains rose against the sky, and the cove nestled sequestered from the world in this environment.

The man on the gaunt white horse suddenly paused, seeing the mill silent and lonely; his eyes turned to the little house farther down the stream.

'Hello!' he yelled. 'I kem hyar ter git some gris' groun'.'

'Grin' yer gris' yerse'f,' vociferated the miller, cavalierly renouncing his vocation. 'I hev no mind ter go a-medjurin' o' toll.'

Thus privileged, the stranger dismounted, went into the old mill, himself lifted the gate, and presently the musical whir broke forth. It summoned an echo from the mountain that was hardly like a reflection of its simple, industrial sound, so elfin, so romantically faint, so fitful and far, it seemed! The pond awoke, the water gurgled about the wheel, the tail-race was billowy with foam.

Presently there was silence. The gate had fallen; the farmer had measured the toll, and was riding away. As he vanished Amos James rose slowly, and began to stretch his stalwart limbs.

'I'm glad ye ain't palsied with settin' so long, Amos,' said his mother. 'Ye seem ter hev los' interes' in everythink 'ceptin' the doorstep. Lord A'mighty! I never thunk ez ye'd grow up ter be sech pore comp'ny. No wonder ez D'rindy hardens her heart! An' when ye war a baby—my sakes! I could set an' list'n ter yer jowin' all day. An' sech comp'ny ye war, when ye couldn't say a word an' hedn't a tooth in yer head!'

He lived in continual rivalry with this younger self in his mother's affections. She was one of those women whose maternal love is expressed in an idolatry of infancy. She could not forgive him for outgrowing his babyhood, and regarded every added year upon his head as a sort of affront and a sorrow.

He strode away, still gloomily downcast, and when the woman next looked up she saw him mounted on his bay horse, and riding toward the base of the mountain.

'Waal, sir!' she exclaimed, taking off her spectacles and rubbing the glasses on her blue-checked apron, 'D'rindy Cayce'll hev ter marry that thar boy ter git shet o' him. I hev never hearn o' nobody ridin' up that thar mounting twict in one day 'thout they hed suthin' 'special ter boost 'em—a-runnin' from the sher'ff, or sech.'

But Amos James soon turned from the road that wound in long, serpentine undulations to the mountain's brow, and pursued a narrow bridlepath, leading deep into the dense forests. It might have seemed that he was losing his way altogether when the path disappeared among the boulders of a stream, half dry.

He followed the channel up the rugged, rock-girt gorge for perhaps a mile, emerging at length upon a slope of out-cropping ledges, where his horse left no hoof-print.

Soon he struck into the laurel, and pressed on, guided by signs distinguishable only to the initiated: some grotesque gnarling of limbs, perhaps, of the great trees that stretched above the almost impenetrable undergrowth; some projecting crag, visible at long intervals, high up and cut sharply against the sky.

All at once, in the midst of the dense laurel, he came upon a cavity in the side of the mountain. The irregularly shaped fissure was more than tall enough to admit a man.

He stood still for a moment, and called his own name. There was no response save the echoes, and, dismounting, he took the bridle and began to lead the horse into the cave. The animal shied dubiously, protesting against this unique translation to vague subterranean spheres. The shadow of the fissured portal fell upon them; the light began to grow dim; the dust thickened.

As Amos glanced over his shoulder he could see the woods without suffused with a golden radiance, and there was a freshness on the intensely green foliage as if it were newly washed with rain. The world seemed suddenly clarified, and tiny objects stood out with strange distinctness; he saw the twigs on the great trees and the white tips of the tail-feathers of a fluttering bluejay. Far down the aisles of the forest the enchantment held its wonderful sway, and he felt in his own ignorant fashion how beautiful is the accustomed light.

When the horse's stumbling feet had ceased to sound among the stones, the wilderness without was as lonely and as unsuggestive of human occupation or human existence as when the Great Smoky Mountains first rose from the sea.