I.

What momentous morning arose with so resplendent a glory that it should have imprinted its indelible reflection on the face of this great Cumberland cliff; what eloquence of dawn so splendid that the dumb, insensate stone should catch its spirit and retain its expression forever and forever? A deep, narrow stream flowed around the base of the "paint-rock." Immense fissures separated it from its fellows. And charged with its subtler meaning it towered above them in isolated majesty. Moons waxed and waned; nations rose and fell; centuries came and went. And still it faced the east, and still, undimmed by storm and time, it reiterated the miracle and the prophecy of the rising sun.

"'Twar painted by the Injuns,--that's what I hev always hearn tell. Them folks war mos'ly leagued with the Evil One. That's how it kem they war gin the grasp ter scuffle up that thar bluff, ez air four hunderd feet high an' ez sheer ez a wall; it ain't got foothold fur a cockle-burr. I hev hearn tell that when they got ez high ez the pictur' they war 'lowed by the devil ter stand on air. An' I believes it. Else how'd they make out ter do that thar job?"

The hairy animal, whose jeans suit proclaimed him man, propounded this inquiry with a triumphant air. There was a sarcastic curve on the lips of his interlocutor. Clearly it was not worth his while to enlighten the mountaineer,--to talk of the unknown races whose work so long survives their names, to speculate upon the extent of their civilization and the mechanical contrivances that reached those dizzy heights, to confide his nebulous fancies clustering about the artist-poet who painted this grand, rude lyric upon the immortal rock. He turned from the strange picture, suspended between heaven and earth, and looked over the rickety palings into the dismal little graveyard of the mountaineers. Nowhere, he thought, was the mystery of life and death so gloomily suggested. Humanity seemed so small, so transitory a thing, expressed in these few mounds in the midst of the undying grandeur of the mountains. Material nature conquers; man and mind are as naught. Only a reiteration of a well-conned lesson, for so far this fine young fellow of thirty had made a failure of life; the material considerations with which he had wrestled had got the better of him, and a place within the palings seemed rather preferable to his place without.

It was still strange to John Cleaver that his lines should have fallen in this wilderness; that the door of that house on the slope of the Backbone should be the only door upon earth open to him; that such men as this mountaineer were his neighbors and associates. The fact seemed a grotesque libel on likelihood. As he rode away he was thinking of his costly education, the sacrifices his father had made to secure it, his dying conviction, which was such a comfort to him, that in it he had left his penniless son a better thing than wealth,--with such training and such abilities what might he not reach? When John Cleaver returned from his medical studies in Paris to the Western city of his birth, to scores of charity patients, and to a fine social position by virtue of the prestige of a good family, there seemed only a little waiting needed. But the old physicians held on to life and the paying practice with the grip of the immortals. And he found it difficult to sustain existence while he waited.

At the lowest ebb of his fortunes there came to him a letter from a young lawyer, much in his own professional position, but who had confessed himself beaten and turned sheep-farmer. Here, among the mountains of East Tennessee, said the letter, he had bought a farm for a song; the land was the poorest he ever saw, but served his purposes, and the house was a phenomenal structure for these parts,--a six-room brick, built fifty years ago by a city man with a bucolic craze and consumptive tendencies. The people were terribly poor; still, if his friend would come he might manage to pick up something, for there was not a physician in a circuit of sixty miles.

So Cleaver had turned his face to the mountains. But unlike the sheep-farmer he did not meet his reverses lightly. The man was at bay. And like a savage thing he took his ill-fortune by the throat. Success had seemed so near that there was something like the pain of death in giving up the life to which he had looked forward with such certainty. He could not console himself with this comatose state, and call it life. He often told himself that there was nothing left but to think of what he might have done, and eat out his heart. His ambition died hard.

As his horse ambled along, a gruff voice broke his reverie, "'Light an' hitch," called out the master of a wayside hovel.

A man of different temperament might have found in Cleaver's uncouth surroundings some points of palliation. His heart might have warmed to the ignorant mountaineers' high and tender virtue of hospitality. A responsive respect might have been induced by the contemplation of their pride, so intense that it recognizes no superior, so inordinate that one is tempted to cry out, Here are the true republicans! or, indeed, Here are the only aristocrats! The rough fellow was shambling out to stop him with cordial insistence. An old crone, leaning on a stick in the door-way, called after her son, "Tell him ter 'light an' hitch, Peter, an' eat his supper along of we-uns." A young girl sitting on the rude porch, reeling yarn preparatory to weaving, glanced up, her sedate face suddenly illumined. Even the bare-footed, tow-headed children stood still in pleased expectation. Certainly John Cleaver's position in life was as false as it was painful. But the great human heart was here, untutored though it was, and roughly accoutred. And he himself had found that Greek and Latin do not altogether avail.

The little log-house was encompassed by the splendor of autumnal foliage. A purple haze clung to the distant mountains; every range and every remove had a new tone and a new delight. The gray crags, near at hand, stood out sharply against the crimson sky. And high above them all in its impressive isolation loomed Sunrise Rock, heedless of the transitory dying day and the ineffective coming night.

The girl's reel was still whirling; at regular intervals it ticked and told off another cut. Cleaver's eyes were fixed upon her as he declined Peter Teake's invitation. He had seen her often before, but he did not know as yet that that face would play a strange part in the little mental drama that was to lead to the making of his fortune. Her cheek was flushed; her delicate crimson lips were slightly parted; the live gold of the sunbeams touched the dead-yellow, lustreless masses of her hair. Here and there the clustering tendrils separated, as they hung about her shoulders, and disclosed bright glimpses of a red cotton kerchief knotted around her throat; she wore a dark blue homespun dress, and despite the coarse texture of her attire there was something of the mingled brilliance and softness of the autumn tints in her humble presence. Her eyes reminded him of those deep, limpid mountain streams with golden-brown pebbles at the bottom. Scornful as he was, he was only a man--and a young man. With a sudden impulse he leaned forward and handed her a pretty cluster of ferns and berries which he had gathered in the forest.

The reel stopped, the thread broke. She looked up, as she received mechanically his woodland treasure, with so astonished a face that it induced in this man of the world a sense of embarrassment.

"Air they good yerbs fur somethin'?" she asked.

A quick comprehension of the ludicrous situation flashed through his mind. She evidently made no distinctions in the healing art as practiced by him and the "yerb-doctor," with whom he occasionally came into professional contact. And the presentation of the "yerbs" seemed a prescription instead of a compliment.

"No,--no," he said hastily, thinking of the possibility of a decoction. "They are not good for tea. They are of no use,--except to look at."

And he rode away, laughing softly.

Everything about the red brick house was disorganized and dilapidated; but the dining-room, which served the two young bachelors as a sitting-room also, was cheerful with the glow of a hickory fire and a kerosene lamp, and although the floor was bare and the tiny-paned windows curtained only with cobwebs, there was a suggestively comfortable array of pipes on the mantel-piece, and a bottle of gracious aspect. Sitting in front of the fire, the light full on his tawny beard and close-clipped blond hair, was a man of splendid proportions, a fine, frank, intellectual face, and a manner and accent that proclaimed him as distinctly exotic as his friend. He too had reared the great scaffolding of an elaborate education that he might erect the colossal edifice of his future. His hands beat the empty air and he had no materials wherewith to build. But there was the scaffolding, a fine thing in itself,--wasted, perhaps. For the sheep-farmer did not need it.

"Well, old sinner!" he exclaimed smilingly, as Cleaver entered. "Did you tell Tom to put up your 'beastis'? He is so 'brigaty' that he might not stand."

Were the two friends sojourning in the Cumberland Mountains on a camp-hunt, these excerpts from the prevalent dialect might have seemed to Cleaver a pleasantry of exquisite flavor. But they were no sojourners; they were permanently established here. And he felt that every concession to the customs of the region was a descent toward the level of its inhabitants. He thought Trelawney was already degenerating in this disheveled life,--mentally, in manner, even in speech. For with a philologist's zest Trelawney chased verbal monstrosities to their lair, and afterward displayed them in his daily conversation with as much pride as a connoisseur feels in exhibiting odd old china. As these reflections intruded themselves, Cleaver silently swore a mighty oath--an oath he had often sworn before--that he would not go down with him, he would not deteriorate too, he would hold hard to the traditions of a higher sphere.

But sins against convention could not detract from the impressiveness of the man lounging before the fire. If Trelawney only had money, how he would adorn the state of nabob!

"Brigaty!" he reiterated. "That's a funny word. It sounds as if it might be kin to the Italian _brigata_. Or, see here--_briga?_--eh?--_brigare_--_brigarsi?_ I wonder how these people come by it."

A long pause ensued, broken only by the ticking of their watches: the waste of time asserted itself. All was silent without; no wind stirred; no leaf nor acorn fell; the mute mists pressed close to the window. Surely there were no other creatures in all the dreary world. And this, thought Cleaver, was what he had come to, after all his prestige, all his efforts!

"Trelawney," he said suddenly, "these are long evenings. Don't you think that with all this time on our hands--I don't know--but don't you think we might write something together?"

A frank surprise was in his friend's brown eyes. He replied doubtfully, "Write what?"

"I don't know," said Cleaver despondently.

"And suppose we had the talent to project 'something' and the energy to complete it, who would publish it?"

"I don't know," said the doctor, more hopelessly still.

Another pause. The foxes were barking in the moonlight, in the red autumn woods. That a man should feel less lonely for the sound of a wild thing's voice!

"My dear fellow," said John Cleaver, a certain passion of despair welling up in his tones,--he leaned forward and laid his hand on his friend's knee,--"it won't do for us to spend our lives here. We must turn about and get back into the world of men and action. Don't think I'm ungrateful for this haven,--you are the only one who held out a hand,--but we must get back, and go on with the rest. Help me, Trelawney,--help me think out some way. I'm losing faith in myself alone. Let us help each other. Many a man has made his pen his strongest friend; they were only men at last, just such as we are. Many of them were poor; the _best_ of them were poor. We can try nothing else, Fred,--so little chance is left to us."

Trelawney laid his warm strong hand upon the cold nervous hand trembling on his knee. "Jack," he said, "I have given it all up. I am through forever with those cursed alternations of hope and despair. I don't believe we could write anything that would do--do any good, I mean. I wore out all energy and afflatus--the best part of me--waiting for the clients who never came. And all the time my appropriate sphere, my sheep-farm, was waiting for me here. I have found contentment, the manna from heaven, while you are still sighing for the flesh-pots of Egypt. Ambition has thrown me once; I sha'n't back the jade again. I am a shepherd, Jack, a shepherd.

'Pastorem, Tityre, pingues Pascere oportet oves, deductum dicere carmen.'

That's it, my dear old boy. Sing a slender song! We've pitched our voices on too high a key for our style of vocalization. We must sing small, Jack,--sing a slender song!"

"I'll be damned if I do!" cried Cleaver, impetuously, springing to his feet and pacing the room with a quick stride.

But his friend's words dogged him deep into the night. They would not let him sleep. He lay staring blankly at the darkness, his thoughts busy with his forlorn position and his forlorn prospects, and that sense of helplessness, so terrible to a man, pressing heavily upon his heart. In the midst of the memories of his hopes, his ambitions, and his failures he was like a worm in the fire. The vague presence of the majestic company of mountains without preyed upon him; they seemed stolid, unmoved witnesses of his despair. The only human creature who might have understood him would not understand him. He knew that if he were writhing in pain with a broken limb, or the sentimental spurious anguish of a broken heart, Trelawney would resolve himself into every gracious phase of healing sympathy. But a broken life!--his friend would not make an effort. Yet why should he crave support? Was it true that he had pitched his voice too high? In this day of over-education, when every man is fitted for any noble sphere of intellectual achievement and only inborn talent survives, might it not be that he had mistaken a cultivated aspiration for latent power? And if indeed his purposes had outstripped his abilities, the result was tragic--tragic. He was as dead as if he were six feet deep in the ground. A bitter throe of shame came with these reflections. There is something so ludicrously contemptible in a great personal ambition and a puny capacity. Ambition is the only grand passion that does not ennoble. We do not care that a low thing should lift its eyes. And if it does, we laugh.

There was a movement in the hall below. He had left Trelawney reading, but now his step was on the stairs, and with it rose the full mellow tones of his voice. He was singing of the spring-time in the autumn midnight. Poor Fred! It was always spring with him. He met his misfortunes with so cordial an outstretched hand that it might have seemed he disarmed them. It did not seem so to John Cleaver. He shifted his attitude with a groan. His friend's fatal apathy was an added pang to his own sorrows. And now the house was still, and he watched through all the long hours the western moonlight silently scale the gloomy pines, till on their plumy crests the yellow beams mingled with the red rays of the rising sun, and the empty, lonely day broke in its useless, wasted splendor upon the empty loneliness of the splendid night.