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 rumours 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 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 recognise himself; every throb within him had an alien impulse; he repudiated every cringing mental process. It was his first experience of the rigours 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 appreciated anguish, each curious scientist most longed to thrust the scalpel.

The coroner held the election, as the sheriff himself was a candidate, and when the result became known the 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 wide-spread spurs and coves, was unprecedented in the annals of the county. He had hoped that the election of judge and attorney-general, taking place at the same time, might divert attention from the disastrous completeness of his failure. But their race involved no peculiar phase of popular interest, and the more important results were subordinated, so far as the county was concerned, to the spectacle of 'Cajah Green, 'flabbergasted an' flustrated like never war seen.'

New elements of gossip were added now and then, vivaciously canvassed among the knots of men perched on barrels in the stores, or congregated in the post-office, or sitting on the steps of the courthouse, 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 to a future under altered conditions was facilitated by the inception of an immediate definite intention and a sentiment co-equal 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 an essential element involving life—perhaps 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 aËrial 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 'twarn't fur love o' him. I wonder ye done ez well ez ye did, 'Cajah, though ye couldn't hev done much wuss, sure enough. All o' 'em war out, from old Groundhog down ter Sol, when they war 'lectioneerin', an' the whisky 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 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 'bald,' with a suspended, isolated effect, like some wonderful aËrial 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 colour were abroad in visionary guise, in unexplained softness of greys 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 splendours of the landscape were not more seemly or suggestive than the colours 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 upon 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 waggon, 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 aimlessly about; now looking, with a gloat of acquisition, at his purchases stowed away in the waggon, and now nervously at a little barefoot girl whom 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, 'Hedn't ye better lay down on the blanket in the waggin an' rest yer bones, bein' ez we-uns started 'fore daybreak?'

But the sturdy Euralina shook her sun-bonnet, with her head in it, in emphatic negation at every suggestion, and sat upright on the board laid across the rough, springless waggon, looking about her gravely, with a stalwart determination to see all there was in the famed Settlement; thinking, perhaps, that her backbone would have leisure to humour its ails in the retirement of home. What an ideal traveller 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 lowering brow as Micajah Green entered.

The shadows of evening were dense in the ill-lighted place; the fluctuations of the forge fire, now flaring, now fading, intensified the idea of gloom.

The red-hot 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 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. Labour 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 clangour, 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, however, 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 experience as a defeated candidate, and he swaggered a little as he strolled 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, and turned with his foot the clods of the cavity still yawning below the 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 the 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' out'n 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.'

'I hain't gin it up, though,' said Micajah Green, still turning the clods with his foot. 'I'll be held responsible by the court fur the escape, I rackon, ef the gran' jury remembers ter indict me fur it, ez negligence. An' ef I kin lay my hands on Rick Tyler yit I'll be mighty glad ter feel of him.'

The blacksmith, without changing his attitude, looked hard at his visitor for a moment. Something rang false in the speech. He could not have said what it was, but his moral sense detected it, as his practised ear might have discovered by the sound a flaw in the metal under his hammer.

'Ye ain't kem up the Big Smoky a-huntin' fur Rick Tyler?' he said at length.

'Naw,' admitted Micajah Green; 'it's jes' 'bout some onsettled business o' the county. But ef I war ter meet up with Rick in the road I wouldn't pass him by.'

He said this with a satirical half-laugh, still turning the clods with his foot, the vivid white light illuminating his figure and his face beneath his straw hat. The next moment the sighing bellows was silent, and Gid Fletcher and his striker had the red-hot metal between them on the anvil, and were once more forging that intricate metallic melody, with its singing echoes, that seemed to endow the little log cabin with a pulsing heart, that flowed from its surcharged chamber out into the grey night, to the deeply purple mountains, to the crescent golden moon, to the first few stars pulsating as if in rhythm to the clinking of the hand-hammer and the clanking of the sledge—forging this, and as its incident the durable skene which should enable Euralina and her parent to leave the Settlement shortly.

'I hopes ter git home 'fore daybreak, Gid,' he said desperately, standing in the door, and looking wistfully at the iron in process of transformation upon the anvil.

He turned out again presently, and Micajah Green paused, leaning against the window, and looking doubtfully from time to time at the striker. This was an ungainly, heavy young mountaineer, with a shock of red hair, a thick neck, and unfinished features which seemed not to have been accounted worthy of more careful moulding. There was a look of humble pain in his face when the blacksmith angrily upbraided him. His perceptions were inefficient to accurately distribute blame; he was only receptive, poor fellow! and we all know that in every sense those who can only take, and cannot return, have little to hope from the world. He was evidently not worth fearing; and Micajah Green disregarded him as completely as the presence of the anvil.

'Talkin' 'bout Rick Tyler, did you-uns go sarchin' that night—the dep'ty's party—ter the still they say old man Cayce runs?'

'Naw'—Gid Fletcher paused, his hammer uplifted, the red glow of the iron on his meditative face and eyes; the striker, both hands upholding the poised sledge, waited in the dusky background—'naw. We met up with Pete Cayce, an' he 'lowed ez he hedn't seen nor hearn o' Rick Tyler.'

'Ef I hed been along I'd have sarched the still, too.'

The blacksmith stared in astonishment.

'Pete Cayce's say-so war all I wanted,' he declared; 'an' I hed the two hunderd dollars ez I hed yearned, an' ye hed flunged away, a-hangin' on ter it,' he added.

'I hev a mind ter go thar now, whilst I be on the Big Smoky, an' talk ter the old man 'bout'n it,' Green said reflectively.

He had drawn out his clasp-knife, and was whittling a piece of white oak which he had picked up from the ground. With the energy of his intention the slivers flew.

The blacksmith glanced in furtive surprise at his downcast face, but for a moment said nothing. Then:

'Hain't you-uns hearn how the Cayces turned out agin ye at the 'lection? Ef they didn't defeat ye, they made it an all-fired sight wuss. Ez fur ez I could hear, me and Tobe Grimes war the only men in the Big Smoky ez voted fur ye. I war plumb 'shamed o' it arterward. I hates ter be beat. I'm thinkin' they ain't a-hankerin' ter see ye down yander at the still.'

The defeated candidate's face turned deeply scarlet pending this recital. But he said, with an off-hand air:

'I ain't a-keerin' fur that now; that's 'count o' an old grudge the Cayces hold agin me. All I want now is ter kem up with Rick Tyler, ef so be I can, afore the gran' jury sits again; an' I hev talked with ev'ybody on the mountings, mighty nigh, 'ceptin' it be the Cayces. Which fork o' the road is it ye take fur the still—I furgit—the lef' or the right?'

Gid Fletcher burst into a sudden laugh, almost as metallic, as inexpressive of any human emotion, as if it had issued from the anvil. His face flushed, not the reflection from the iron, which had cooled, but with his own angry red blood; his figure, visible in the sullen illumination of the dull forge fire, was tense and motionless.

'Ye never knew, 'Cajah Green!' he cried. 'Ye don't take nare one o' the forks o' the road. Ye ain't a-goin' ter know, nuther, from me. I ain't a-hankerin' ter be fund dead in the road some mornin', with a big bullet in my skull-bone, an' nobody ter know how sech happened. Ef ye hev a mind ter spy out the Cayces fur the raiders, ye air on a powerful cold scent; thar ain't nobody on this mounting ez loves lead well enough ter tell whar old Groundhog holds forth. Them ez he wants ter know—knows 'thout bein' told. Ye ain't smart enough, 'Cajah Green, ter match yer meanness!'

It is difficult for a man, without the hope of deceiving, to maintain a deception, and it was with scant verisimilitude that Micajah Green denied the detection of his clumsy ruse, and swore that he only wanted to come up with Rick Tyler. He went through the motions, however, while the blacksmith looked at him with uncovered teeth, and a demonstration that in a man might be described as a smile, but in a wild cat would be called a snarl. The fierce, surprised glare of the eyes added the complement of expression. Now and then he growled indignant interpolations:

'Naw; ye 'lowed ez I'd tell ye, an' ye'd tell the raiders, an' then somehow ye'd hev shifted the blame on me, an' them Cayces—five of 'em an' all thar kin—would hev riddled me with thar bullets till folks wouldn't hev knowed which war metal an' which war man.'

Still Micajah Green maintained his feint of denial, and the blacksmith presently ceased to contradict.

It was Fletcher's privilege to entertain this visitor at the Settlement, and the behests of hospitality could hardly be served without ignoring the disagreement that had arisen between them. Little, however, was said while the waggon axle and skene were in process of completion, and then adjusted to the vehicle by the light of a lantern.

Jer'miah came over from the store, and presided after the manner of small boys, regarding each phase of the operation with an interest for which a questioner would have found no corresponding fulness of information—a sort of spurious curiosity, satisfying the eye, but having no connection with the brain. Euralina, who was small for her sun-bonnet, a grotesque and top-heavy little figure, stood in the door of the forge—also a wide-eyed and impressed spectator.

The blacksmith was a very good illustration of a rural Hercules, as he riveted his bolts, and lifted the body of the ponderous vehicle, and went lightly in and out of the forge. He did his work well and quickly too, for a mountaineer, and he had the artisan's satisfaction in his handicraft, as, with his hammer still in his hand, he watched the slow vehicle creak along the road between the corn-field and the woods, and disappear gradually from view.

The wheels still sounded assertively on the air; the katydids' iteration rose in vibrant insistence; the long, vague, pervasive sighing of the woods added to the night its deep melancholy. The golden burnished blade of the new moon was half sheathed in invisibility behind a dark mountain's summit.

The blacksmith's house was on the elevated slope beyond the forge, and as he turned on his porch and looked back, he noted the one salient change in the landscape as seen from the higher level—above the distant mountain-summit the moon showed its glittering length, as if withdrawn from the scabbard. He glanced at it and shut the door.

Micajah Green had the best that the humble log cabin could afford, and no dearth of fair words as a relish to the primitive feast. It was only the next morning, when his foot was in the stirrup, that his host recurred to the theme of the evening before.

'Look-a-hyar, 'Cajah Green, you-uns jes' let old Groundhog Cayce be. Ye ain't a-goin' ter find out whar his still air a-workin', an' ef he war ter hear ez ye had been 'quirin' 'round 'bout'n it 'twould be ez much ez yer life air wuth.'

Micajah Green renewed his hollow protestations, discredited as before, and the blacksmith, shading his eyes from the sun with his broad blackened right hand, watched him ride away.

Even when he was out of sight, Gid Fletcher stood for a time silently looking at the spot where horse and man had disappeared. Then he shook his head, and went into the forge.

'Zeke,' he said to his humble striker, 'ye air a fool, an' ye know it. But ye air a smart man ter that loon, fur the hell of it air he dunno he air a loon.'

His warnings, nevertheless, had more effect than he realized. They served as a check on Micajah Green's speech with the few men that he met—all surly enough, however, to repel confidence, were there no other motive to withhold it.

He saw in this another confirmation of the Cayces' enmity, and their activity in weakening his hold on the people. He began to think it hard that he should be thus at their mercy; that his office should be wrested from him; that they should impose unexampled indignities of defeat; that he should not dare to raise his hand against them—nay, his voice, for even the reckless Gid Fletcher had cautions for so much as a word.

Some trifling errand which he had used as a pretext for his journey brought him several miles along the range, and when he was actually starting down the mountain, his vengeance still muzzled, his ingenuity at fault, his courage faltering, all the intention of his journey merged in its subterfuge, he found himself upon the road which led past the Cayces' house, and in many serpentine windings down the long jagged slopes to the base. Noontide was near. The shadows were short. He heard the bees droning. The far-away mountains were of an exquisite ethereal azure, discrediting the opaque turquoise blue of the sky. The dark wooded coves had a clear distinctness of tone and definiteness of detail, despite the distance. The harmonies of colour that filled the landscape culminated in a crimson sumach growing hard by in a corner of a rail fence. The little house was still. The muffled tread of his horse's hoofs in the deep, dry sand did not rouse the sleeping hounds under the porch. The vines clambering to its roof were full of tiny yellow gourds; he could see through the gaps Dorinda's spinning-wheel against the wall. A hazy curl of smoke wreathed upward from the chimney with a deliberate grace in the sunshine. He smelled the warm fragrance of the apples in the orchard at the rear, stretching along the mountain side. The corn that Dorinda had ploughed on the steep slope was high, and waved above the staked and ridered fence. There were wild blue morning glories among it, the blossom still open here and there under a sheltering canopy of blades; and there were trumpet flowers, too, boldly facing the blazing sun with a beauty as ardent.

He looked up at this still picture more than once, as he paused for his horse to drink at the wayside trough, and then he rode on down the mountain, speculating on his baffled mission.

He hardly knew how far he had gone when he heard voices in loud altercation. He could not give immediate attention, for he was in a rocky section of the road, so full of boulders and out-cropping ledges that it was easy to divine that the overseer had a lenient interpretation of the idea of repair.

Once his horse fell, and after pulling the animal up, with an oath of irritation, he came, suddenly, turning sharply around a jutting crag, upon another rider and a recalcitrant steed. This rider was a child, carried on the shoulders of a girl of twelve or so, who had a peculiarly wiry and alert appearance, with long legs, a precipitate and bounding action, a tousled mane, the forelock hanging in her wild, excited eyes.

He recognised at once the filly-like Miranda Jane, before either caught a glimpse of him, and he heard enough of her remonstrance to acquaint him with Jacob's tyranny in insisting that his unshod steed should keep straight up the rocky 'big road,' as he ambitiously called it, in lieu of turning aside in the sandy byways of a cow-path.

The expedient flashed through Micajah Green's mind in an instant. He drew up his horse. 'I'll give ye a lift, bubby,' he said; then, with a mighty effort at recollection, 'Howdy, Mirandy Jane!' he cried jubilantly.

His success in recalling the name affected him like an inspiration.

The girl had shied off, according to her custom with a visible tremour, looking at him with big eyes and a quivering nostril, instantly accounting him a raider. As he called her name she stopped and stared dubiously at him.

'How's granny?' he asked familiarly, 'and D'rindy?'

'She's well,' Miranda Jane returned, lumping them in the singular number.

Had he inquired for the men folks, she would have been alarmed. As it was, she began to be at ease. She could not at once remember him, it was true, but he was evidently a familiar of the family.

'Come, bubby,' he said to Jacob, who had been peering over Miranda Jane's head, sharing her doubts, but sturdily repudiating her fears, 'I'll gin ye a ride ter the trough.'

Jacob held up his arms, he was swung to the pommel, and the cortege started, Miranda Jane nimbly following in the rear.

Such simple things Jacob said, elicited by questions the craft of which he could not divine. Where had he been? He and Mirandy Jane had gone with the apples in the waggon, but the waggon had afterward been driven to the mill, and Mirandy Jane had been charged by D'rindy to 'tote' him on the way home if he got tired, and Mirandy Jane wanted to tote him in the cow-path, 'mongst the briars. And where did he say he went with the apples? To the cave.

'To the cave!' exclaimed the querist, astonished.

'Over yander on the backbone,' returned the guileless Jacob, reinforcing the information with a stubby forefinger, pointing toward the base of the mountain.

And here was the trough. And Miranda Jane and Jacob stood by the roadside to regretfully watch the big grey horse trot slowly away.

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